Robert Went

Fixing cURL DNS Failures on AWS EC2: Elementor Webhooks, WPML and bind9

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If Elementor webhooks aren't sending or WPML can't connect to its servers on an AWS EC2 instance, the problem probably isn't WordPress - it's bind9 causing intermittent DNS failures.

Why I Built AI Data Stream: Chat With Your Analytics Without the AI Markup

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most AI analytics tools markup API costs by 300-1000%. I built AI Data Stream with a different approach: bring your own AI keys, pay zero markup, and get the context your AI needs to actually explain what’s happening in your data.

Fixing Elementors CSS Regeneration Issues for Good

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

If you use Elementor with a caching plugin, then the odds are that you’ve seen pages of your site lose styling after updates. It has been brought up multiple times on GitHub and WordPress forums, but it doesn’t seem like Elementor developers feel it’s their responsibility to fix.

Caching Contact Form 7 Schema Requests

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

If you've noticed performance issues on WordPress pages that contain a Contact Form 7 form, especially during traffic spikes, you might be experiencing an overlooked problem: uncached API requests.

Track Elementor Form Submissions with TagManager and Google Analytics

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There are several articles already out there on how to track Elementor form submissions with TagManager. Still, most seem to rely on an element visibility trigger, which is inefficient, or overly elaborate custom JavaScript.

Remove Sitelinks Search Box Schema from Yoast Structured Data

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

On the 21st of November 2024, Google retired Sitelinks Search Box from SERPs. Although SearchAction is part of the schema.org standard, it was essentially a Google-specific enhancement.

Integrating AbuseIPDB With the Nginx Ultimate Bad Bot Blocker Script

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The Nginx Bad Bot Blocker script is fantastic and a no-brainer to install on any Nginx server hosting publicly accessible websites. As great as it is though, I’ve recently noticed a significant increase in the number of attacks on the servers which I administer and websites in general. So I looked into into integrating the

Elementor 3.18 Breaks Plugins Sending JSON Ajax Responses

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

If you find certain areas of your site not working after updating to Elementor 3.18, take this step to fix them.

Automatically Add Unique CSS Classes to Contact Form 7 Forms

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

When using certain CRMs and marketing automation tools, Contact Form 7 submissions can all look like they came from the same form. This is especially noticeable in HubSpot which uses the class on the form tag to identify each form. Unless you specifically add a class to the shortcode then it will look like any

Clear W3 Total Cache by URL From the Admin Bar or Dashboard

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

When recently working on a WordPress website that generated pages from an API that aren’t stored in the main site database, I discovered that the W3 Total Cache admin bar link to clear the current page’s cache didn’t work. The ‘Purge Current Page’ link in the Performance menu item works by passing the current post

Forcing W3 Total Cache to Clear Parent Term Listing Pages on Post Save

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

In the page caching settings of W3 Total Cache there is an option to flush the ‘Post Terms Pages’ when saving or updating a post. This clears the listing pages for any terms that the post has been added to, but it doesn’t clear the listing pages of any parent terms that aren’t checked, even

Fixing Yoast Broken Organization and Logo Schema

Sun, 10 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Get your Logo and Organization schema back after a Yoast update.

Mapping a Synology NAS Drive in Windows 11

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

How to map a Synology NAS with Windows 11 that you previously had connected with Windows 10

Prevent PDF Caching With Invoice Ninja 5 (Apache, .htaccess)

Sun, 02 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

If you find that PDF files aren’t updating after changes, it could be that they are cached by the browser or a CDN such as Cloudflare.

Customising the Client Portal Colour In Invoiceninja 5

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Customizing the invoiceninja V5 client portal colour scheme.

Extend Yoast Schema with a New Type

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Yoast 11 introduced schema data added by default. If your site already has schema added through your theme then this may break.

Remove Yoast HTML Comments in Version 11.0

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

If you were previously stripping Yoast HTML comments on your website then there is a good chance that updating to v11.0 will show the new schema data at the top of your website.

