Last week we released Guru 5.1.18 major released with new features SCORM, custom fields and many more improvements and bug fixes.

In this post we will discuss the usage and importance of the Custom fields option in Guru with some more new features added in the latest version.

Custom Fields :

Guru introduced custom fields options that allow admin to add more new fields in the registration form for teachers and students. On the backend a new option is added for the custom fields

How to use custom fields:

Custom fields creation is now very easy, To add a new field, first admin need to login on Joomla backend > Guru > custom fields. There are two options given for custom fields :

Field Group : Fields group must be created first, so you can add custom fields
Field : There are 6 types of custom fields

1. Text
2. Text area
3. Select
4. Radio
5. Checkbox
6. URL

You can add new fields and add any type of the custom fields from selected options.

Once you add custom fields, You need to select them for teachers or Student registration. Guru offers different setting for Teacher and student registration for a better workflow.

For example you want to add the custom field in student registration form. Navigate to Guru > Student > registration. Select the custom fields you want to show and save.

Once it successfully saved, you can see the additional fields in student registration.

Enable custom fields for Teachers :

On LMS sites, every admin required to get additional information from the teachers, like the education backgrounds, skills etc. This new option will make it easy to get all these information.
Once you create new custom fields, Navigate to Teachers > Settings > custom fields.

More New Features :

SCROM :

Guru 5.1.18 version scorm integration, Now you can add the SCORM zip file in Guru courses, check this post for complete information.

Integration with JomSocial Groups :

If you are using Joomla social community extension : JomSocial, this features will give more flexibility to your students to join JomSocial groups. In each course there is new option to assign JomSocial group

Each new user will be added on the JomSocial group on successful payment for the course. If a user payment is failed, he/she will not be part of JomSocial group.This helps you to create community groups based on the courses.

More Info Live Demo

Step 1: Create an account on Google Adsense Here

Step 2: Configure the Google Adsense account to create your Ad Code.

Step 3: Login to your Joomla site admin > components > Ad Agency to create new ads.

Step 4: Create New Ads with type Affiliate Ads > Add the Google Adsense code and assign the ad to a zone.

Step: 5 Configure and Publish the Zone to a module position to show the Google Adsense ads on your site.

Type of Ads you can use and customise

• Multiple Ad types:
• Banner Ad for graphic or affiliate codes
• Popup Ad that shows on top of the loaded content
• Textual Ad
• Floating Ad, similar to Popup Ad, floats on top of the site content
• Transitional Ad takes up entire page focus and requires to be closed before site can be used.

Ad Customization Options

• The length of the ad headline
• The length of the ad text
• The size of the ad content image
• Whether to show the ‘Create Ad’ link
• Whether to show ‘Sponsored Stream’ information
• The JomSocial Custom Profile Fields used to target ads
• Whether to show ‘Target Audience Preview’ when advertisers create their JomSocial Stream Ads
• The frequency with which JomSocial Stream Ads appear in the activity streams
• Dedicated options to display mobile and desktop ads
• And the Activity Streams on which to display the ads

Read The complete list of features offered by Ad agency Here

Creating Ads in Ad Agency package is simple and easy, you can easily create ads with different types of features. If you are not familiar with Ad Agency you can learn it from learn.ijoomla.com

Please Note: Course is free for Active members.

DON’T HAVE AD AGENCY YET?
Then head over to the Ad Agency website and see all the features it offers.
Once you’re ready, get Ad Agency for your Joomla! site. Get it separately or buy all our products at $299 in Ultimate developer and bring your website to a whole new level!

The new Joomla generation – Joomla 4 introduced incredible new features, huge updates at core and totally new front-end and back-end template. In this blog post, we will focus on new front-end template of Joomla 4 – cassiopeia with more flexible layout system, bootstrap 4 integration, optimized codebase, new web technologies and more.

Let’s have preview on the new Joomla 4 template:

Bootstrap 4 integration

Joomla 4 new template – cassiopeia integrates Bootstrap 4 that is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework to help build responsive, mobile-first websites easier and faster.

New look and feel

Joomla 4 new front-end looks comes with more modern and colorful style than any previous Joomla default front-end templates like Beez3, Protostar.

Mobile-first

Joomla 4 cassiopeia template is design to work better on responsive layouts : mobile, tablet and also have better performance thanks to the Bootstrap 4 integration, new web technologies and the codebase optimization.

Flexible layout structure (module positions)

The new Joomla 4 template has more flexible layout system than ever, it has more module positions based on 4 columns layout system that let user build layout their ways with ease and layout customization will be easier as well.

View Joomla 4 Template Layout Structure →

Template folder structure

Cassiopeia template folder structure is clear, easy to understand functionality of each folder that will help developer customize template.

Developed with SASS

SASS is very powerful CSS extensions designed to make CSS more maintainable, themeable, and extendable.

Module variations

With the purpose of helping user build website faster, Joomla 4 new front-end template supports variety of module variations.

Optimized codebase

Joomla 4 focuses on coding quality, performance and ease of customization, therefore the new front-end template also has optimized and well structured codebase.

Know more about Joomla 4:

• 8 most exciting Joomla 4 new features
• [INFOGRAPHIC] 9 exciting Joomla 4 new features introduction
• Joomla 4 New Media Manager: How it helps manage media files
• JomSocial on Joomla 4: What to expect?
• Joomla 3 and Joomla 4 features comparison: 15 new things to take note

The alternative is to build your own advertising program with Joomla.

It’s not as hard as you think — and it can be a great deal more lucrative than you imagine.

Here are 10 tips that will help you to create a successful advertising program with Joomla.

1. Create a WorkFlow

Your first step will be to create a workflow and a financial outline of the service your site will offer. You’ll need to know every step the advertiser might take and every scenario that could unfold as a result of taking that step.

The workflow should be built around a “perfect system,” the simplest route from reading about the offers to choosing a package, uploading the ads and purchasing the campaign. But it should also include the ways in which the advertiser could request technical help or pull down a report. You’ll want to be ready.

