Guru 5 Quiz with Media

I am happy to announce the release of our highly anticipated Guru 5 Beta 1. This version has all the exciting new features and the complete redesign I mentioned in my last blog post. It is the ultimate Joomla LMS!

The new Guru looks and works beautifully! It will take your learning center to a whole new level.

As we’ve been explaining the improvements coming to Guru 5, we’ve received lots and lots of messages from excited customers. They’ve told us that the extra features were exactly what they were hoping to see. It’s been hugely encouraging. I’m sure you’re going to love it!

How to download Guru 5 Beta 1:

1. On iJoomla.com navigate to My Downloads.
2. Click the green download button of your Guru product. If your license has expired, please renew it and receive a 20% discount.
3. Unzip the package and find the “Guru PRO 5.0.0 Beta 1 (Joomla3)” folder.

How to upgrade:

You don’t need to un-install anything! Just install the new version on top of the old version.

1. Make sure your Joomla version is up to date (current version is 3.6).
2. Upload the component (com_guru_pro_5.0.0_xxx.zip).
3. Upload the module (mod_guru_courses_3.0.4xxx.zip).

Do not install this beta version on a production site:

Guru 5 is still a beta version and should not be uploaded to a production site. We do not support beta versions, so please only use it on production sites.

Found a bug? Submit a bug report

We want to know about any bugs you find on Guru so we can fix them quickly and get to a stable version as soon as possible.

If you find a bug, please submit it here:

https://www.ijoomla.com/report-a-bug

Please follow our bug report template to help us understand the exact issue:

http://beta.jomsocial.com/guidelines

Ready to try Guru 5 Beta?

Get Guru 5 Beta here!

This is our weekly installment of Joomla extensions to be aware of. There are so many new extensions that come out everyday, it’s hard to stay current on what is out there and what might help you with your Joomla site. This go round we will focus on extensions from NoNumber.nl.

ReReplacer

ReReplacer is a Joomla! component and system plugin that enables you to replace anything in your Joomla! site’s output with whatever you want.

ReReplacer will search the text (html) of your pages for your search request and replace it with whatever you want. These replacements are on the fly, which means they are not permanent. They are done every time you request a web page in your site. This might have a negative effect on your page loads times if you do too many of these, so keep an eye on that. This is a great plugin that provides you with loads of options when you need to replace things en masse. If you are familiar with regular expressions you will love this.

Keep in mind this is for HTML and NOT for articles or any content stored in the database. If you need to replace words or text in articles, try DB Replacer.

Learn more about ReReplacer at NoNumber.nl

DB Replacer

DB Replacer enables you to search and replace in any table in your database. Sometimes you need to replace something in all your articles. That takes hours doing it the conventional way. Open the article, change, save article, open next article and so forth. Now you can do it in a few seconds with this plugin. It supports searching with case sensitivity and using regular expressions. This is a great tool that will save you loads of time if you need to change a lot of articles at once.

Learn more about DB Replacer at NoNumber.nl

Advanced Module Manager

This is one of my all time favorite extensions to use. It allows you to show modules depending on a variety of conditions, ranging from what page you are on, if you are logged in, if you are an admin, if you are a spider, and much more.

• See what modules are active for the menu item you are editing
• Edit modules in modal popup windows
• Option to not show modules that have no output (handy for things like dynamic menus)
• Option to show modules on all pages, except the selected menu items (reverse functionality of normal selection)
• Many other publishing assignments for your modules! You can control publishing modules by (ALL / ANY):Menu Item, Sections / Categories, Articles, FLEXIcontent Categories, K2 Categories, Mighty Resource Categories, ZOO Categories, Components, URL, Date, User Group Levels, Users, Languages, Templates, PHP evaluation and more.

This is a great tool with both free and paid versions. I use this quite often on bigger websites when I need sidebar modules to only show in very specific locations or conditions. Joomla 1.0 and 1.5 never had a lot of control over the modules. Joomla 2.5 has recently added very basic module display control, but AMM goes well above and beyond what comes included in Joomla.

Learn more about Advanced Module Manager at NoNumber.nl

What are your must have extensions?

Those are some of my favorite extensions to use. What are some of yours?