Add Joomla’s Article Layout as a Body Class

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

If you are using Joomla’s alternative layouts for certain pages, you might want to target those pages with a css class. You could add a class directly into the layout file, but since the layout file is inserted into the main component area this only lets you target that specific area and not the page

How to Stop Joomla 3 Loading Bootstrap 2 JavaScript

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

It used to be easy to remove core JavaScript files from Joomla’s output by unsetting the script at the top of your template’s index file. unset( $this->_scripts[ JURI::root( true ) . ‘/media/jui/js/bootstrap.min.js’ ] ); For whatever reason, this doesn’t work anymore with Joomla 3.9.

Block WordPress Image Uploads by Filename Match

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Are you continually telling people to optimise their image filenames before uploading them to a website? Do staff members keep assuring you that they will optimise their filenames in the future whilst having no intention of doing so? Have they said “I’ll go back and do it later” rather than taking 2 seconds to do

Securing ISPConfig Admin Panel the Easy Way

Sat, 19 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

The latest ISPConfig hosting panel includes support for Let’s Encrypt free SSL certificates. This makes it easy to secure all domains added to the panel, but it doesn’t have an option to generate a cert for the actual control panel login. Rather than manually installing and configuring a new cert through the command line, there

Better Mautic Opt-In Campaigns

Sun, 12 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

How to create a double opt-in campaign with Mautic that instantly sends the confirmation email rather than waiting for a campaign to trigger.

Removing WooCommerce noindex Tags on Account Login Page

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

If you have a website using WooCommerce and have registered it with the new version of Google Search Console, it's likely that you will get an email notification about 'index coverage' issues for the /my-account/ page.

How to Send Custom Attributes with the Official Mautic WordPress Plugin

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Example code to update preferred locale with information from WPML using the 'wpmautic_tracking_attributes' filter of the official Mautic WordPress plugin.

Tracking Known WordPress Users in Mautic with the Official Mautic Plugin

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

A new option was recently added to the official Mautic WordPress plugin (Version 2.1.0), but it won’t do anything out of the box. Here’s how to set it up to track extra information from your logged-in users.

Using LetsEncrypt With Serverpilot

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

How to install Certbot on a server managed by Serverpilot for free SSL certificates and enable HTTP/2 for a faster website with automated cert renewal.

Serverpilot Cron Jobs For Mautic

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

If you have used Serverpilot to set up your server intending to host Mautic then here is how to add the cron jobs to keep everything running.

Creating a Mautic Email Theme Using Foundation for Emails

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

On first glance, the blank Mautic theme looks like the perfect starting point for a simple HTML email, you just drag and drop the elements that you need into the layouts, add your images and text, select some colours and it’s done. Unfortunately, after testing the resulting emails in different email clients and web apps

Adding Woocomerce Bought Product Tags to Mautic Users

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

This is a follow-up to the original post about adding Mautic tags to users based on what they view on your site. In this post, I’m going to add (or remove) tags after check out, based on the products that the user bought.

Using Joomla Custom Fields to Add Canonical URLs

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

In this article, we are going to add a new field to the article editor screen and use the content of the field to output a canonical link in the head of the page on the article view. At some point, Joomla’s automatically added canonical links were removed as they didn’t work correctly, so this

Running Symfony 4 on Windows

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

How to get the Symfony 4 demo app running on Windows without errors. Fix errors related to using the ‘make’ command and get routing and cache clearing working.

Mautic Installation Checklist

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Usually, when I install Mautic, there is a bit of back and forth with the client to get the information required to get the job done. This is my list of information that needs to be provided to get Mautic installed and operational in one sitting.

Tagging WordPress and Woocomerce Users in Mautic

Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

The official WordPress plugin for Mauitc comes with a number of shortcodes, which makes it easy to add Mautic forms and content into posts and pages. One of the shortcodes adds the ability to tag (or un-tag) visitors in Mautic depending on the pages they view. This makes it easy to tag visitors dynamically by using the

Using Geocoding API's to Add Address Information from a Zip to a CSV File

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Today I was talking to a musician importing thousands of contacts into a newly setup Mautic install. The issue was that the CSV of contacts to import only contained Country Code and Zip columns.