2. Plan the Sale

The workflow lets you plan the offer but sellers also need to know exactly what they’re offering. Before starting to offer advertising, you’ll need to know:

• The amount of advertising inventory you can comfortably handle;
• The number of impressions you can deliver for that inventory;
• How you can increase impressions for that inventory over set periods;
• And the average industry pricing for the models you’ll be using.

While it may be possible to increase inventory broadly, each expansion may carry extra costs involved in collecting the inventory and managing it.

3. Know How You’ll Manage the Program

In practice though, each advertiser may need an account rep to work with them

Ideally, an advertising program will be entirely hands-off. Advertisers will be able to choose a package and submit their ads, and you won’t need to do any more than approve the campaign and send a reminder when it’s up for renewal — and sometimes, not even that.

In practice though, each advertiser may need an account rep to work with them. You will need to be available to answer questions both before the sale and afterwards, and you’ll need to draw up a plan and a script to handle each of the most important aspects of the site/advertiser relationship.

You should know how you plan to manage marketing outreach, client contact, sales follow-up and even customer service surveys.

It’s not a lot of work but you should know what to expect.

4. Build Your Tech Support

Tech support shouldn’t just be an option for troubleshooting; it should be a sales point that reassures potential clients that they’ll never need to struggle. The support might consist of live chat, a FAQ section, a forum/knowledge base, direct support e-mail or a support ticket system.

The more types of help you can offer clients, the better, but bear in mind that each option will take a different amount of time and require a different level of investment.

5. Offer Targeting

The better you can target your ads, the more you can charge for them

The better you can target your ads, the more you can charge for them. Smart advertising programs can offer a choice of three different kinds of targeting:

Geo-Targeting

Geo-targeting allows advertisers to display ads based on the geographic area of the viewer. They help to ensure that their ads are local, their products are reachable and the ad appears in the reader’s language. So the owner of a pizza restaurant could be sure that his ads are only being seen in the areas to which he delivers, and a fashion designer could show her ads in French, Italian or English depending on where her buyers are viewing the page.

Geo-targeting should be a basic feature of the advertising program you offer.

Social Targeting 

Social targeting lets advertisers target their ads according to demographic data such as age, gender or education — or a mixture of that data. So a wedding planner could make sure that her ads were only seen by women aged 30-plus with college degrees.

Combine social targeting with geo-targeting and you’re already on your way to a powerful advertising program.

Keyword Targeting 

Keyword targeting returns ads based on the advertiser’s or the website admin’s chosen keywords. It’s a valuable, accurate way to make sure that ads are shown on appropriate pages. You’ll just need to make sure that your keyword metatags are set up properly.

6. Offer a Free Package

Letting your advertisers try your program before they commit can greatly increase your conversion rate. Advertisers want to see their return before they spend their cash. Limiting the number of impressions your advertisers receive, for example, will show them exactly what you can deliver without either of you having to give too much away.

However you choose to do it, let advertisers know about your free package. Encourage them to upload their banners and ads while they’re trying it out so that they can see exactly how it works and what they can get from it. The more engaged they are, the more likely they are to buy.

7. Don’t Hide Your Advertising Program on Your Site – Promote It!

Don’t Hide Your Advertising Program on Your Site – Promote It!

A common mistake made by publishers is to hide the advertising link in some out-of-the-way corner of the site, as though advertising were something to be ashamed of. It isn’t. Make your advertising opportunities clear.

Place a big “Advertise on this site” link above the fold and keep the “Advertise here” link in as many of your zones as possible.

8. Invest Time in Your “Overview Page”

The Overview page is where you get to sell your advertising program. Include graphs about your traffic, add testimonials, provide details about your demographics, and more.

Don’t be afraid to market your site. You built that data, now sell it!

9. Offer Promo Codes

Promo codes can be a very effective way to convince doubters to buy your advertising program

. Send a code in an email, announce it in your newsletter or share it on social media and watch your orders rocket.

That’s especially true when you limit the code to 72 hours and keep the code simple. Any more than eight characters and people start to mis-type it.

10. Take Recurring Payments

When a campaign ends, you don’t want to give the advertiser a chance to think again. If you’re using PayPal, you can set the campaign to renew automatically.

The advertisers keep their traffic, and you keep your revenue!

If all that sounds complicated, you can relax. Joomla users have a simple solution. iJoomla’s Ad Agency has all the features we’ve described here. From targeting to free trials and from promo codes to recurring payments, you’ll be in complete control of your advertising program.

You’ll also be able to:

• Use zones to place ads in any module position;
• Choose to display ads vertically or horizontally;
• Create packages based on CPM, CPC or time limits;
• Create inventory zones;
• And even rotate banners to increase clicks and views.

Take a look at Ad Agency and start taking all of your site’s advertising value.

Jacob Stansky, XOPandora

Jacob Stansky of XO Pandora has been a customer of Ad Agency for some time. He’s always given me some great feedback. I first met him at CMS Expo and then again at the last Joomla World Conference. Since I don’t always get to connect personally with our customers, seeing him again was a great opportunity to discover a real-life success story using Ad Agency. It was also a chance to pick some valuable insider tips that will help other customers create a successful, professional advertising program.

Jacob, tell me a little bit about you and how you came to create XO Pandora.

I am the lead web developer / designer / programmer at XO Pandora. I graduated college in 2000 as an English major and had no clue what I wanted to do with my future. One of my last classes before I graduated was an advertising class. Completely in love with this course, I pursued a way into the ad world. Long story short, the process was go to ad school, get an internship, shop your portfolio for a job.

I went back to school and just before graduating, had a huge distaste for the ad agency world. One of my last classes before graduating a second time required an online portfolio. Making the website reinvigorated a love of computers I had as a kid. Instead of advertising, I forged ahead with pursuing a life of online production.

What made you choose Ad Agency?

I choose Ad Agency for a few reasons

• I met you at a CMS expo. I like knowing there are real people behind real Joomla products.
• It had a thorough landing page explaining the component features.
• It had a video. I like to see what a component can do before I promise it to a client.
• The modules. A component needs good modules.
• Geo-targeting. A major feature that beats others.
• And to be honest, Google DFP does not play well with Joomla and there are no components, modules or plugins out there to mesh this.

