Blog entries

Usability - SEO in disguise

Markita Parzybok — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:14:07 +0100

The relationship between SEO and Usability is now clearer to me than I can ever remember it being. It might be that Search Engines are promoting this fact more, or that the web community is discussing it more, or simply that over the past few years my degree of interest in these two areas has increased. I’d like to think that it’s a combi...

Tending to your data garden with Jentla CCK

Anthony Fisher — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0100

Defining data for your website is akin to gardening at home - difficult to get going (unless you love getting your hands dirty), watching it happen seems about as interesting as watching grass grow, but being involved in it - actually getting in there and digging out the weeds and planting that neat little patch you wanted - spurs you on to greater and greater successes. Thing is, it helps to have a little to work with in the first place.

It will be called Jentla E and the version will be 1.6, to indicate the next version to where the old name would have proceeded.

So instead of tryingto use a simple eCommerce solution like VirtueMart, or one that is not fully integrated, like Magento, site builders will now have a powerful, ...

Comparing fully distributed CMS and symlinked CMS systems

Administrator — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:00:00 +0100

This is a comparison between a CMS architecture using a fully distributed CMS like Jentla and a symlinked CMS. There are lower risks in the use of a distributed CMS hosting arrangement mostly due to the ability to spread the load across multiple servers. The only real advantage of a symlinked system is the space saving on files but with A Joomla sites able to be cut down to 30Mb before content is added and disk space being so cheap this is no longer so important.

We hear of system...

Comparing CCK Implementations

Administrator — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 07:00:00 +0100

There are two other Joomla based CCKs available, K2 and mooTheme's Zoo. They are slightly different in that K2 adds additional fields to a Joomla article while Zoo creates a new article "type" that does not include all the standard article fields. They have cut the mandatory field set down to 5. This new record "type" is very similar to the Drupal CCK.  

We have opted for the K2 variety of additional fields to a standard article for reasons that will beco...

Joomla/Jentla site development processes

Administrator — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Below is a diagram showing a variety of processes developers use to move a website into production. It surprises and shocks me how many Joomla developers work directly on live sites (We call that Cowboy mode!) and conversely how few developers build sites using the full online or blended mode at the other end of the spectrum. A development process that stresses the importance of adequate organised system and user testing prior to Go Live is likely to catch the types of issues I mentio...

Jentla a business layer for Joomla

Administrator — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 07:00:00 +0100

A trend is emerging as we talk to larger businesses who already base a significant proportion of the web properties on Joomla. Their internal developers who recommend Joomla to their CIOs are originally attracted because Joomla offers low cost of adoption, templating, a broad feature set and short learning curve amongst other real benefits. These benefits are not listed in order because each organisation has specific interests.

Once the sites are built - and they a...

Intro to Jentla's CCK

Administrator — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 07:00:00 +0100

To service the needs of our corporate customers, we have started work on an advanced version of CCK or the Content Constructor Kit. CCK is a very useful CMS feature which makes content richer by letting you add new fields to articles.

For example, an event listing would be enhanced with location details, weather forecast, Ticket purchase number, photographs, driving directions etc. as well as the more standard event description available in the standard Article format. Using CCK, ...

Lifting the lid on Joomla 1.6

Administrator — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:00:00 +0100

This live streamed presentation is the first detailed chance to lift the lid of the hotly anticipated Joomla 1.6 release. Andrew Eddie and the Development team have been hard at work building new features. It is part of the Joomla User Group Brisbane where Andrew will be talking about what's in this release including Access Control in the Administrator, the addition of commenting and extension upgrades. There's lot's of great stuff to look forward to! Andrew will also describe what it will take ...

Welcome to Jentla

Administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Hi,

We are really excited to be going public with Jentla. We'll blog extensively in the coming days about all its features and the development underway.

We'd like to thanks Andrew, Rob and Louis from JXtended for GPLing all the good stuff in their toolset. We have extended them considerably with Jentla and are going to be releasing them shortly.

We think lots of people are going to like it.

Thanks,

Jentla Team

Inaugural Jentla Development Blog

Administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Just to introduce myself, I'm Russell, the Project Manager responsible for the Jentla development. My background spreads from my early days coding System 10 Assembler (Early 80's), to managing the development of enterprise wide systems for government and industry (the latest being OPTUS). I bring a typically non-Joomla (enterprise) view of the world to Jentla.