Fixing Invalid File Type text/x-pascal When Importing Contacts to Mautic

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

If you get the following error when trying to import contacts into Mautic, it’s likely that the issue is not with the file encoding, but with one of the fields within the file. Invalid file type “text/x-pascal”. Use a file that matches of of the following mime types: “text/csv”, “text/plain”.

Loading Disqus Comments On Demand Without jQuery or AJAX

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Simple on demand Disqus comment loading without any library dependencies. Automatically loads when linked to directly and optionally for search engines.

Cutting the Size of the Mautic JavaScript Tracking Script

Sat, 03 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Having used Mautic for a few clients, I decided to install it on my own site, partly for testing and partly to actually use it’s functionality. Unfortunately, having made an effort to keep my page sizes to a bare minimum, it was depressing to see that the tracking script increased the overall size of my pages

Fixing Broken Email Template Images When Running Mautic in a Folder

Sun, 28 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I first ran into this issue after installing a local copy of Mautic to develop some custom Email templates. Everything looks fine until you open up the email builder and images added in the Email Twig template don’t show. The fix is pretty simple if a little counter intuitive.

Using the Symfony Installer Command Line On Windows

Sat, 27 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

If you are following the official documentation to use the symfony installer on Windows then it is very likely that you will run into the error: ‘symfony’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. Here’s how to fix it.

Fixing JSON Data Errors After Updating to Joomla 3.6.3

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

How to fix fatal errors related to JSON decoding when updating you Joomla core version.

How to get your Windows 10 Key

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I recently bought a new pc, and was a bit quick to install Windows, create a backup drive and remove the disk to install the larger ssd from my previous computer. The upshot of that was that, after installing the operating system on the new drive, it wouldn’t activate Windows as I didn’t fully activate

Adding Custom Mime Types for WordPress Uploads

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

WordPress allows the upload of different filetypes to posts through custom fields, but it only understands certain file types by default.

How to Find the Full Joomla Version in the Site Files

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes, for whatever reason, I need to find out the exact version of Joomla a site is running without being able to access the administration area. Here’s where to find the version number in the file system.

Issues Assigning Nameservers to .de Domain Names

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I recently ran into an issue whilst trying to change the nameservers for a German (.de) domain name. When I tried to point the domain to a whm/cpanel install I got the error ‘Failed to Modify Domain Nameservers: The domain DNS check has failed’. The reason for this is specific to .de domains.

Selecting WordPress Posts That Contain a String in PhpMyAdmin

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I was asked to find a list of posts in a WordPress install where the body text contained a certain string. Subsequently, I discovered how bad the search is in the post listing screen and decided it would be easier to find them in the database.

Standard URLS Called by Websites for DNS Prefetching

Thu, 14 Aug 2014 00:00:00 GMT

There are many articles out there on how DNS prefetching works so I will keep it brief. It works by adding a link to the head of your web page with a relationship of ‘dns-prefetch’ and the url of a domain which holds assets needed for the page to load. That could be a cdn

Adding a Compile LESS Button to a Joomla 3.2 Template

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 GMT

There was no big announcement, but you may have noticed that the Joomla 3.2.2 templates area now has a compile LESS button when viewing a less file. I had a look at how to bring this into a custom template without having to use a plugin, giving you the possibility to compile a templates less

A reCAPTCHA Plugin for Joomla 1.5

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 00:00:00 GMT

Finding extensions for Joomla 1.5 is not so easy any more, and when you do find something you need there is a good chance it doesn’t work anymore (php versions, api changes etc). I was asked today to add a recaptcha field to the standard contct form on a 1.5 site. Please, no comments about

Site Sends no Mail After Updating to Joomla 3.2

Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Unfortunately I was on the receiving end of this bug before finding out that it existed. Apologies to anyone trying to download my extensions – I have just enabled all new user accounts. Updating to Joomla 3.2 introduces a new option which allows you to disable email sending globally. You can find it in Global

Introducing JoomlaPure – A lightweight, Fully Featured Joomla 3.x Starter Template