How long have you been using Ad Agency?

More than two years.

How much money have you and your clients generated from Ad Agency so far?

This is tough to tell because the primary client that uses Ad Agency offers page ads to his major sponsors. These deals range from $5,000 to $100,000. The sales team throws the banner ads into the package. We recently calculated that a $5 CPM on a niche topic website would garner about $600,000 for the client if broken into four geo regions.

What have you found to be the elements for creating a successful advertising program?

A successful program needs four elements.

1) The Map – You need to create a workflow and financial outline map of the service as a whole. Know every step that you’re asking the potential advertiser to go through and then map out every possible scenario. This will outline all the areas you need to set-up.

The first workflow is your perfect system. The following workflows will show what happens if there is a technical problem, when an advertiser requests a report, and so on. This will then highlight all the areas you need to put in place for a sales step. It also forces you to budget time for all scenarios or put personnel in place to manage various workflow scenarios such as tech support, customer service, etc.

2) The Sale – You need to know the full revenue matrix beyond the simple logistics. How much inventory can you handle? How many impressions you can deliver with that inventory? How you’re going to increase impressions for your inventory in multiple timelines (six month, one year, two years, etc.) What’s the industry average for the pricing models you’ll use, and so on.

When you know everything about your revenue matrix you can make your sales tools stronger and simpler.

The next step is to take the info and present it in a simple and modern designed way on a special landing page. You should also produce a single-sheet in PDF format. Not all sales will come from crossing traffic. You’ll network along the way and you’ll want to give someone a digital file or hard copy “sales one-sheet” immediately.

3) Management – The system will demand babysitting. You need dedicated time available to get on top of situations immediately. The manager should ensure that the checkout process is simple and working. He or she will need to answer pre-sales questions and be an account rep for all the advertisers. The manager should also have several protocols to follow that were outlined in the map process, such as marketing outreach, client contact, sales follow-ups, and customer service surveys. Each advertiser should be taken care of individually from start to finish.

The manager will provide advertiser analytics upon request and by protocol after seven days and after the campaign ends. The manager should also steer growth on the timeline outlined in the map phase.

4) Tech Support – Don’t just have a tech support structure in place; advertise it as a major strong point. Make such services clearly advertised on your sales landing page:  “live chat” support, FAQ section, Forum / Knowledge base, direct support e-mail, support ticket system and so on. People need to know that their investment is going into something solid. It makes them feel good and have positive expectations in the opportunity you’re providing.

If you want to make real money, you have to have every situation outlined and know how long each situation will require. If your production or management time is too stretched, your profit will be minor and you’ll be doing a ton of work for little pay. If you realize that the project could potentially overwhelm you because of time restrictions — if you have a day job or you’re a single mom, etc. — don’t do it! Go willy-nilly into an online advertising program and you will lose time, money and relationships with advertisers. If you need to put a manager in place while you do other things, compare the revenue to the costs.

An online advertising program is a not a turnkey operation. A $300 component does not mean you don’t have a $1,500 start-up cost. The Ad Agency component is only one piece of the opportunity. It is the keystone piece but only a single piece overall.

What is your preferred package type? Do you opt for impressions, clicks or a fixed date?

For sponsorship packages it’s fixed date. For general revenue, we prefer CPM.

How many people work on the sales force of the advertising program?

For my major client there are two people. I’m the manager of the program and we have one sales person pushing the banner sales.

How do you find the advertisers?

It’s a niche industry so going to the industry rags to find advertisers is easy. The client is also a beacon in the industry so people call all the time to inquire. And they put out extensive marketing and media kits to a lot of related industry businesses.

What is the minimum traffic one needs in order to sell advertising on their site?

Probably about 25,000 visits  per month. I mean you can sell a banner ad to someone for $10 per month with only 100 clicks if you want. If it’s niche, it can be anything. You have to value your time to manage the ads and the system against the revenue you pull in. You also need to balance impressions against inventory. Too few impressions with too many ads is a disaster. I feel around 25,000 monthly page visits will give your inventory a fair shot at 5,000 to 7,500 impressions per month. At $7.50 per 1,000 impressions you might make a few bucks.

Do you use the remote feature to show ads on other sites?

Not right now. This would require me to have another Ad Manager in-house which would require hourly pay and would have to be justified by revenue. With no time to develop this in-house, I can’t establish the need for this feature yet. The worse thing I can do is play with features just because they are there. Time is the enemy of curiosity.

How do you use geo-targeting to generate more sales?

For me, this is easy because our primary client has events in fourteen states across the US. We can sell east, central and west coast advertising, and the full scope of the company’s fans are exposed to relevant ads. There are national brands that go into all three regions, and we sell a nice three-play package for this. We make three times the revenue on the same module area by selling the area to all three regions.

What is the best way to display your advertising program on the website? What should be there?

This is best answered by standing on the shoulders of giants. Check out these guys:

• http://aws.amazon.com/free/
• http://mailchimp.com/features/
• http://mailchimp.com/pricing/

Hundreds of companies have great methods of promoting their services. The two keys:

1. Make it look real good. People trust well-designed things just like people like a well-dressed salesperson.
2. Make it simple but cover the basics: The “how it works,” the “how much” and the “what it is.”

What do you think about social targeting?

Social targeting is like anything else in advertising: it’s a numbers game. Go where the numbers are and you’ll take away a percentage of them to convert into revenue.

How do you determine the price of advertising packages?

We shop the industries that are comparable to our clients that offer similar advertising. We check out Google AdWords and then we evaluate the value of the page content of the client’s site. We take these considerations into account and run that value basis against our site traffic and available impression counts.

Thank you Jacob!

At the last Joomla World Conference in November I had the pleasure of meeting Marc Gaffan, one of the founders of Incapsula. Marc gave a great presentation about Incapsula’s solution. You can see it below. I’m going to give you a little review and then move to the interview with Marc.

The concept

Incapsula behaves like a firewall, protecting your site from all sorts of bad stuff like cross scripting, SQL injections and more.

