Joomla 1.6 Usability Improvements - Alledia

I had time to take a good look at the Alpha version of Joomla 1.6 this weekend. The Art of Joomla is doing a great job of explaining new features. I'll also blog later about the new SEO features ... they've taken on board of a lot our recommendations including the ability to control the metadata for each page!
However, today thought I'd hightlight some nice usability improvements.
Several common frustrations that beginners had with 1.5 seem to have been resolved:

1) The "Menu Manager" Has a Purpose

In 1.5 beginners always expect the Menu Manager to do much more ... such as actually manage something. In 1.6 the Menu Manager is much more closely integrated with the display of menu links. Oh, and you no longer get those four confusing boxes when making a new menu:

2) The "Tools" Menu Has Gone

I hate explaining to beginners what the "Tools" Menu is and why its there: "well, its a bunch of not very useful stuff they had left over ..."

Joomla 1.5		Joomla 1.6

3) The "Media Manager" Options Are Clearer

In 1.5 you could use the Media Manager to do 2 things: make new folders and upload images. Why then were the two tasks placed in opposite corners of the screen? That's fixed in 1.6:

4) The Install / Uninstall Screen Links Are Much Clearer

In 1.5 many people were confused because the links inside the Install / Uninstall screen looked they it should take them to the Module Manager, Template Manager and so on. Click on "Templates" to get to the "Template Manager", for example:

5) The Word "Parameters" Has Gone

Doesn't "Options" sound so much less geeky and make so much more sense?

Over to You ...

Have you had the chance to look at the new version of Joomla 1.6? What do you think?

Joomla 1.6 Usability Improvements - Alledia: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

jUpgrade: THE way way to go to upgrade..

jUpgrade is a simple Joomla 1.5 component that will download a version of Joomla 1.7, decompress it and install it.

After that, it migrates all of the data from old Joomla 1.5 to the new Joomla 1.7 installation.

I have used this on 4 different sites now and it has worked flawlessly from 1.5.23 up to 1.7!

Guide to migrating from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.7

With Joomla 1.6 officially released, there have been a lot of questions as to how to migrate or upgrade to Joomla 1.7 from 1.5.

This guide will take you step-by-step through the general procedure of how to migrate to Joomla 1.7.

Please read through all the material as this is not a light undertaking.

Migrating from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.7

Joomla caching demystified

Joomla 1.6. makes heavy use of caching and to be able to use it's full potential we must first understand how caching works. As caching was almost completely redone for 1.6. (mostly by the author of this article), some older descriptions and typologies don't apply any more.

Cache - temporary store an unit of information to be reused later.

Why?

Mostly because retrieving stored information is MUCH (up to 10 times or more) faster than initial generation. If you need a drastic example - a book is long term cache of it's authors knowledge. It could take years to accumulate this knowledge, while reading from this cache is a much faster thing as we all know.

But back to Joomla - more specifically, what we are dealing with here is web application caching - creating temporary static copies of otherwise dynamic pages (or smaller data units). Caching is particularly appropriate for web applications as typical web site displays the same content over and over again and without cache everything has to be generated for each and every page view. Caching system temporary stores this information generated by the code in a cache object and serves it when it is requested by the next user.

To understand Joomla cache a little deeper we must get familiar with two concepts - cache types and cache handlers.For easier understanding take a look at pictures that illustrate each cache type coverage area.

Full article here:

Joomla 1.6 caching demystified (Jennifer series)

Speed up Joomla 1.7 on Godaddy

Turn on caching in the General Config!
The slowest aspect of GoDaddy Joomla hosting is the shared access to MySQL. 


By turning on caching, a page will be stored as a standard HTML when accessed (the home page, for example).


If the next time the page is referenced the cached version hasn't expired, it will simply send the stored file instead of reconstructing the page from the MySQL database.


Follow these steps:

1. Login to Admin
2. Go to General Configuration
3. System Tab

Check out:

1. Joomla documentation here:http://docs.joomla.org/Cache#Page_Caching
2. Also herehttp://www.joomtraining.com.au/tutorial ... erformance

Progressive Cache 
The progressive settings are the default cache settings. It provides faster caching and takes up the most space in terms of system caching. It isn't recommended for very large websites. It will cache modules.

Conservative cache 
Conservative cache will only cache certain elements of your website.

Host Multiple Sites and Domains on the Same GoDaddy Hosting Account

When is next LTS release? 1.8 or 2.0?

The next LTS release looks likely to be Joomla! 1.8 (or perhaps Joomla 2.0 as it will most likely mark a new era in Joomla?) which is supposed to be released at the 10th of Jan 2012, which is exactly 12 months after the release of Joomla 1.6.


This means that if we deploy a website on Joomla! version 1.7 we'll need to keep in mind that after about six months no new security fixes are released. 


If you’re the administrator of many Joomla! sites this can have a big impact. Joomla 1.5 will be supported until april 2012 as it is marked as an LTS release. You should ask yourself before upgrading to Joomla! 1.7 (or version 1.6 of course) if there are any features in it that you really need. 


And if you decide to upgrade to version 1.7 (or any other non LTS release) you should be aware that after approximately six months you probably need to upgrade.