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I guess it’s been a long time coming but, as more and more sites need to be upgraded to the latest Joomla versions, I finally put together a starter template using the best practices I have built up over the past 6 years of helping people speed up their Joomla websites and helping them share

Fighting Spam on Joomla K2 Based Websites

Fri, 05 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In the days of Joomla 1.5 there were a few limitations to using core content for anything other than simple pages. Yes, plugins were available but they couldn’t handle things like nested categories, item specific galleries and videos etc etc. Many components were created to combat those limitations but the outright winner in terms of

How to Remove Joomla’s Canonical Tag Without Hacking the Core

Tue, 02 Jul 2013 00:00:00 GMT

For reasons detailed in an earlier post about why Joomla canonical urls are not implemented correctly it may be that you want to remove them. That’s pretty easy by hacking the core, but safer to unset the tag in your template so the changes don’t get wiped out on an upgrade.

Permanently Redirect all URL’s to Lowercase

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Ideally I like to keep all urls in lowercase, but there are a few things that can lead to your site being indexed with a mixture of upper and lower case characters, which in turn can lead to problems with search engines. How can this happen? Well, for me it was playing around with Joomla’s

The Problem With Joomla’s Canonical URL Links

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Joomla 3 introduced a new feature of canonical url links. There is no way to turn it off in settings, which wouldn’t be a problem if it worked correctly, but unfortunately it doesn’t. It has been plagued by problems since it was introduced and has led to some sites taking a massive hit on visitor

Using Google’s Data Highlighter Tool

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

For a while now in Google webmaster tools there has been an option under the ‘optimization’ tab called ‘Data Highlighter’. This is their new attempt at an alternative to structured data (or another way to add it without changing the structure of your pages). It is essentially a wizard interface to get Google to understand

How to Check for the Default Page in Joomla 2.5 and 3

Sun, 26 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

In Joomla 1.5 this was quite easy as there was generally only one homepage (multiple in Joomfish but the same check worked for all). With the introduction of multi-language in 1.6 (or was it 1.7?) it was made a bit more difficult as it is possible to have multiple homepages, and checking for them involves

The Easiest way to add Google Authorship to Joomla Articles

Sun, 26 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I wrote about this a while ago in my Joomla microdata article. It has struck me since that it was complete overkill to add authorship in that way and can be done without any code changes at all, just using the standard contacts component. The reasoning is, that you don’t have to link each article

A New Solution to FOUT (Flash of unformatted text)

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Adobe recently released their ‘blank font’. It is essentially a font which contains no glyphs and is basically a css hack to stop the flash of unformatted text when using webfonts. I wrote a long time ago about how to cache the font files when using @fontface. That method can be used in conjunction with this

Protecting Email Address Links from Website Scrapers

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Spam mail is an unfortunate fact of life. The more things we sign up for, the more our addresses get sold as marketing lists. There is one area where we can try and minimise the collection of email addresses though and that is when pasting them on a website. These days, content management systems such

Adding Microdata to Joomla Articles

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Google has been using microdata for quite a while now and adding it to your website can help with clickthrough rates from search engine results. The most obvious is Google’s own authorship markup (not strictly microdata per se) where linking to your Google+ profile adds your profile image to pages in search results, but there

Adding Twitter Meta Tags

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Last month (April 2013) Twitter announced the introduction of a new set of meta tags known as ‘Twitter Cards’. Adding these tags to your site allows extra information such as an image and description to be attached to any tweet which contains a url of a page on your website. You can read the twitter

Find the Root Path to your Hosting

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes you just need the root path, for whatever reason. If you can’t get it you can create a php file and include the following lines.

