This is a fun, light post for many of our customers who ask us about the tools that we use for Joomla development. So, for those of you who are wondering, here is the list of tools that we use to work on Joomla sites: Total Commander: We use Total Commander to browse local files […]

Everyone talks about the benefits of using gzip on Joomla sites (you can enable it by logging in to the backend and going to Site -> Global Configuration -> Server, and then choosing “Yes” next to Gzip Page Compression), but nobody tells you the whole story. The whole story is that gzip, in general, only […]

Note: This post contains a core modification, which means that the next Joomla update may overwrite it. Another note: This post only applies to Joomla 2.5. The below will not work on Joomla 3.x. According to our customers, one of the most annoying features in Joomla is the checkout feature. Yes, this feature does the […]

Note: Make sure you backup your Joomla website before following the guide below. You should backup both the filesystem and the database. We are lately getting many Joomla 2.5.x websites with modified core to update to the latest version of Joomla. Obviously, this is a very delicate task because a Joomla update can (and most […]

We get a couple of call every week or so from new clients telling us that their Joomla website got penalized by Google. The first question that we ask them is: “Are you sure you got penalized?”, and the second question is: “How did you know you got penalized?”. The answer to the first question […]

We had a call earlier this week from a client telling us that whenever he tries to edit his Gantry template from Joomla’s backend, he gets a blank page. Hmmm! We tried to edit the Gantry template ourselves but we also got the blank page… Of course, there are many, many reasons that cause the […]

A new client called us today and told us that his Joomla website was penalized by Google. The client told us that his Joomla website slowly lost its rankings over the past few months, until it got penalized. We did a very quick investigation and we discovered that ever since Joomla 3.1 was out, our […]

Note: Before starting, we would like to explain what we mean by “files” in the title of this post. By files, we mean media files (such as images, videos, mp3s, etc…) and documents (such as PDF files and Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents, etc…). Another note: This post assumes that no file is linked to directly from outside […]

Using caching in Joomla will come back to haunt you. (Source: the team at itoctopus!) If you are using caching on your website, and we’re not even talking about page level caching, just global caching, you might have experienced some broken functionality here and there. Even if you haven’t noticed anything wrong on your website, […]

Let us start this post by explaining, in very concise terms, what is W3C compliance: W3C compliance is ensuring that the page has no HTML errors according to the W3C standards. W3C compliance has several benefits: It’s good for SEO: It is well known that Google, as well as other search engines, consider websites that […]

We love RSForm – it is by far the best form builder out there. We think that Joomla is blessed to have RSForm in the JED. One of the nicest things about RSForm is that it’s very flexible: there’s always a solution to whatever you want done, regardless of the complexity. OK – enough flirting! […]