On December 15th, the Joomla Project announced the immediate release of Joomla 1.6 release candidate 1. This release comes after a long series of beta's and a lot of hard work by the development team and bug squad.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in general is a vast subject to cover in a single blog post, optimization requires patience and experience. We will just deal with the basic steps one can take to optimize their Magento stores for better SERP (search engine results page) rankings.

In this post we will introduce to you several CCKs you can consider to use to empower your Joomla site. First of all, using a content construction kit gives you more features, flexibility, control over any sort of content, structure and layout than the core of Joomla itself can do.

Overview

We were probably the first of the Joomla template clubs to introduce Mega Menu feature with our first generation T3 framework way back in 2009. It was an instant hit and we have refined the mega menu workflow since then and in our latest T3 framework V3, we moved to jquery instead of mootools. In the template userguides, we provide screenshots of how we configure the Mega Menu as in the demo site. But what if you are trying to configure Mega Menu without any userguides? That is when this tutorial comes in to play its role.

One of the most common questions we hear all the time, is how to move a site from a development environment to a live site, or how to move a site from one directory to another, or even from one server to another. For many this seems to be a huge challenge, fortunately, this can be one of the easiest things you do with Joomla.

Today we are trying out something interesting. We switch on Facebook comment for the few next posts to be used parallel to our in-house comment system and want to get a feel of how users react on this move.

Recently JoomlArt has been recommended by webhostingsearch.com as BEST WEB TEMPLATE provider to their community (listed under Web Tools directory).

Congratulations on choosing to use Joomla for your website Content Management System (CMS). Currently Joomla 2.5 is the current Long Term Support (LTS) version, and Joomla 3.1 is the current Short Term Support (STS) version. After Joomla 3.1, there will be Joomla 3.2, then follow the next Long Term Support version Joomla 3.5 due for release in March 2014.

If you haven't read our previous blogpost about the demo toolbars yet, you should take a look at the Demo toolbars - overview and tips to improve yours. It will give you an insight on the ongoing trends and deliberations on improving our demo toolbar.

Important changes we tried to incorporate in our new demo toolbar :

• Reverse listing pattern : Earlier we had template name with rollover thumbnail, now its thumbnails with rollover template info.
• User-friendly filters : Easy to filter based on categories, years or tags.
• RESPONSIVE : It had to be responsive.

Keeping the intro short, let me walk you through the upcoming demo toolbar :

Have you ever been on a website and just can’t figure out how to navigate to a certain page? Or perhaps suddenly been frustrated by trying to find the navigation bar after reading through countless comments or posts down the page. Not only is this annoying but often happens even more when using a mobile device or tablet, and is more complicated to remedy.

I have, and these problems while small, really bother me and countless other users too. Navigation is among the most important features in web design and focusing on it’s development will be a huge trend in 2013. To help improve the users experience and improve customer satisfaction we have recently incorporated Sticky Navigation for Desktop and Off Canvas Navigation for Mobile in JA Argo - responsive Joomla 2.5 / 3.0 template based on our all new T3 Framework , as well as in T3 Framework.

Overview of web navigation

A. Traditional navigation

In the past we would see all kinds of links listed on the top navigation bar. First we would scroll down to read the article, information, or blog post then have to scroll up to find the navigation bar located at the top of the page. Let’s be honest, that is one annoying and inconvenient thing to have to do everyday of your life.

A few days ago, we introduced the Layout Configuration feature. We're here with the update, to show you how this awesome feature can be easily used in JA Brisk - our latest Joomla! 3.0 responsive template.

It does so happen that we choose templates and extensions for our Joomla project and start building the site, adding more extensions as we go and since most of the development happens on the localhost, site loading / performance does not seem to be an issue. Shock sets in, when the site is moved to live server and tested and having invested 100’s of hours, its way difficult to remove extensions or cut down features to improve site performance. This is the story of most of the people asking for professional help to optimize their sites.

Remember, if it’s heavy... it’s going to load slower.

What should one do?

From day one, keep the site optimization as one of the top priorities. Have tools to measure the effect of each and every addition you make on the site’s overall performance before adding them and try to fix an upper limit for site size and HTTP requests. Here are some of the easy-to-use tools to test your website.

For the past few days, we have received several reports on our forum related to unexpected virus issues detection by Avast antivirus software on our site which has disabled our member access to JoomlArt.com! Our team immediately jumped in and carefully investigated to detect the issue's origin.

We quickly figured out why Avast has defined it as a “Potentially Suspicious ” as we did implement some page redirections to our JoomlArt 2012 Thanksgiving Nexus10 giveaway official page.

There has been a lot of confusion around Joomla 1.6 recently. After 3 years of heavy coding this major upgrade has been finally released in early 2011. Right now many users are wondering what 3rd party support for J1.6 will look like in the next months. Does it make any sense to start a website in J1.6 at the moment? How long should I wait until making any movements for my clients?

Finally we got it out! Surely you have noticed from the homepage that we have changed the design several days ago. Thanks to the design team for their creative effort to improve accessibility for visitors. This is a major design refinement since our Joomla site update from June 2010.

We have seen a big wave of new product launches around cloud computing and hosting since last year. And it has even become hotter during the past few weeks. Recently Amazon announced it'sFree Usage Tier starting from November 1st, 2010. In this tutorial we will show you how to get your own Joomla (or Drupal, Wordpress) site hosted for free with Amazon EC2.