Joomla Stalling at Installation Stage | PHP Session Storage

Sun, 19 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

There has been a few reports about not being able to install Joomla because it stalls at the installation and you can’t get past the first installer step. Whilst there are many reasons why this could happen, most times I have come accross it it has been down to the server setup and Joomla not

Adding Facebook Opengraph META Tags to a Joomla 3 Template

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

There are hundreds of plugins, modules and components which add Facebook opengraph tags to your articles, but is it really necessary to add an extension for the sake of a couple of meta tags. There was a time when Facebook ignored your standard meta tags and insisted that you add a specific opengraph tags for things like page title

How to get Joomla’s Current Site Language

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes there is a need to get the current content/site language to use in other places. An example being when you want to set social share buttons to display in the same language as the site. Luckily Joomla makes this easy for us.

Intelligent Contact Forms and HTML5 Local Storage

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Contact forms are supposed to make it easy for users to ask a question or just get in touch. These days, with all the captcha and anti-spam methods attached, the chances of a form being filled in incorrectly and not being sent is highly likely. The number of people using mobile devices who might loose

Using JLayout to Override Global Views in Joomla 3

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Global layouts were introduced in Joomla 3 so that they are no longer limited to a particular view or extension. In this example I am going to create a new view for the tags component which will output a plain comma separated list so that I can use it in a facebook opengraph tag.

Website Internationalization and Alternative Language Links

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

I was recently asked a couple of times about international SEO and targeting websites with similar content at the correct people without just serving up a duplicate site. The most obvious example of this is a .com website which is meant for American audiences and .co.uk which is meant for England, but it could also be

Mobile blogging with boomla 3 ;)

Sun, 12 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The future is here, the future is now. Boomla 3 has been sent back from the future to fitful our mobile bogging needs. I’ve been away for the weekend so what better time to sample a piece of the future. And what better time to test android s predicted words features.

What Does Google See When You Move Domains?

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Ok, so I moved my site. I used to have a domain called serach-friendly-web-design.com, I moved all that stuff to here because I thought that the information I gave was benifical to other people and I should retain the pages. So basically, if anyone goes to an old page they will get to see what

Are CDN’s Always a Good Idea?

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:00:00 GMT

At first a content delivery network seems like a great idea, but is it possible that it can actually be detrimental to your sites speed? Lets find out.

What is the xreference Meta and Joomla External Reference Field?

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The reference field is not something that is new in Joomla 1.6 and up. Joomla 1.5 had a ‘Key Reference’ field in the articles advanced parameters tab. What is different is where the field is now found and the way the data entered is utilised. In Joomla 1.5 the content of the key reference field

Disabling Joomla’s Auto Update by Extensions

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Template overrides are great, but sometimes you have no choice but to take a component apart to get it to do what you want it to do. It’s great that all the code is open and you are able to do that too. What’s not great is when you hand over that site to someone

Stripping Joomla 3

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 GMT

So Joomla 3 has been around for a while now and seems stable enough that you can use it for production sites without having to check up on it everyday to see if anything new has broken. And with a new site comes a new template. As always, I wanted it to be fast loading,

301 Redirect Each Page of Site to New Domain Address

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

To redirect all pages from http://www.olddomain.com to http://www.newdomain.com in the domain root of your old domain create a .htaccess file and paste the following code, changing the domain name:

Activate Windows God Mode on Vista and Windows 7

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I stumbled upon this yesterday whilst looking for something completely different… In windows 7 and vista you can activate a hidden ‘god mode’ which creates a desktop control panel giving you direct access to many useful features.

Compress Favicon with Htaccess

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Add MIME type and Expires Header to Favicon Add these lines to your .htaccess file to speed up favicon loading, as specified by the Yahoo Yslow documentation.

Easily Upgrade Joomla and Automatically Import Content from J1.5

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Today I was looking into moving our company blog to a new joomla 1.6 test site so I could experiment with a bit of HTML5 Due to the structual differences between 1.5 and 1.6, there is no option to import data from the backup of an old site like it was when upgrading from 1.0

Enable KeepAlive on Godaddy VPS

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Another red warning light when running google page speed or yslow that is quite easy to sort out if you are running your own server. First you need to know how to login through SSH as root user which you can do by reading this post. And you need an editor installed to be able

French Translations for K2store

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I have been working recently with the K2 component/plugin K2store. As a simple shopping cart it works great, but I had a nightmare trying to get hold of any translation files. The forum is full of people asking questions about how to translate different parts of the store into lots of different languages, but no

Get Your Joomla Website Images Indexed by Google

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Google, Bing, Yahoo and all search engines are instructed not to index photos from a default installation of Joomla.With the advent of blended search results, why would you not want your images to be indexed and shown alongside your site in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS)?