Incapsula behaves like a firewall, protecting your site from all sorts of bad stuff like cross scripting, SQL injections and more. They have a large, dedicated team of security experts whose only job is to protect your site. They’ll even scan your pages for backdoors and report back to you. Since the average small business can rarely afford even one security person, that’s a great benefit.

And the reports Incapsula delivers are really eye-opening. You will be stunned at the number of hacking attempts that happen on a regular basis against your site, mainly by robots but also by humans.

Incapsula is not hacker-proof

You should know, though, even if your site is behind Incapsula, it’s not 100% protected. You still have to do your due diligence. You still have to close security holes both on your server configuration and on anything you install on top of Joomla. (I’ll include some resources at the end).

The backend of Incapsula has a bunch of tools to help you get the most out of your subscription and to control the alerts you receive.

The difficulty of set-up varies

Setting up Incapsula can be challenging — or easy — depending on the complexity of your site. You may have to tweak your email accounts, FTP and get a new SSL (it’s included free with your membership). It might take you a little bit of time to get everything up running smoothly again. Incapsula will send you a number of emails that explain the steps you need to take. I recommend that you read them all carefully and follow the instructions.

Marc Gaffan, Co-founder, Incapsula

And now over to Marc Gaffan:

Marc, what is Incapsula?

Incapsula is a cloud-based service that protects and accelerates websites. Through a simple DNS change, your website’s traffic is seamlessly routed through Incapsula’s globally-distributed network of high-powered servers.

Incoming traffic is intelligently profiled in real-time, blocking even the latest Web threats: from sophisticated SQL injection attacks to scrapers, malicious bots, intruding comment spammers and thwarting multi-Gigabit DDoS attacks.

Meanwhile, outgoing traffic is accelerated and optimized with Incapsula’s global CDN for faster load times, keeping welcome visitors speeding through.

What made you start Incapsula?

Until recent years, website security and acceleration was accessible only to the big companies, those with financial resources and IT departments capable of handling the configuration and management of appliance-based solutions.

New cloud technology that has emerged over the last few years has allowed services like Incapsula to create affordable and easy-to-set-up website security and acceleration solutions. This is definitely a growing need by SMB’s today who have to make sure that their sites are always online and protected but do not have the time or money to handle it themselves.

What are the top three benefits of Incapsula?

1. Website Security – Instant Virtual Patching:

Incapsula’s unique bot detection technology and Web Application Firewall technology protect Joomla websites from intruding comment spam, fake registrations, site scrapers and other threats. Leveraging a unique crowd-sourcing security model and an extensive real-time knowledge base of website attack patterns, new vulnerabilities are quickly detected and virtual patches are released to mitigate these threats.

2. Website Performance – Global CDN & Optimizer:

Incapsula’s global CDN improves website performance by caching and optimizing its content, and delivering it directly from the Internet’s backbone. On average, websites using Incapsula are 40% faster and consume 50% less bandwidth.

3.Advanced Analytics – Traffic, Performance and Threat Statistics:

Incapsula’s dashboard includes live stats for all website traffic, including human visitors, bots, performance statistics and detailed threats reports.

What does your Joomla extension do? Do I need to install it to use Incapsula?

Any Joomla site owner can sign up to Incapsula through our website and set up their website through our online management console.

Our newest Joomla component enables site owners to do all of that and manage their security and performance directly from their Joomla admin without using the management console.

What are some of the unique challenges Joomla users have when it comes to security?

I think that anyone using open source CMS platforms is exposed to many security vulnerabilities that are detected from time to time on different versions. The extensions installed on CMS websites also suffer from vulnerabilities, so users finds themselves in constant concern that their website may be exposed to different threats.

Obviously patches and new Joomla versions are released to overcome vulnerabilities, but it requires the user’s time and efforts each time a patch needs to be installed or a version upgrade is required.

Can Joomla users protect themselves from hackers without Incapsula by using Joomla tools like RS Firewall? What added benefits does Incapsula have that those tools lack?

Joomla users defend their websites by using different extensions such as RS Firewall, but Incapsula’s advantage is the fact that it’s an external service that constantly updates with the newest threats and makes sure the website is protected at all times. In addition, you need to remember that traffic to the protected website is routed first through Incapsula’s servers. This means that attacks are stopped at Incapsula’s side and never even get to the protected website. That is something which is unique to Incapsula.

In addition, Incapsula provides a PCI DDS Compliant WAF, which is the highest widely recognized standard for Web Application Firewalls.

And last, remember that Incapsula doesn’t provide websites just with security but also accelerates websites with our CDN and optimization technology

I feel like your security team works for me, which is cool. What can you tell me a about their work routine and function?

Incapsula keeps a dedicated team of security engineers 24/7 who monitor all the websites under our protection. Once a new threat is detected, we learn the threat and immediately deploy a new security rule protecting from it. This is something you get only with a cloud-based service like ours.

Do you ever hire hackers?

No, we do not.

How do the people in your security team work to find new vulnerabilities?

In three ways:

– We get information from our community members who alert us about new vulnerabilities that

they have heard of or encountered.

– We monitor the thousands of websites under our protection and detect attempts

to exploit vulnerabilities in these websites.

– We proactively look at all the online resources where you can find information about new

vulnerabilities: forums, blogs, etc.

What are the top countries for hackers?

Well, the bigger the country the bigger the number of hackers, so you can see lots of hackers from China, the U.S., Russia, U.K., etc. But you can also see lots of hackers from smaller countries as South Korea, Israel, Denmark and more.

The feature that surprised me the most was the spam blocking. We used to get dozens of spam posts on our forum. Since we moved to Incapsula, we only got one, which makes us very happy. How does the spam blocking work?

We developed a unique bot classification and detention technology which is based on several layers of protection and on our existing and ever-growing bot signature database. When filtering human visitors from bots (and good bots from bad bots) we will look at signatures, HTTP headers and even behavior patterns. We will cross-verify these signals to gain an initial “first impression” and when still not 100 percent sure, we will perform a series of seamless tests (i.e. JS challenge and Cookie challenge). This process will accurately identify 99.9 percent of all bots and our users can turn up their Security setting to provide CAPTCHA challenges to the remaining 0.01 percent. Upon identification, every new bot signature is aggregated across the network to benefit all users, who become instantly immune, even from the latest threats.