After the Melbourne Joomla Day (thanks for Matthais), the feedback we received showed us how important it is to be able to import...

Global Replace Utility

Administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

I've been setting up some demonstration sites for Jentla and I've hit upon a point of pain that hopefully isn't limited to me....

I find it difficult to track down specific pieces of text in specific sites, particularly when a great deal of the text is so similar. If I'm told that I've misspelled a word, a two character change can take me an hour. I'm sure some of you have developed great short cuts to help you correct such mistakes, but I was hoping for something simple.

We have built a...

Upgrading Joomla

Administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Joomla 1.0 has an imminent end-of-life, leaving many developers with a pile of customers who need to be upgraded to Joomla 1.5. We had hopes of alleviating some of that pain. That is, until we started planning what would be required to automate the upgrade process for a batch of up to 500 sites. Creating databases and Joomla 1.5 instances across a spread of servers, exporting code from possibly non-standard Joomla 1.0 databases, etc, etc, seems like biting off a little more than we can chew at t...

Environment Checking

Administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Have you ever been working happily away on a nice stable Joomla environment, when, for no fault of your own, something you've done dozens of times just doesn't work? You immediately doubt yourself and try it again. It still doesn't work. You start to doubt your memory. You haven't bothered taking notes on such a straight forward task. You eventually come to conclusion, after wasting a lot of time, that something has changed that you don't know about. Some part of the infrastructure that you just...

Merge Tags

Administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Jentla helps you manage a thousand sites. Prior to Jentla the complexities of handling more than a few sites was a headache. Now Jentla removed the problems associated with managing large numbers of sites, the headache shifts. This pushes the management problem to that of coping with differences between the sites. With batch processing making it possible to repeat administration functions across hundreds of sites, it's the exceptions that are now the speed bumps.

One of our solutions for this ...

Site Selection

Administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Managing very large numbers of sites poses some subtle problems.

Selecting sites to propagate articles to, or to update a particular extension, or to assign a single merge value could just be a matter of ticking a number of checkboxes, or just a multi-select combo box. But when you have hundreds of sites, or even dozens of sites, keeping track of which sites you'd like to select is going to be a problem.

To help administrators, contributors, editors and publishers, Jentla allows the site...

Common Users

Administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Everyone knows how Joomla can restrict content to registered users (viewers who have logged onto the site). It's usually a simple task to register on a site, giving you access to content you wouldn't see otherwise. But what if you have multiple overtly related sites? Should you force your users to register on each site to gain the same access? Well we think that you should have the option of not annoying your loyal members by giving them a user that spans sites.

I say that it is optional becau...

Inter-site and intra-site content sharing

Administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Joomla is a little restrictive in the way it shares content within a site. Each article is assigned a category. So if you would like the same content to appear in more than one category on your site, you must duplicate that content. This is not only inefficient for the storage of the same information multiple times, it is also bound to lead to inconsistencies within the site, as such duplication can only be tracked manually.

With Jentla, not only can we share content between sites, but we can ...

Staging and Production Environments

Administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

The ability for a contributor to submit their content to a safe staging environment prior to it being approved to the public takes a great deal of risk out of sensitive sites. Jentla can maintain identical staging and production sites, restricting contributors to the staging sites, and allowing an approver to publish the contributor's content to the production equivalents. Of course, it also gives the approver the opportunity to change or reject the submission, with a reason being returned to th...

Security implications of content sharing

Administrator — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0100

Most medium to large organisations have an intranet and at least one internet site. And generally information is repeated on both. Sometimes internally abbreviated terms and phrases are written in full on the internet, but in general much of the internet content will appear on the intranet.

The internet site is at the mercy of malicious attacks. It is a publically visible prize to would-be hackers. So it must be fortified inside firewalls, to make it difficult to access from inside as well a...

Scalability

Administrator — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 08:00:00 +0100

Everyone claims their software will scale. They can always back up their claims with a finely tuned database showing great throughput and impressive selected transaction times. But true scalability is so much more than showing how many records can be held, or how efficient transactions are.

Particularly when we are talking about Enterprise CMS with many sites, scalability really means viability of the system as a whole.

For example, an organisation with three sites can maintain the softw...