Google Pagespeed for Firefox 4

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Although not on the official page speed site, Google have actually released a version of pagespeed that runs on Firefox 4. Why it’s not on the site I have no idea, I would imagine it would have something to do with pushing developers towards chrome. Anyway, the link is here:

Google+ Timeline Feed for your Website

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I was asked earlier today to create a Google+ widget for a website to replace a twitter widget. I was suprised but also interested to get it working. Currently there is no widget maker from Google but there is an api which allows you to do the same thing.

Gzip Content Through .htaccess for Suported Browsers | Joomla

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Compress all files through .htaccess Here’s a few more tips to speed up your joomla website through your .htaccess file. Borrowed from the magento standard .htaccess, which contained some nice code to compress, or not compress depending on the user agent calling for the page. The lines look like this, and can be added to

How does Article Marketing Affect your Website?

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been working for a search engine optomization company for many years now. I still see the whole process offered by many companies as a little bit shady. At the end of the day, nobody can make a search engine do what ever they want. You can’t pay google to move you up higher in

How I Upgraded to Joomla 1.7

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Inspired by Robert Vining over at www.joomstew.com and the fact that I am building most of my new sites using Joomla 1.7, I decided it was time to finally migrate this site to the latest Joomla version. I think the actual decision maker was when I was adding about 50 flickr gallery modules to a

How to stop xmap showing your homepage as /home

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I only realised a few days ago as I looked into someone elses site that the standard url on an xmap sitemap for the homepage is /home Both this and the standard / urls exist and it can lead to problems when getting indexed. Here’s how to sort it out…

Add Read-more Link to Roktabs Module and Limit the Introtext

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I was looking for a simple latest news slider module for joomla 1.5. You would think that there are hundreds of them around but nothing really fitted what I needed and anything that did was using jquery which conflicted with the ajax search and twitter modules. Plus I don’t really want to be loading 2

Joomla JEA Canonical Link Problem with Duplicate Property urls

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Joomla Estate Agency Canonical URL Problem, solved Before reading this please note tht some php code has been stripped out of this article. I’ve included a zip of a text file at the bottom containing all the code update #2 – I found a way to do this automatically in the end, the info is

Joomla Estate Agency Xmap Plugin Update

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Joomla estate agency component has had the ability to use the title alias in the url since the last major update. The currently available plugin for xmap still uses the old url structure which just uses the property id. I noticed this when checking on a site made a couple of years ago which has

Joomla Estate Agency Xmap Plugin Updated

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The xmap plugin for Joomla Estate Agency (JEA) has now been updated to stop duplicated properties with buying and selling menu items. It can now be found on the JED {removed as it is 1.5 only}. Please give it a vote {try, I dare you} so it rises above the older module which produces the

Joomla Module to Display a Diaspora Share Button

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve just uploaded a joomla 1.5 module to display a share to diaspora button. The module automatically takes the url of the page, the page title and the introtext and sends it to the users diaspora stream and shares it with their frineds. I added a parameter to limit the number of chars sent, as

K2 Store Quickicons Admin Module Released

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I just made a quick module based on the K2 Quickicons admin module to add the quickicons from the K2store component to the Joomla dashboard. After just building a site for a client with K2store, I thought the only reason they would want to go to the back-end of the site regularly (It is an

Leverage browser caching | Joomla Speed Tips

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Enable Leverage browser caching for Joomla websites If you use firebug with either the pagespeed or Yslow plugin, you’ll be familiar with the persistantly red, top warning of ‘Leverage browser caching’ (‘Add Expires Headers’ with Yslow) This can be quite simple to fix by adding the following lines at the bottom of your .htaccess file.