It almost seems like fighting with hackers is pointless because they will always be a step ahead of us. That’s why I believe Incapsula and similar services will become the standard for websites in the not-so-far future. Do you see a future where every website out there is protected by a service like yours? Is it even plausible? Will it make your service stronger or weaker if most websites use it?

That’s actually a very good question. Obviously today a website owner can’t really keep up with all the different types of attacks that emerge every day, and we do already see millions of websites using services like Incapsula. This trend will only grow over the next few years.

From our point of view, the more websites we protect the smarter we get and the better our website protection becomes. Our system constantly detects bots and threats that arise against any website on our network. This means that Incapsula continually learns and that every site, regardless of size, makes the system smarter.

What words of advice do you have for Joomla users when it comes to security?

Accept the fact that the days when installing patches every time a new vulnerability arises are over. Website owners simply do not have the capacity today to monitor new threats and make sure their websites are protected from them. Use security services as Incapsula which do the work for you. As one of our customers put it: “Incapsula is like hiring a System Administrator that never sleeps.”

Thank you Marc!

Marc’s Presentation:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdkdr398xfk[/youtube]

***

To find out more about Incapsula, visit http://www.incapsula.com/. To learn more about their Joomla extension visit this page. You can find more details about their Joomla extension here.

Here are some security resources:

Joomla Security Check List: http://docs.joomla.org/Security_Checklist

Security Checklist/Getting Started: http://docs.joomla.org/Security_Checklist/Getting_Started

So What is Responsive Web Design?

It must have happened to you. You open a web page on your mobile device and it looks all squashed and tiny. You constantly have to increase the size of the font and scroll left to right to read the content. It’s annoying.

That’s a site that isn’t using responsive design. However, if you go to a web page and find that everything is laid out perfectly with no need to scroll or resize, there is a good chance it’s using a responsive design.

When a website is responsive, the layout and/or content adapts to the size of screen on which it’s presented. A responsive website automatically changes to fit the device you’re reading it on.

Responsive design usually reacts to four kinds of screens: the widescreen desktop monitor; the smaller desktop (or laptop); the tablet; and the mobile phone.

Here’s a screenshot of one of the Joomla responsive templates from JoomlArt.com. As you can see on each device, the layout looks a little different. On every device though, the design looks great with no tiny text.

When a website is responsive, the layout and/or content adapts to the size of screen on which it’s presented. A responsive website automatically changes to fit the device you’re reading it on.

How Does Responsive Design Work?

Responsive design works by using @media queries to identify the size of the device screen and present a layout based on that size. It’s something you can test easily. Go to this page and drag the browser window to scale it down. You’ll see the layout change.

When Did the Responsive Design Trend Take Off?

According to Google Trends, people started searching for the term “Responsive Web Design” only in the middle of 2011 — so it’s all pretty new. But as more and more people use their mobile devices to access the Web, it’s been growing fast. Users expect a good experience whether they’re on an iPad, a Galaxy or a desktop. If they don’t get it, they’ll go elsewhere.

According to Google Trends, people started searching for the term “Responsive Web Design” only in the middle of 2011

Joomla Responsive Design

“Joomla Responsive” only turned up in Google Trends in the third quarter of this year so it’s even newer! But it is catching up very quickly, and every Web designer, template provider and extension developer needs to know what it means and how it works.

“Joomla Responsive” only turned up in Google Trends in the middle of this year

Responsive Joomla Templates

I’ve been looking at some of the most popular template clubs to see if they provide responsive templates. Most do. Some, like RocketTheme, have just started and offer only one responsive Joomla template. Others already have three or four responsive Joomla templates.

A surprisingly large number of Joomla extensions are also already responsive, most involving images and media.

Should I make my Joomla site responsive?

You may think at this point that the answer should be yes. But hold your horses! Sure, responsive design is a great idea… if you have a simple site without too many extensions. Those extensions can cause trouble if they’re not as responsive as the template. Just take a look at the example below. This is a responsive template with a video using the AllVideos plugin from Joomlaworks.gr. This plugin doesn’t add the videos in a responsive way… although there is a way to do it.

Even though the template is responsive, the video plugin is not and it doesn’t display properly on a mobile device.

If you want a responsive Joomla site, every front end extension you use has to be responsive. It’s going to take the Joomla development community a bit of time to catch up with that.

At iJoomla we plan to dedicate the rest of this year, and much of next year, to making all of our extensions responsive.  We’ll start with iJoomla DigiStore, our Joomla eCommerce solution. (Imagine a responsive shopping cart — now that’s sweet!) Then we’ll move to Guru, our Joomla LMS, so that students can view their lessons easily on their iPads or iPhones or whatever device they may be using.

Once you have both a responsive Joomla template and responsive front end extensions, you’ll have a real responsive Joomla site.

And in the Meantime?

Until all your extensions are responsive, you can use any of the other Joomla mobile solutions:

• WeeverApps will create a slick app of your website’s content. It’s cool but does have a few issues which the company is working on. WeeverApps also has a very limited support to third party extensions, but it’s great if you have a simple site with mainly text content.

• Mobile Joomla will display your Joomla site differently depending on the device. I tried to use it and had quite a few problems. We’re trying to make it work but it’s hard going. I’ll let you know how we get on.

• Some template clubs have a built-in mobile version. I believe this trend will fall away as soon as the responsive Joomla templates catch on.

So where are you when it comes to Joomla and responsive design? Are you using a responsive Joomla template yet? Let me know, I’d love to hear about it.

Update: We’ve just finished converting most of our products sites to responsive design. Check out the following sites with your mobile device to see how it looks like:

• http://adagency.ijoomla.com/
• http://ecommerce.ijoomla.com/
• http://guru.ijoomla.com/
• http://helpdesk.ijoomla.com/
• http://seo.ijoomla.com/

Andrew J. Holden, Chief Experience Officer (CXO)

Tell us a bit about your background

I certainly never thought I’d be developing mobile apps with Joomla!

