Many, many thanks to Jen Kramer for driving all the way from Keene to be our guest speaker last night! What a great turnout - 18 members and half of them were first time attendees! Like seasoned Yankee traders, Lee Parmenter and Rob Graham left with the 2 top giveaways, a copy of Jen Kramer's "Joomla! Start to Finish" and a shoulder bag of goodies from the NYC Joomla Fest. Jen also gave away mugs from Marlboro Graduate School (who sponsored Jen's visit, more later), Joomla! tattoos, Lynda.com passes, Template Cheat Sheets, O'Reilly books discounts, enviro-pens, and probably other stuff I can't remember!
A few links and tidbits we discussed last night:
- Jen's website: http://joomla4web.com/
- Joomla! User Group New England
- Joomla! Day New England, June 5, Marlboro, VT - We have several members signed up again this year! Not too late to register. 4 Tracks - Beginner, Intermediate, Developers, and a potpourri of Joomla Goodness
- A good site that Jen recommended is Brian Teeman's at http://brian.teeman.net. A wonderful blog, Brian keeps you up-to-date with various Web subjects and tells is like it is.
- Another interesting note that Jen shared is that Tesco, the 3rd largest retailer in the world, has adopted Joomla!
- Recommended extensions to add first thing to every site
- JCE Editor - http://www.joomlacontenteditor.net/ ( the "paste from word" button is one big reason to use JCE for your site editor)
- Wysiwig Pro
- Akeeba Backup (formerly Joomlapack)
- Joomla Update Manager (be sure it's from developer is Sam Moffatt)
- Sites that Jen recommends learning hand-coding HTML and CSS (always very good to have these skills):
- HTML Writers Guild http://hwg.org and A List Apart http://alistapart.com
- Also, Lynda.com http://lynda.com and WWW Consortium http://w3.org
- SCAM: Acronym for Sections, Categories, Articles and Menus (as this relates to Joomla!)
- ACL: Acronym for Access Control List
- Newly launched this week: Test drive Joomla! free for 30 days http://demo.joomla.org/
This new testing site is hosted with www.cloudaccess.net - Jen's favorite hosting: LiquidWeb; Rochen (at Rochen, your backups do not count towards your spaced used);
- Jen's favorite templates: RocketTheme
- Broken link check: Xenu ; NetMechanic ; Google Webmaster Tools
- How to view module positions: type ?tp=1 at end of URL (see notes below added by Justin via email later)*
- What is a Framework? It's purpose is for consistency and general rules to follow. It's similar to what a spec sheet is to a car.
- Artisteer: www.artisteer.com is kind of "junkie" in the back-end. You don't necessarily need to know HTML and CSS (pretty easy to use ~ also a pretty quick template generator "on the fly")
- Morph: www.prothemer.com is ~ code is a bit cleaner than Artisteer (fairly easy to use)
- Gantry: www.rockettheme.com ~ pretty confusing, it's like shorthand for templating (not easy to use, but very good templating and support)
- Themeables: www.themeables.com Is known to be very complicated
- Joomla 1.6 - code freeze, beta due out early June
- ACL (access control list) - Community ACL
- Jentla (www.jentla.com) is about multi-site management: The more significant purpose is that it updates all your sites together instead of having to do each of your sites individually. You can update up to 10,000 sites at a time, however, this costs thousands of dollars
And now a word from our sponsor...
Marlboro Graduate School offers Masters of Science in Information Technology and a certificate program in open source web development - with particular focus on Joomla CMS. Classes meet every other weekend; in addition the certificate program has a fully online classroom option.
Next Meeting
Next meeting will be Wed. June 9, topic/location TBA.
Turn off ?tp=1 Feature
* For those that might be interested in "turning off" the ?tp=1 feature, I did some digging and found some good suggestions/fixes/hacks...
Editing the .htaccess File:
http://joomlatips.com/2010/core-tips/how-to-disable-tp1-in-joomla
Editing some Core Files:
http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=236&t=293789
Just in case you don't want people to be able to see your module positions.
