Robert Wilson

We, like many in the web development world, have been slightly obsessed with optimization lately. Joomla is somewhat known for being difficult to optimize well for both speed and security, so it's seen as slow and insecure by some in the web development world. It can even feel that way for Joomla site developers who can't quite get their heads around how to configure things properly. Is Joomla really that difficult to optimize? Is the bad rep it gets deserved? In this article, we discuss a solution that may solve most of the problem for almost everyone...and it's dead simple.

How to speed up your Joomla website is a topic that's been discussed quite a bit in our forum lately. In this article we will look at just one technique, how to combine and minify your JavaScript and CSS files. The tool we'll use is a freely available Joomla Extension called JCH Optimize, and it can help speed up your Joomla site dramatically.

Image maps were very widely used for web design in the past. Hand coding them was almost impossible for most people, but tools like Dreamweaver made them quite easy to create. A large, prominent image with hot spots linked to various pages of a website were at the edge of creative web design. They improved the look and feel of a website and helped to make branding easier for many businesses. So, what happened to image maps?

The Administrator back-end of a Joomla website is the area where a user such as a Manager, Administrator or Super Administrator manages all aspects of a Joomla website, including the content, much of the behavior and functionality, and the look and feel of the front-end as well.

In a Joomla powered website, the front-end is the area that visitors interact with, as opposed to the Joomla Administrator that is used by developers and site admins to manage and update the site from the back-end. The site Template is used to display the Modules and other content in the front-end of Joomla.

Every webmaster wants the sites that they manage to load faster. Highly optimized, quick loading pages are important for many reasons. A speedy site, according to Google, is good for SEO. Mobile devices, where bandwidth is limited, definitely need quick loading websites. This is also very important from a usability perspective as we all know how quickly we navigate away from a page that just hangs as everything loads. It seems that nothing is more frustrating these days than a slow loading web page. In a matter of seconds, people will decide to go elsewhere. Let's look at one way to prevent that from happening.

Earlier this month The Joomla! Project released the beta version of Joomla 3.1. This gives the community a great opportunity to see what's in the pipeline for stable releases, and it allows extension developers the opportunity to test their code on the new version. Aside from finding out about this new feature, Tags, the biggest question will no doubt be...Should I upgrade?

CAPTCHA is one of the most used and hated pieces of technology on the web. It almost defines the term "necessary evil" while driving website visitors completely insane. Webmasters love the fact that it can cut spam on their sites to almost nothing, and website visitors sometimes completely abandon their form submissions over frustratingly garbled words and numbers.

People have lamented over and over, "There must be another way!" Well, there are other ways, and we'll look at one in this article. This alternative, however, could be just as controversial as CAPTCHA itself.

Video is clearly becoming the king of media formats on the internet. Adding video to a website is one of the most common needs today, but relatively few people do it because it's not always the easiest thing to accomplish. Most people with a decent understanding of online technology can upload a video to YouTube, and embedding a player has become easier over time, but getting a great looking playlist on your site is normally a different matter...until now.

This week we examine a new service that allows you to monitor and update multiple Joomla websites from one easy web portal dashboard.