I was a community organizer in the U.S. before I moved to Canada and launched a small web design company which exclusively served community for not for profits and renewable energy startups in 2004. I actually learned web design ‘in reverse’ using the early versions of Mambo, which as you know, became Joomla!

Having a free open-source web site platform to work with and the support of Joomla!’s amazing volunteer community was everything in those days. I have an article at Joomla! Magazine that’s basically about how I went from a total newbie to developer in a very short period of time.

How was Weever Apps born and by whom?

Our lead programmer Rob Porter and I were very frustrated with the ‘mobile problem’ in 2010. Native, ‘app store apps’ feel great but were far too expensive, technical and platform-limited for our not for profit and startup clients to afford.

Yet, we understood early on that the future is mobile and the organizations we worked with would need a solution immediately. That proved out – today there’s more mobile connected devices that people on earth and at least half of all local searches are on mobile devices.

So we felt stuck! We explored mobile plugins, responsive CSS techniques, etc – but nothing gave us the mobile-aware, touch-aware and “contextual” mobile experience we wanted to provide. Ultimately we found we were just making smaller versions of desktop web sites, which isn’t ideal for a goal-oriented mobile solution.

And we didn’t like that our clients could be ‘shut out’ of the app store due to political or personal reasons – when a handful of companies dominate the (mobile) web it’s not great for web democracy or open source, in our opinion.

So we took a walk. We spent two days hiking the Bruce Trail in Northern Ontario, Canada and talking about how we could solve this problem for us and for our clients. (Photos here).

We came back with a plan to create an “app builder” for Joomla! that would allow non-technical users to create and maintain apps. It would be free and it would do more than replicate a desktop site, but also allow for a lot of new social media interaction on twitter, photos from flickr, etc – that’s Weever Apps!

It’s been almost two years since then. Our invention caught the eye of some local successful business people and we found investment and built a team. While we’re not exclusive to Joomla! anymore (WordPress too now, custom and Drupal coming), it’s still our home and ‘first release’ platform.

Tell us a bit about your team?

We’re fortunate to have about 10 core team members in programming, marketing and custom development, which supports a large set of ‘resellers’ around the world. We’ve seen thousands of apps built in about 60 countries. Our app-framework is available in about 15 languages so far.

Weever Apps Team

What’s your business model?

We have a free version for Joomla! and WordPress sites which includes basic app features like social media streams, content, launch screens, qr codes, and quite a bit more. Our pro version is $10/month and includes ‘GeoTagger’, our plugin which creates a GPS-enabled mobile map(s) of articles in Joomla!. Pro also includes more advanced signup forms and other marketing integrations.

We also have a Premium / Reseller version at $40/month which web design companies and site owners use to fully rebrand the app as their own solution, removing a ‘powered by’ message when the app launches for mobile visitors to their web site. That’s where we see most of our sales.

I believe you’re the first Joomla company to get funding. How did you make that happen?

There were a few factors. We had the support of the Hamilton, Ontario, “Innovation Factory” which serves as a business incubator and taught us how to pitch for investment and really put together a strategy for the company, not just a strategy for creating fun new technology. We’re in a former steel town here and the city really needs new businesses to thrive. So we had the support of the business and larger civic community from day one in terms of introductions, training and more.

There’s hundreds of ‘how to get your startup funded’ articles out there but I’d say the deciding factor is that the potential funders we spoke to saw that we really, really wanted to change things for mobile and we weren’t going to let up on that. We had solid advisors and also took the approach that we were looking for more business experience to help us create a great team. I think being honest about our shortfalls was another important factor.

Do you think other Joomla companies should seek funding, and if yes, what’s your best advice?

That’s a tough one. There’s a strong case to be made for Bootstrapping and for building a ‘lean startup’ – the 37Signals blog has some great articles on that.

Overall I’d say it’s about how big you want to be. Creating a smaller product for a smaller set of customers in a niche market is a nice approach too and doesn’t require funding.

With Weever, you make an HTML5 “Web App” – that is that *one* app which works for all popular touch phones and tablets. A Weever HTML5 Web App also launches instantly for mobile visitors to a desktop site, according to the preference of the site owner.

So we have a big and kind of crazy goal – deliver a mobile solution that makes the app store model mostly obsolete by creating something that launches instantly, updates instantly, is affordable and works for every customer. So there was no question for us on seeking funding.

You also won a TV competition, tell us about that?

Lions Lair

Have you seen ‘Dragon’s Den‘? It’s a reality TV show/contest in the US where people pitch their business ideas to potential investors. We were on a more local, Canadian show called “Lion’s Lair” which has a similar format.

It was quite an experience. Partly because it’s strange being on camera but also because the format is that you go in front of experienced, insightful and very successful business people and have to prove you belong there too.

We practiced and practiced and it paid off. We won the top prize and $50,000 in startup resources.

How many apps were created with Weever Apps?

It’s in the tens of thousands now. Most apps tend to be simple and built for small businesses that want to generate leads via a click-to-call number, blogs or not for profits. We’ve seen quite a few tourism maps and other kinds of mobile directories made as well.

What % of apps are created with Joomla vs. wordpress or other CMS?

They’re mostly Joomla! since that was our first release and our only plugin for the first six months or so, although WordPress is growing pretty quickly now. We also have an open API where we’re seeing a fair amount of custom development for existing corporate/enterprise databases, new services, new CMS’s and other needs.

We’ve had some great support from the Joomla! development community as of late, both internal from the leadership team but also with developers like StackIdeas using our API to make their plugins (in this case, EasyBlog) compatibile with a mobile app.

Some template clubs have mobile support. What’s the difference between doing it that way and using Weever apps?

There’s a *lot* of differences – so many it’s hard to know where to start.

Most mobile sites are a reflection of a desktop solution – which means that the mobile context usually isn’t recognized and mobile marketing isn’t much of a consideration. That’s a missed opportunity in a changing web where more than half of all local searches are on mobile devices.

The key difference is that the user experience is actually made for mobile and is made to drive mobile *results*.

