Beginning this month, users of the Chrome browser will begin to have notifications when visiting websites that do not have a secure certificate configured. Luckily, we partnered with Knownhost last year and have been using the free SSL service provided there so our clients have nothing to worry about. Contact us if you need assistance getting your site secure.
New tutorials using Pagebuilder CK. Pagebuilder will help you manage your web pages with ease. We plan to add to the playlist so check back often - or subscribe to get notified when new tutorials are available.
I am on a private FaceBook page where web designers can talk "around the water cooler" from our generally lonely offices'. Another designer posted the above meme and I could really relate.
Many Joomla! developers are in Europe so perhaps my email inbox was fuller than most, however, any large company that deals with Europe also needed to comply with the new GDPR laws and I received a large amount of updated privacy notices from companies of every size.
The majority of sites I work on are not obligated to abide by this new law. A few did and so I got the opportunity to learn the basics last week (got to love a deadline...)
Begining in June all those Google Maps you see on web sites everywhere it seems will change. Maps that use the Google API will need to have a credit card enabled on the account so that Google can charge if you exceed the free limit.
Some designers are saying "No worries, I don't use the API - I just embed the map". Bad news is that all those embedded maps will now be watermarked with a message of "for development use only" and will be grayed out. Not very professional looking.
Need help with your Map ?
One of my clients needed to generate a PDF from their ACYMailing Newsletter. In the past I have used Phoca PDF to generate PDF's from Joomla content, however, this extension only works with Joomla articles and so was not an option.
The quick fix for this (and other Joomla extensions) is to "print" in the Chrome Browser. Simply navigate to the page in Chrome, choose print, select the pages that are generated, and save your PDF. Photos and links are retained and the output was exactly what we needed.
Although Phoca Gallery is a great photo management tool for Joomla, I had forgotten the steps to upload and create a gallery. I jumped on over to youtube.com where I found the Basic Joomla Tutorials channel. Tim Davis from Cybersalt Consulting and Communications has a number of tutorials on all sorts of Joomla related subjects. He also uses some of my favorite tools from Regular Labs, Akeeba, MyJoomla, and of course Phoca Gallery. The tutorials are very easy to watch since Tim is such a likeable guy. Every Monday he has a live "Maintenance Monday" video with chat and it has been fun to pop in and chat up some Joomla :) I encourage all of my clients to subscribe to his youtube channel.
Over the years there have been many opinions on what CMS offers the best search engine results for your web site. Many of these opinions deserve some consideration, but the bottom line is...
Search engines don't care what you use for your web site !
That's right, unless you are using a system that obscures your site content, you're good. Yay ! Now here is the bad news.... Content is King. Talk to anybody who is working on organic search engine rankings and they will confirm the mantra, Content is King.
Having your website hacked is more costly than keeping it up to date. Joomla 3.6.4 released today.