Long Term Weather Forecast yr.no Joomla Module

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve just uploaded a weather module I created using the api from yr.no. It produces a 10 day, detailed weather forecast. Check out the details here And the demo here

New Free AWeber Module for Joomla 1.5

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Today I made a quick module for Joomla 1.5 to display a newsletter sign up box on your site. It connects with your AWeber account and signs up subscribers. I looked around and found that a module was made for mambo but never updated. There was a plugin for $30 that also used the registration

Joomla Custom Code Module, Plus Override Page Title & Meta Tags

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I have just created the custom html plus module to be able to add text to a component view and override the page title, meta description and meta keywords. I also added the functionality to add extra css and general code to the head section. Normally there is no option in a menu item to

Enable Incompatible Addons in Firefox

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

If you have the beta test version of firefox then it can be quite annoying when you upgrade to find that most of your addons don’t work anymore. I used to scour the internet for working versions that people had managed to pull from google trunk, but last night I discovered a must have extention

People Register to Web Site When There is no Registration Form

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The launch of a new site left me really confused a couple of weeks ago. The launch went better than expected, but a few days later people were registering on the site, which would have been great, except that there was no registration form on any of our pages. At first I jumped to the

Playing with Adobe Edge and getting the Output into a Joomla site

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Last night I had my first play with the new Adobe Edge prieview (available free to download and works for just over 100 days). It creates flash style objects using only html, css and javascript. Having never really used flash before I was unfamilliar with the layout of the program (it’s a kind of cut

Run Facebook Messenger on Windows Vista

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

NOTE: This post is old and not relevant anymore. I have removed the link as it no longer works! Facebook has just released its new messenger for windows but it only runs on Windows 7. Prior to this there was a leaked version whilst in beta phase that ran on Windows Vista. The new version

Set Expires Headers in .htaccess

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Set Expires Headers in .htaccess to speed up page load times If you use the firebug pagespeed addon or yslow you will be used to seeing the warning ‘Add Expires Headers’ This can be quite simple to fix by adding the following lines at the bottom of your .htaccess file.

Show Local Tweets on a Joolma Site

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Just put out a new google map module that plots tweets with info bubbles. Check it out here

Speed up @fontface loading time

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

@fontface is a great tool for giving your site an individual look, the down-side is that on a standard site, the font is downloaded on each page view. As the font can take a little time to download, the page text is loaded first and then the font is replaced once it has finished downloading

Speed up the Joomla Search Function

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This is more apparent when using an AJAX refreshless search method, but affects all joomla sites using the default search settings. Here’s how to speed it up…

The Facebook Like Button Never Picks Up The Right Url

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Well, the google +1 works fine, the tweet this button is cool, but really…..FHTML is rubbish. Basically facebook never picks up the current url through fhtml, unless I’m even more stupid than I think I am. Here’s how to get facebook to take the right url for each page.

Translate K2store Product Attributes with Joomfish

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

If you have a K2store and your site is in multiple languages, you might have found that there was no way to translate your product attributes and their options. Now there is……..

Update Godaddy VPS and DS to run PHP 5.2xx

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

In order to run the next generation of content management systems, you really need to be running an up to date version of PHP. The next incarnation of Joomla (1.6) requires PHP 5.2+As does Drupal 7 (as well as some current modules for the existing system) Look at any new CMS or shopingcart PHP software

Updated Long Term Weather Module

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The yr.no joomla weather module has now been updated to work with all UTF8 characters.

yrno Module Updated for Joomla 1.6

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Just a quick note to say that the yr.no module has just been updated to add joomla 1.6 configuration parameters. I’m still testing it but there doesn’t seem to be any problems so far. Let me know if there are!

YRNO2 Joomla 2.5 beta module available

Mon, 03 Sep 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve just finished the basics of the next version of the popular yrno joomla module. YRNO2 is Joomla 2.5 specific and has a load of new features including:

Add a Module Class Suffix to Any Joomla Module

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Open up your module zip file or download the module folder from your server. In the main directory there will be a php and xml file, usually with the same name as the module.