Moving through the app ‘feels’ like shuffling a deck of cards – not tapping and waiting for pages to load. There’s a big and obvious click-to-call and ‘share this on twitter, google+, facebook’ buttons in every app. Mobile maps and nearest-to-me pages ping the GPS and deliver *relevant* information instantly.

It’s not just a ‘read this’ solution, it’s an opportunity to actually engage and interact with visitors, and that’s what apps are great at, of course. I’m a big fan of good CSS and mobile-first strategies – but apps are made to accomplish goals in a mobile context, and that’s what we build Weever Apps to do well.

Those are the finer user-experience points. In the bigger picture of things we think that recognizing that a ‘site’ is now just one location where an organization ‘lives’ on the web is important. So we don’t just integrate one web site’s content, but also allow for real-time streaming of flickr photos, youtube, vimeo channels, and *lots* of other wide social and web-integration. Our 2.0 release is coming out soon and includes some really cool stuff for tablet interactivity as well. You can see all our features here.

What’s your goal with Weever Apps?

Make the mobile/web more affordable, accessible and fair by “weeving” the best features of traditional apps and web sites together – and – ‘”weeving” an organization’s entire web presence into one focused, engaging mobile presentation. Thus the name, “Weever” – the ‘a’ was taken

What are some of your challenges?

It can be really tough introducing a almost completely new technology – we had a lot of trouble explaining that web-apps launch in the browser but can also install and go full-screen early on. And that one app can actually launch and work for all popular touch phones and tablets.

It took a lot of time for us to learn how to explain what HTML5 Web App technology is and what the marketing benefits are to people who had only ever thought of ‘apps’ as something that exists in the app store. Fortunately there’s been a surge in HTML5 Web-App adoption by big companies so that’s made that process a little easier.

When you combine that with a basic free product, it’s easy to spend too much time explaining what a technology is and too little time making it better. So we learned that we had to restrict ticket-based support to our pro version, even if we didn’t want to initially.

Even though we see more benefit in an app that launches and updates instantly for *every* customer, we found that some businesses and larger organizations just had to be in the app store too. So we’re adding a ‘turn this web-app into a native (traditional, app-store) app’ solution with the forthcoming Weever 2.0 release.

What % of sites are mobile ready currently?

Believe or not, it’s still less than 20% and that’s for *any* mobile solution at all. Going mobile is tough for a lot of web designers and site owners. All the options out there can be overwhelming.

Another suprising stat – most people don’t realize that for all the buzz the iPhone generates, it’s actually less than 25% of the phones in use out there. Android averages anywhere from 50-60% globally so having a solution that works for every popular smartphone-OS is even more important these days.

What are some of your main future plans for Weever Apps?

I’m currently exploring a way to use Weever Apps to interact with a Joomla! site using Microsoft Kinnect, a motion-capture device, which is pretty fun. More immediately, we have a Weever Apps 2.0 release coming which includes a *lot* of new features.

We’ll be supporting deep-linking in the app for the first time, as well as a whole new set of templates and layouts to choose from on a per-feature, per-tab basis when building the app. We’ll also be allowing for native (app store) packaging and supporting a new of Joomla! extension integrations and new features in general for events, ticketing and lots more.

We have an ‘AppBuilder’ platform coming soon too. Some of our best early Joomla! site and app resellers told us they sometimes needed a place where they could build apps that aren’t attached to a desktop site, for use in specific mobile marketing campaigns. So we’re making that too!

Do you have any message for Joomla users who want to take their site mobile?

Try us! The basic version is free, building the app is non-technical and you’d surprised at how far you can go. But more than that, I’d say “focus on goals”. If you’re building an app for a restaurant, put the click-to-call area ‘up front’. If it’s a tourism map, make sure you distribute QR Codes in the relevant areas so folks can launch your app instantly on their phone. Mobile today represents a huge opportunity but only if you think through the context of what your mobile users actually want to see and deliver an engaging solution.

*and volunteer with Joomla! once in a while too

Thank you Andrew and good luck!

Thanks Merav!

Visit WeeverApps.com and get your site mobile today!

1. Tell us a bit about OSTraining, how you got started and where you are now

Steve Burge

I’ve had two careers in my life and neither was perfect.

I was a teacher initially and taught in Mexico, Japan, Australia, the UK, and the US. I loved the job no matter where I went, but the pay was awful. I always did web design work to pay the bills.

By the time I moved to Georgia, in the United States, my evening job as a web designer was paying better than my day job as a teacher. So, I started Alledia.com and built web sites full time. Thus, web design became my second career.

What was imperfect about web design? Well, after a few years and a few dozen web sites, I was spending too long in my office, staring at the screen, wearing my pajamas all day and starting to smell a little. I started to feel the urge to teach again. A friend asked me to teach a Joomla class in Chicago: I tried it and loved it. That reintroduction to teaching led to more classes in Atlanta, New York, Washington, and other cities. We kept growing and by 2010 I ended up combining my two careers and becominga full-time web design teacher.

2. What have been some of your challenges with this business

We’ve experienced hundreds of challenges, but I’ll focus on those that are specific to running an online training company. There are three things that have been a struggle for us:

• Subscriptions: We struggled for a long time to find an ultra-reliable way to process subscription payments. We went through Authorize.net, PayPal.com and at least one Joomla subscription extension. There are just so many things that can go wrong with subscriptions. We ended up going with Recurly.com which does nothing but subscriptions and it does them well.
• Videos: It’s hard to provide a reliable video stream to everyone. There are so many local glitches, connection problems and speed problems with the internet. We finally solved the problem by moving to Brightcove.com , which produces multiple copies of every video we upload. Brightcove automatically detects if you’re on a fast or slow connection. If you’re on a fast connection, Brightcove serves you a high quality version of the video , and if you’re on a slow connection, they’ll give you a low quality version.
• A stream of new content: An odd truth about video creation is that it’s very hard to do it all the time . It’s very painstaking, detailed work and everyone working in videos needs to have regular breaks where they tackle other things in the business. So, it’s been a challenge to manage our video pipeline so that there is always fresh content for our members. We’ve ended up by working with a lot of different teachers. It works well for them to do videos for a while and then go back to live teaching or web design for a while.

