How to display more than 20 items in Joomla Admin
Dec/110
There is a default of 20 line items set in many Joomla backend administration menus – including articles, modules, plugins and the extension manager. This ‘lines per page’ can be changed but it’s not stored next time you login. Here’s how to permanently get Joomla to remember how many lines you’d like to see.
Global configuration > Site settings > List Length
This screenshot is for Joomla 1.5:
The configuration screen in Joomla 1.5
Here’s the same setting in Joomla 1.6, 1.7 and beyond. Click to enlarge.
Configuration page in Joomla 1.7
For more on Joomla, see www.2020media.com/joomla
Usergroup Roundup and news from EU
Nov/110
It’s been a busy week with a Joomla and WordPress usergroup sessions, as well as a meeting with Eurid, the registry for .eu domains.
Joomla Usergroup
The regular monthly meetup of the London Joomla usergroup took place on Tuesday. Phil from SoftForge gave us some insights into the Akeeba Backup tool. Many people already use the extension to make backups of their site. What is not so well know is that the Pro version (a very reasonable $50 or so for unlimited sites) easily adds the ability to copy the backup to offsite storage. Currently DropBox and Amazon Storage are available. Phil also pointed out the security feature of Akeeba to setup a secret key as attackers could trigger your backup repeatedly and cause a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. This setting is in the top right Parameters button. Akeeba Backup is even being used to non-Joomla websites.
2020Media will setup Akeeba for any customer using our hosting competely free of charge. Just ask!
WordPress Usergroup
Two talks this week – WordPress SEO and a newbies guide to Custom Post Types. The evening began with a quick roundup of WordPress news (download the podcast).
- WordPress 3.3 is almost out. New features include a drag and drop interface for adding images and other media.
- Akismet, the anti comment spam service is continuing it’s march towards a paid model
- There’s a plugin to check your website for vulnerability to the tomthumb problem.
- WP Install Profiles is a Drupal-like idea for developers who want to pre-fill their installs with their favourite plugins and themes.
David Bain, an internet marketing expert who uses WordPress in his work, talked about getting your WordPress website noticed in the search engines. David talked us through his 3 “P”s – Preparation, Publishing and Performance. Lots of great tips and well worth attending if you were able to get to London. His slides and our podcast will be available soon. Download the podcast
Keith Devon gave us a great introduction to Custom Post Types, which was very useful for the new developer or designer. Simply put, setting up Custom Post types allows you to add a new section to the admin menu for a adding content to a specific type of page that you design. For example if you had staff profiles, you can create a page entry that has boxes for their name, position and job description, and then on the front end display this in a particular way. Download the podcast.
Eurid Meeting
Aliette Boshier
The team for the .eu registry were in London to convince the euro-sceptics in the UK that getting a .eu domain is a good idea! Whilst the argument “show you are European” may not be terribly popular at the moment, the EU is still Britains largest overseas trading partner. If you run a business that trades with the European area, a .eu domain is a wise choice to link to your website.
The .eu domain is 5 years old this year and is now considered a well established and trustworthy domain extension. There are over 3 million .eu domains in use, and it’s the 5th most popular extension in the UK (behind .uk, .com, .net and .org). .eu domains are now available from 2020Media with multi-year periods of 1 to 10 years, and were one of the first domain extensions in the world to offer a registry-backed DNSSEC (secure DNS) support.
Privacy Matters
Oct/111
Google adverts and many others set cookies in your browser that allow them to track you across the web. Google (as an example), uses this information to display adverts that it thinks you are more likely to click on, based on the kind of sites you’ve visited in the past. Here’s how the world’s 3rd biggest search engine Yahoo! describe it:
Quite apart from the privacy concerns this raises, it can make SEO (search engine optimisation) of your website harder to do. If you are checking keywords in search engines, how do you know if you are seeing the same results as an ordinary user who’s never heard of you before?
Fortunately you can opt out of these networks (well most of them).
- Opt out of Google tracking
- Yahoo Ad Interest opt out
- Opt out of many Network Advertisment programmes.
- Quantcast Opt out.
Because the default behaviour is opt-IN, these methods set a cookie that tells the advertiser to stop tracking. If you clear all your cookies, this preference it lost and you will have to revisit these pages again to opt-out again.
Location information is also commonly being captured by search engines so it’s important to clear this as well when you are doing research on your website’s search engine ranking. Google call it location-based customization.
2020Media can help
SEO Panel
Use the links above to check your browser’s current settings – if you use more than one browser you will need to use each in turn.
2020Media are beta-testing a new free service to all customers – SEO Panel. This is a complete open source seo control panel for managing search engine optimization of your websites and works independently of your browser settings. If you’d like to be in the trial, let us know.
Customers can update their communication preferences with 2020Media by logging in to the customer portal, clicking My Profile and editing the Bulletins tab.
2020Media takes privacy matters extremely seriously. We have a privacy statement on our website. This describes the policy that is in place to protect your personal information.
When changes are requested to your services, website or email, expect us to be robust in challenging the person making the request to prove they are authorised to do so, especially when the change requested could affect the availability of that service. 2020Media prides itself on being “small enough to care, large enough to cope”; so our staff attempt to speak to each and every contact during the service. This helps improve security as well as emphasises that we are not just a faceless supplier – we’re trusted partners in your internet presence.
Greatest WordPress Plugins
Oct/110
Adds a custom logo to your wp-admin and login page. If you are building sites for other people this is a must.
http://bavotasan.com/downloads/add-your-logo-to-the-wordpress-admin-and-login-page/
Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any "consumer" side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages/
Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analyticator/
This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog, adding lots of features, eg. custom variables and automatic clickout and download tracking
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/
Provides several Twitter widgets: show your own tweets, show tweets relevant to post's tags, show tweets for Twitter lists, show tweets for hashtags, show tweets for keyword searches, show favorite tweets. Multiple widgets on the same page are supported.
http://www.tweetblender.com/
Adds a splash page to your site that lets visitors know your site is down for maintenance. Full access to the back- & front-end is optional.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-maintenance-mode/
London Joomla User Group report
Sep/111
The September London Joomla User Group meeting took place with less than a week to go until the only UK Joomla conference of 2011 – Joomla!Day UK 2011. Several of the speakers were at the meeting and we were given a preview of one of the talks coming up on Sunday.
Coupon code for 100% discount on your extra tickets is MAXIMUM.
Use the code for today (Wednesday 21st September) only.
Other topics discussed were getting Joomla running on a local Windows setup for development (Microsoft’s Web Matrix was recommended); the imminent release of the long awaited VirtueMart 2 – this will actually be released during Joomla Day London; a discussion about everyone’s favourite extensions; and finally we talked about making Joomla fast.
Jet Set Joomla
We asked what the fastest Joomla theme was – Afterburner from Rockettheme was suggested; honourable mentions went to Joomlapolis and Morph.
To further increase your site’s speed, use of a content delivery network was suggested – although not free, these can definitely help. If you sign up via the guy who makes the Joomla plugin there’s a discount for one popular commerical CDN.
Use Firebug for Firefox to check the download speed of all the components of your site – find out if anything is dragging your load times down.
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