Add Json suport to Php on Godaddy VPS

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Today I was updating a joomla site using the MYAPI Facebook Connect conponent to show facebook feeds on a joomla site. When updating version 1.0 of the component to 1.4 I found that the site had turned to dust and saw nothing but a white page and empty source code. It turned out that the

Add Php MCRYPT to Godaddy VPS

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

A godaddy Virtual Private Server comes without Php-Mcrypt and Mhash installed. Here is how to install it.

Customise the Joomla Administrator Area Header Images

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Where are the Joomla Administration Header Images? To customise the Joomla admin header locate the images directory administrator/templates/khepri/images/ For the purpose of this tutorial we’re going to edit the default template style which is green. The files are contained in the folder

Edit Joomla Estate Agency Contact Form

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Joomla Estate Agency is an excellent real estate component for joomla. After using it for several sites and spending some time in the support forum I noticed there seemed to be some confusion on how to edit the property contact forms. So here is how to do it….

Facebook Chat not Working, Shows no Friends Online

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Many people seem to be having this problem. Here’s 2 solutions I found.

Joomla Article Url from ID

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

URL to preview joomla articles If you want to preview an atricle without adding a menu item you can use this url and add the item ID of the article on the end. index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id= If you would like it to display the modules assigned to a menu item then you can add: &Itemid= using the

Joomla JEA forms don’t send when you come from a search page.

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I recently had an email asking how I removed the ?task=search from the url of the joomla estate agency component. I originally removed the ?task=search query string as it prevents people from emailing the url of a property to a friend. When the url is visited by another user it will show a session has

Joomla – Increase php memory without changing server settings.

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Certain functions within joomla rely on a high/normal php memory limit. Certain web hosting companys have a very low php memory limit, around 8mb.

Joomla | Rewrite Xmap URL to /sitemap.xml SEF URL

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Xmap is a great automatic sitemap generator for the joomla content management system. It produces HTML (For your users) XML (for search engines) and news (Please fill me in!) The URL’s to these sitemaps however are not so search engine friendly.

Joomla SEO, .htaccess, 301 redirects and Apache mod_rewrite

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Joomla .htaccess and SEO for Dummies The Joomla content management system provides a powerful, yet simple way for anyone to design a website. However, out of the box, a standard site is not set up with search engine optomisation (SEO) in mind. There are several simple rules that should be implimented into every Joomla

Joomla, Speed up Mootools Loading

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Joomla slows down page loading times by loading the full uncompressed Mootools 1.1 Javascript library. Here’s an easy way to speed it up…

Login to Godaddy Server as Root User

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Godaddy does not give root user login information as standard, but it is easy to switch to root user in an SSH terminal. Download and run the Putty SSH program from their site HERE. Or download the windows version directly HERE. In the “hostname” box insert the IP address of your server and click

Menu Drop-Downs Falling Behind Flash Objects and Iframes

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Placing a flash movie or Google map on your page can be useful, but not when menu drop downs fall behind the flash object or iframe.

Remove Joomla Generator Tag

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Rather than hacking the core files, which can be replaced with an update, place this line in your template index.php file above the tag. setGenerator(‘Changethisline’); ?> Replace Changethisline with whatever you want to show or just leave it empty.

Remove Joomla! is Free Software Text from the Admin Area

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

To change or remove the “Joomla! is Free Software released under the GNU/GPL License.” links from the joomla administration area we need to edit 3 files: administrator/templates/khepri/cpanel.php administrator/templates/khepri/index.php administrator/templates/khepri/login.php

Remove Numbers from Joomla Category View

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

By default joomla shows a number by each article when listing all the titles in a category view layout. Here’s how to remove the numbers…

Remove the ‘Powered by xmap’ Link

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

How to remove the xmap ‘Powered by Xmap!‘ link from your HTML site map.

Stop Joomla from Loading Mootools Javascript

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Joomla loads Mootools.js and caption.js by default. If you have ever wondered why your simple pages load slowly, this could be the reason. If you have nothing that uses Mootools.js (dropdown menus and such) and want to speed up your site then it would be a good idea to stop it from loading. In