Too much meta info

Open up your website, right click, and view your source code. Look for the “meta name” lines.


meta name="keywords" content="keyword, another keyword, more keywords"


meta name="description" content="This is your meta description field. It will be made up of 156 or less characters and will be what you see in Google search results so make it perfect."


These are the most important meta tags you can have on your site. They must be different for every page on your site, they must not include your site name, and they need to be skillfully written to include keywords representing what your single webpage is about. If you use the same meta description for every single page, Google might not rank you properly or can potentially penalize you. Proper SEO is a whole other topic we will talk about in the future. If you want some quick tips and solutions for SEO in your Joomla site, try out our SEO extension. Now, let’s get back to meta tags.
Joomla loves adding additional meta information. Every single Joomla install you do will have this tag automatically added to your site.


meta name="generator" content="Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Management"


This is a largely useless tag, used mostly to advertise Joomla. You can remove it by using a plugin or by adding a small bit of code to your site. You can read about how do do that in this blog post.
There are about a million different meta tags you can use in a website. Make sure to use only the ones you absolutely need, and if you aren’t using one, take it out. Do you want an easy way to edit all your Joomla meta tags at once? Try our extension.

Keeping your < head > clear

The < head > element of your source code is the place where a lot of stuff is going on. You will see meta information, references to css, stylesheets, javascript files, Google tracking code and a variety of other things beyond the scope of this article. This area can quickly get bloated and out of control. If your < head > area has 500 lines of code inside of it, you are doing something wrong. Webpages will load slower, Google will have more troubles scanning and indexing your site, and compliance will most likely be shot as well. Try to keep things tidy, and having a solid understanding of what is in the < head > area of your website is infinitely valuable.

Too much bling

When building a website it is easy to get caught up in fancy sliders and widgets and tabs and lightboxes and flippy things. They look pretty, and in many cases help display content on your site. The down side is code bloat. Look at this example:

What is wrong here?

Lines 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 are all calling some sort of javascript. The problem is 1,2,& 3 are calling the same code but in different locations. This means every single time you load your website, you are executing 3 identical chunks of code. This will make a massive impact on your page load speed, as well as potentially conflict with your website, preventing your fancy effects from even working.

What else is wrong?

You can also see in this example that jquery is being loaded two times at once. Frequently jQuery and MooTools will conflict with each other causing all sorts of headaches. When possible, try to stick with one form of javascript or the other. Running both on your site is code bloat. When looking for extensions, try to make sure you always use the same library. It will be better for you in the long run.

Do you have any tips or pet peeves?

These are some of my pet peeves for a clean Joomla site. What do you do to keep your site clean, fast and efficient?

Do you want to remove the meta tag “generator” from your Joomla site?  It’s very easy to do.


In this post I will show you how to do it with a plugin, and also how to do it with a single line of code.

Why do I want to remove it?

Ideally you do not want large amonts of unnecessary code in your website. You do not want to make it harder for Google and search engines to find what they need–you want to make it easier. Now I understand, this one line of code isn’t exactly a ton of bloat, but it all adds up over time. A bit of code here, an extra meta there, and all of a sudden you have a huge index file that takes ages to load. Keep things tidy.

Give me a plugin.  Code scares me.

By far the easiest way is to use the Joomla plugin ByeByeGenerator.  Install the plugin, enable it, verify the meta tag is removed in the source code and you are done.  Not only is the method the easiest, it will work for any version of Joomla.  1.5, 1.6, 1.7 & 2.5.  This method is also persistent, so if you change your templates a lot or do any updates, this plugin will always work and never get overridden.  But what if you are a purist?

I don’t want another plugin, just tell me how to do it manually

The method to removing the meta name generator tag for Joomla varies between versions.  On Joomla 2.5 you can simply add this code to your index.php file in your template.

JFactory::getDocument()->setGenerator('');

Put it just after the line //no direct access.  This method will vary greatly on what template you are using and from what company, so I cannot get too detailed.  For example YooThemes has a different template structure then RocketThemes.  You will have to noodle around a bit yourself in order to do this.  The main advantage of editing the template code instead of installing a plugin is less overhead.  The fewer plugins you have, the faster your site will be, and queries add up fast.

Conclusion

This is one of the few cases I’d suggest using a plugin over editing code.  This plugin totally removes the meta name generator tag, installs in no time at all and get’s the job done.  I use this plugin personally for the Joomla sites I build.  I heartily recommend it.