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.
Decoding Cron
Sep/110
Cron is a useful feauture on Linux operating systems that allows easy scheduling of repeated tasks. Typically this includes rotating log files so that they don’t get to big, and checking for updates to software.
Cron commands can look intimidating to the non-technical user, so this article explains how to read them.
A typical crontab line looks something like this:
The asterisks at the beginning of the line are the all important timing information.
The values accepted for each field are: The minute field value must be 0-59, the hour field 0-23, the day of month field 1-31, the month field 1-12 and the day of week field 0-6 (Sunday is 0 but this can also be given as 7).
The values can be given in a variety of formats:
- An asterisk (*) character will match all possible values for the field: e.g. the Cron expression “* * * * *” will run the command every minute since this is the smallest representable time period.
- A literal value: e.g. “30 * * * *” will run the command whenever the minute is 30, i.e. once an hour at half-past the hour.
“* * 5 * *” will run every minute when it is the 5th day of the month.
- A list is given by separating each possible value using a comma: e.g. “0,15,30,45 * * * *” will run the command whenever the minute is either 0, 15, 30 or 45. Another example, “0 1,2,3 * * *” will run the command between 1am and 3am (inclusive) but only when the minute is 0, i.e. on the hour. Lists can also contain ranges (see below).
- A range is given by separating the lower and upper values of the range with a hyphen (-): e.g. “0 1 1-5 * *” will run the command at 1am on the first, second, third, fourth and fifth days of the month.
- An increment is given by using a forward slash: e.g. “*/15 * * * *” will run the command every 15 minutes starting on the hour. i.e. this example is the same as the list example given above to run whenever the minute is 0, 15, 30 or 45.
- A final example “35 7 * * *” means run the command at 35 minutes past 7am, everyday.
By default each run of the command will write to your log file. A couple of options are to change this:
- Add “>> /dev/null 2>&1″ to the end of the command line (a space then the text inside the “)
- Add “| mail -s “Subject” me@domain.com” to send a confirmation by email.
Ready to have a go?
This utility helps you build Cron expressions easily by choosing job scheduling scenarios. The crontab entries produced work with Vixie Cron, popular in many Linux distributions.
In the examples above, you should normally remove the inverted commas (“) around the commands.
If you need any advice about cron, we’ll be happy to help. Please contact us.
Themes that do more
Jul/114
The WordPress.org website includes an online directory of thousands of completely free themes. WordPress insists on GPL licensing which also means these themes are free to modify to your own custom design if you wish.
There are also many many sites offering paid for themes. The quality is generally high and if you are after something that gives your site instant wow appeal, it can be worth spending a few pounds on a theme. Expect to pay USD $35- USD $95 (GBP £20 – GBP £60) for a theme.
This post is about WordPress themes that do more than just change the appearance of your site. We’re looking at themes that include specific functionality. This often means the theme comes with extra plugins to perform these roles.
Business Directory
The DirectoryPress WordPress theme is a complete theme and plugin. Cost is USD $79. The theme includes maps, payment gateways for paid directory listings and around 20 different template designs.
Business Directory for WordPress is a plugin only. It allows simple text based listing, submitted by the unregistered users. There’s no editing facility. Cost is free although a suggested donation of USD $5 is requested by the author to help fund further development.
WP Business Directory Manager is a plugin only. It supports user registration, paid placements (at extra cost to the plugin creator). It allows images in the listings. The plugin is free and you can see a live example at www.hairdressing.co.uk
Jobs
9-to-5 theme. This theme from a paid theme provider costs USD $35 and includes both a job board theme and the listing plugins. Features include ajax filtering, google maps, and the ability to take payments via paypal for paid listings.
Jobroller is another paid theme. It includes separate portals & tools for both job seekers and employers, has built-in payment gateway support and a has a CV section. Cost is USD $99.
Job Manager is a plugin only. It’s designed for a single company’s job listing and includes functions to take online applications and manage the interview process. It’s free and has been downloaded over 30,000 times from WordPress.
Classifieds
Sofa OpnPress is a paid theme that styles itself “WP Yellow Pages”. It offers front-end editing for users, paid or free listings mode, a voting system, and supports localisation. Cost is USD $35.
Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin is a well established free plugin (2 years old) and boasts upwards of 70,000 downloads from WordPress. It allows for paid or free ads, moderation, notifications and social integration. A number of premium (paid-for) modules are available which add things like featured listings, fee per category and google checkout integration.
wp-classified is a simpler option that adds a simple information & advertising blackboard or classified page in to your wordpress site. The plugin is free. A few comments in the forum indicate that some users find the documentation lacking.
Charity
Agency Theme is a paid theme that includes a nice “donation bar” on the home page. Ideal for fund raising towards a target, the donation bar shows progress towards the specified amount features a prominent donation link. Cost of this theme is USD $95. A number of plugins that offer a similar feature can be found on WordPress.
10 themes for non-profits. Not a theme or plugin itself, this post reviews 10 beautiful themes designed with charity websites in mind.
Donate Plus is a free WordPress plugin with PayPal integration. The plugin contains lots of options for creating a donation form on your site, and includes a recognition function for displaying donations and comments. In function it’s similar to Just Giving, though does not include any Gift Aid functionality.
Conclusion
We’ve chosen just 4 categories here but there are dozens if not hundreds of customised themes and plugins for just about any specific function you might care to imagine (let us know in the comments). Costings shown above were correct at the time of writing but are likely to change in the medium-long term. Sometimes you may need to pay for the feature you want, but compared to the cost of bespoke development it’s likely to a be fraction of the cost. Many of the developers actively encourage customisation work so even if the plugin or theme doesn’t do quite what you want, it’s very well worth contacting the provider to ask if they will make a change for you.
About Us
2020Media is an established UK hosting provider. We offer WordPress hosting with expert technical assistance. Our service includes free migration from other hosts or WordPress.com and plenty of free help getting your site up and running. Hosting plans start at £45+vat/year.
Gallery
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- 9-to-5 theme
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- Agency Theme
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- DirectoryPress
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- Jobroller
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- Sofa OpnPress
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- Business Directory for WP
Spell it out with IPv6
Jun/110
Today is World IPv6 day - a day for websites around the world to test their IPv6 readiness. One unexpected consequence is that IPv6 address are hex – and therefore contain the letters a-f. This hasn’t been lost on the network boffins at the big sites that are taking part in todays experiment.
- Facebook – 2620:0:1c08:4000:face:b00c::
- BBC – 2001:4b10:bbc::1
- Cisco – 2001:420:80:1:c:15c0:d06:f00d
- US Dept of Commerce- 2610:20:0:20:5ec:d0c:d0c:d0c
- 2020Media has gone for the simple: [2a00:19e8:20:20::20]
SysAdmins everywhere will enjoy inserting their favourite beverage into addresses: :c0:ffee
For more tips on spelling in IPv6, see Pingdom
And Finally…
Lancaster University Network Services have gone for the schoolboy favourite: [2a01:8900:0:1::b00b:1e5]
VirtueMart 2 almost ready
May/110
VirtueMart, the popular opensource shopping cart extension for Joomla, have announced the availability of the release candidate of version 2 of the package.
The long awaited release of VirtueMart 2 means there will be one final bugfix and then the software will be ready to use in production. Also in the announcement was news that Joomla 1.6 is not being supported in this release after all. The developers say that as Joomla 1.6 is only being supported by Joomla for 6 months, and 1.7 will be out in around 2 months time – therefore they have not had enough time to develop VirtueMart around Joomla 1.6.
No doubt this news will disappoint some developers who have been eagerly awaiting a fully featured ecommerce add-on compatible with Joomla 1.6, but VirtueMart 2 is a complete rewrite from scratch and will fix many of the outstanding gripes people have with the extension.
The Release Candidate contains a lot new features:
- Media Handler (multiple images)
- Custom Fields (replacing the old attributes, producttypes, variants,…)
- True Child Products in the sense of OOP (unpublished parents can be used as linked product pattern)
- Mail template system
- New Currency Formatting possibilities
- More Modules and Plugins
- New Admin Menu Layout
- Meta Tags
- More Filters and Search Options
- Completely Anonymous Checkout
- Revenue Report
- New Templates
2020Media can provide a completely free installation of VirtueMart with any of our Joomla hosting plans – seee www.2020media.com/plans for further details.
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