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?

What is the Joomla 2.5 Beta for?

This beta is being released to allow the public to test and play with this new version. Developers can install it and test their extensions to make sure they work. Website administrators can download it and test the upgrade process from Joomla 1.7 to Joomla 2.5.0 on their development sites.
It’s important to note that this version should not be used on a live or a production site. Changes are still being made and running beta scripts such as this on a active site is poor form. Test it, play with it, try and break it, but don’t use it for Grandmas new muffin website.

I like my muffins fresh out of SVN

When will Joomla 2.5 come out of beta?

The Joomla Project people have stated that it will go stable around January 10th, 2012. New releases will come out every six months after that. ex: 2.5.1, 2.5.2 and so on. Of course these are not exact dates, remember Joomla is coded by volunteers.

Will Upgrading from Joomla 1.7 to Joomla 2.5 be hard?

Nope. Remember back a few months ago when Joomla 1.7 was released and we talked about it’s features? The most important new option was upgrades via the administration area. You can safely upgrade from Joomla 1.7 to Joomla 2.5 via a click of a button. Obviously you should test this in your sandbox first and not on a live site, but it will drastically speed up your upgrade process.

How can I upgrade Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5?

There is no upgrade path from J1.5 -> J2.5. You will have to migrate. There are a variety of changes from J1.5 to newer versions including changes to tables and the ACL (access control list) so a migration is the only way. If you are comfortable with migrating from different Joomla releases you probably have a system in place. If not, you can try out this extension. I personally have not tried it, but it seems pretty straightforward. Take all the usual precautions and backup your databases and files before doing something like this. Try it on your development site first and test the process before doing it on a live site.

Will iJoomla extensions work on Joomla 2.5?

We plan to keep up with the development and convert all the products that are 1.7 to 2.5.

Have you installed Joomla 2.5 beta yourself?

Let us know in the comments what your experiences have been and if you had any problems. We would love to know what you think.

The CMS Expo, held last week, was a great conference with fascinating presentations and a perfect ending: Ad Agency was named “The Best Joomla Commerce App”!

Merav Knafo showing her CMS Expo Award for iJoomla Ad Agency

We’re thrilled to win, and we’re celebrating. We’re slashing $50 from the price of the extension.

This is going to be a three-day celebration (yes, we know how to party!) so make sure you grab your copy for just $99.9, before we come back down to Earth and realize what we’ve done. It really is a HUGE discount. (But then an award from the CMS Expo really is a big deal!)

And Ad Agency just keeps getting better and better. If you’ve been humming and hawing about whether to buy it, here’s your chance to get it at a rock-bottom price — and still with a money back guarantee.

What’s New with Ad Agency?

The latest version of Ad Agency, 2.0.9, comes with a few bug fixes and enhancements. You can upgrade it here and find the full change log here.

What About a Version for Joomla 1.6?

We’ve had a lot of question about when Ad Agency will be ready for Joomla 1.6. We did want to start and finish the conversion a few months ago but most users are still using Joomla 1.5. We have to consider them before we stop the development on 1.5 completely.

So we’ve decided to add a few much-needed features and fix a few bugs on 1.5 while Joomla users continue to make the switch. One of these features is an optimized database with compacted expired campaigns; another is a limit to the number of ads that an advertiser can add to a campaign.

We hope to finish these two features and fix a few more minor bugs within the next couple of weeks. We’ll then release the Joomla 1.5 version and move on to conversion to Joomla 1.6.

Best Regards,

Joomla’s new login module though is HUGE. In fact, at 159px X 258px, it’s about 43 percent taller than the old version! Yes, I know there are a bunch of new links to “forgot password” and “forgot username” etc., but making this module so big shows little understanding of usability and web optimization.

The premium real estate on your website should be about getting people to convert… to subscribers, to customers, or to whatever else you want them to become (you do know what that is, right?) So save your space and don’t waste it on a login module bigger than your house.

Fortunately, there are a few login alternatives out there. The one I found to be the most elegant was the Wow Login Box from Wow Joomla. It’s tiny — only about 37 px high — it’s free to download and they also have a Pro version… but I haven’t tried it. The only weakness I found on this little module is that the “Submit” button is hidden. You may need to tweak the CSS to make it work.

There are many ways though that Joomla can optimize this module and make the size more reasonable. My proposed layout is only about 90 px and it has exactly the same elements:

• Place the text box label inside the box, so that when users click on it, it disappears;
• Place the username, password and button next to each other on the same row;
• On the button, change “login” to “go.”

As for usability, one more suggestion:

• Place the “remember me” check box on the left. It’s just good practice and makes more sense.

Last time I checked, 127 people were logged in!

The problem wasn’t that the four of us were handing out passwords like business cards at a convention. It was that Joomla logs online users time after time, and keeps them “logged in” for much longer than it used to. That’s great if you’re a user — on Joomla 1.0, you took a pee break and Joomla was kicking you out. But don’t count on this number because the number displayed both on admin and on the front end “who’s online” module is completely inaccurate.

Maybe we should change the module name from “Who’s online” to “Who’s ever been online multiplied by roughly the number of the times they were logged in.” Less sexy but more accurate.

I was curious, so I googled the subject and found that the official Joomla.org answer was “Check your server access log for the ‘real’ definitive answer as to who/how many are visiting your site.”

Yikes! Maybe someone can create a *real* “who’s online” module that shows what’s *really* happening on the site, rather than cached and outdated information.I wonder if this is the reason you won’t find this module anywhere on the Joomla.org website?

In the meantime, when you look at your “who’s online” module, take the number you see, divide it by the number days of the site has been online, divide it again by the estimated number of logged in members, add the number you first thought of and subtract the year of your birth. That should give you a good idea of the real number.