HarperVance.com :: Latest Posts on Ranwilli's Blog

New Joomla Patch Released

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 12:13:28 -0400

Yes, it's that time again...

After six months of respite, we have a Joomla! upgrade in the 1.5.X series. You are viewing it now on this website, and I am "testing it" so that you don't have to. I always wait about 48 hours to let the dust settle a bit before I patch the numerous client sites entrusted to my care, because I want to watch the forums to see what issues arise, so that I can take special care when doing the upgrades of some

SEO and Joomla - What is the best tool?

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 08:04:00 -0400

In this morning's email, from a friend and occasional client:

"What Joomla tool do you recommend, to be able to have a site in the first positions of the listing of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query?"

I sat a few moments thinking about this, and re read the question several times. What follows is the answer I gave.

It's not really a question of tools, although there are some that are u

Styling Individual Joomla Pages

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:11:35 -0400

One of the most frequently posted questions in the Joomla! forums is:

"I need to style my HOME page differently from the rest of the pages. How can I do this?"

While there are many, many MANY ways to do so, one of the best I have seen was recently posted by user "beanluc".

I am reproducing this as an image, so you won't be able to copy/paste it, but it's only 3 lines, four counting the body tag.

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:48:24 -0400

The toughest and most time consuming tasks about building a website are not what you probably think.

The programming and "code busting" can really be done quite quickly, especially with a CMS (Content Management System) like Joomla!

The real time sink is content: What shall we say? What is the best way to say it? How should it be illustrated? How sh

Sometimes Old Dogs CAN learn new tricks

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:07:53 -0400

Working on some sites for a new client, we noticed an oddity on one of them, and as we are "cloning" the sites one from another (with new content in each domain) the oddity showed up in the latest clone as well.

In all my days with Joomla (about 1800 and counting), I had never seen anything like this:

The entire back office of Joomla was full of "dots" wh

End of an Era...

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 13:41:55 -0400

As promised, the Joomla! Community has formally "retired" Joomla! 1.0

A new entry in the blog at jooomla.org made it official on July 30.

So... what does this mean to us?

All new site development should begin at Joomla 1.5.14 (as of this writing).
If you are still procrastinating abo

Combine Training with Problem Solving

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:49:02 -0400

Through my volunteer work at Joomla.org, I meet lots of folks who "get" most of Joomla!, but there are one or two things they can't quite master.

Certainly the forums are a lot of help. When I am stuck, which happens more than I like to admit, I go straight to this link, which I got from Brad, the Forum Wizard at Joomla.org (and Rochen).