3. Do you think online training will be replacing off line training at some point?

Yes, absolutely. Why? The simple truth is that off line training doesn’t scale. There are only so many cities we can visit and teachers we can put on airplanes.

We’re aiming to become an “online first” company.

“Online first” means we’ll get a majority of our revenue from online training. We’re on track to achieve that by September.

4. What are some of the most common challenges your students have when learning/using Joomla?

The major challenge is that the workflow is not as intuitive as it could be. Once people know what the workflow is, they can understand it and use it easily, but the user interface often gets in the way.

We use the reminder CASh: Categorize, Add, Show to help people remember the workflow. CASh applies whether you’re adding content, weblinks, menu links or many other things:

• Categorize: Go to Category Manager and set up categories.
• Add: Go to Article Manager and add articles.
• Show: Go to Menus and add menu links.

We find that people get confused if they approach this process in a different way. Some people try to make their menu links first, which is what you do in Dreamweaver. Others forget to create categories , and this leads to a disorganized mess of articles.

5. What are your plans for OSTraining for the future?

We’re going to dig far deeper into popular extensions. We’ve just released a security course covering Admin Tools and Akeeba Backup . Anyone can take this course for free at: http://www.ostraining.com/courses/class/joomla-25/security/view/.

Next up are K2 and JomSocial.

6. What’s missing now when it comes to Joomla training?

I’d love to see more of it. I’d love more people to give us competition. Whether we are website builders, template designers, or extension developers who are involved in Joomla in any (insert space) way, we need to be explaining Joomla to people. Most users are too busy to spend hours figuring things out for themselves. If you’re a professional working in Joomla, it needs to be part of your job to explain what Joomla is and how to use it.

7. What technology have you used for your online training?

We rely on five key pieces of technology:

• Platform: We use Joomla 1.5 still.
• Videos: All our videos are on Brightcove.com .
• Subscriptions: We process payments using Recurly.com and connect that to Joomla using a custom component.
• Newsletters: We use MailChimp to send out a packed newsletter every week. This is a key advertising tool for us. We have a huge readership who might not be members but enjoy getting the newsletters every week.
• Training classes: Guru!

8. What made you switch to Guru?

We needed a solid platform to show off our classes. Our class pipeline has become busier in 2012, and our staff is struggling to keep up with all the new classes. Guru has made that much easier. We can set up a new class in a couple of hours now, rather than it taking all day.

OSTraining course pages powered by Guru

9. What are your favorite Guru features?

We love the ease of use. The process of adding training sessions is as easy as this:

• Click New.
• Enter a session title.
• Paste in the embed code for the video.
• Click Save.

Guru does everything else for us. It manages the class layout and teacher profiles. It tracks viewer activity and presents students with quizzes. It’s great to have all of this in one integrated package, specifically designed for online training.

10. What else would you like Guru to have that’s not on our roadmap?

The roadmap looks great as it is! It’s one of the reasons we moved to Guru.

To answer the question, I’ll suggest one thing on the frontend and one on the backend:

• On the fronted, I’d love to see a really good user profile page where people can show off the courses they’ve taken and the tests they’ve passed.
• On the backend, it would be nice to able to move course sessions from one course to another.

*********

Thanks  Steve and good luck!

Prerequisites

This is an advanced article. You will need a server running mod_rewrite and you must have at least a basic understanding of .htaccess files. I’d also advise you to test this out in a dev environment not a live site. It took me a while to get it right myself, so there is definitely a learning curve. Alright, let’s get down to it.

STOP THE INSANITY!

Set it up

Open up your web servers public_html directory via SFTP. (or ftp if you are old school)  This article is written with the assumption that this is a new account with no files in public_html.

Make a folder called /v1/. Don’t worry, we will hide the directory from showing in your url later in this article using mod_rewrite. Create a .htaccess file in the public_html root as well. For now you can leave it blank.
Now dump your Joomla files from Joomla.org into the /v1/ directory and create your database users via cpanel or phpmyadmin or how you normally do it.

the .htaccess file

Now we need to put some code in your .htaccess file. Our goal is to have our physical files for Joomla in /v1/, however we do not want to see the /v1/ in the url of our site. This is easy with some mod_rewrite magic.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule ^$ /v1/ [QSA,L]
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule !^(forum|blog|wordpress|activecollabs|affiliates)(/.*)?$ /v1%{REQUEST_URI} [QSA,L]


Voila! Now when you go to yourwebsite.com you will actually be accessing the /v1/ directory. Install your Joomla site as you normally would, and not using the /v1/ in the url.

Changing to a new site, or a new version

The best part of this method is now you can have a directory at /v2/ that you can use for creating a new version of your site. When the site is ready to go, you just open up your .htaccess file and change the 2 instances of /v1 to /v2 and now your new site is live and your old site is not.

Mind your configuration.php file

Everything should work fine the way it sits, but don’t forget to change your log_path and tmp_path in your Joomla configuration.php file. They should be the actual path , not the fake path we are creating with .htaccess.
For example:

var $log_path = '/home/website/public_html/v1/logs';
var $tmp_path = '/home/website/public_html/v1/tmp';


Dev site, test site, new versions, anything is possible

By setting your public_html directory up like this, you are creating all sorts of space and room for freedom. You can make a directory at /dev/ and then duplicate your main site into it. Now you have a place to test new plugins or upgrades without tinkering with your live site.

public_html_done_right

Security and Googlebot

Naturally search engine spiders will want to look over your new directories. Chances are you don’t want Google to be sniffing into your dev or future site builds, so it’s best to block then from snooping around. You can create a file called robots.txt and put this into it.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /dev/
Disallow: /v2/
Disallow: /freakydeekystuff/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Ultimately however, if you really don’t want anybody goofing around in those directories you need to just disable the site in configuration.php or create a .htaccess password using cpanel. Much like the lines on the road, robots.txt is just a guideline for search engines.

How do you do it?

This is how I organize my web server directories, how do you do it? Do you have a better method?