Welcome to the Joomla SEO Club and Book

If you subscribe to the Joomla Extensions Directory RSS feed, you can see the future of Joomla pass before your eyes. Sure, there are a lot of "me-too" listings but at least once a week there's something new and exciting.

The latest extension to catch my eye is an automatic installer and updater. Its key selling point? It allows you to install just one extension and use that install and updates dozens of others. No more registering, downloading, uploading and looking out for updates.

After Joomla's recent security issues, people have been double-checking their sites. In some cases it's easy to tell if your site has been hacked (the large Turkish flag and blaring music are strong hints) and on other occasions, the hackers might leave no trace.

One of my colleagues found a very subtle hack ... his robots.txt file has been altered to block his entire site from being indexed by Google. The hack had been in place since June, causing him to lose all his rankings. It's likely that this was a highly motivated rival rather than just another group of script kiddies.

Is it possible to defend against these subtle attacks? In this case, yes.

UPDATED: We have a few tickets sold out our Joomla Training in Atlanta, next weekend, Saturday August 23rd. However, we've opened registration for the next class on October 25th. Click here to sign up , and use the coupon "allediablog" for a $50 discount!

In addition to the class, attendees get:

• Lunch and coffee / snacks throughout the day.
• Free membership to our SEO Club.
• Free copy of Barrie North's best selling Joomla Admin Manual eBook.
• A flash drive full of tutorials and best-of-breed Joomla components.

Coming up in December, we're taking our training to Colorado and early birds get a $200 discount! Read on for more details:

Joomla.org has a new template today. The design looks a little similar to the website of another emerging new force in the United States.

It's also interesting to note that the ! has been dropped from most uses on the homepage, something most books and blogs have done for a while.

I've made this chart after getting several requests in the last few days, all asking which Joomla E-Commerce they should use. There's no right answer as the two main shopping carts, Virtuemart and Digistore, are both very different.

There are two other shopping carts available that look like they may become contenders:

• Freeway is an enhanced modification of osCommerce and thanks to Damian, the lead developer, I've been able to create a column for it also.
• IXXO is a commercial script I haven't had the chance to fully test-drive yet. It costs nearly $300.

If any major features have been missed and need comparing, drop a note in the comments.

There has been an interesting update to the forum sections on the Joomla Extensions Directory. It has been split into Native Joomla Forums and Forum Bridges. 

I was shocked to see only five native Joomla forums remaining. There are two native forums with a wide range of features:

• FireBoard (still in legacy mode on Joomla 1.5 until version 2.0 in the fall)
  
• Joo!BB (still in Alpha)

And three very basic forums:

• Simplest Forum
• Rapid Forum
• Nice Talk

There are some third rails in every community ... things that people are reluctant to discuss. Joomla's move to a GPL license was one of those, and I think we did a reasonable job of openly talking about the issues and implications.

This week, I'm going to attempt to touch another third rail: Joomla's trademark.

Today, Joomla's trademarks for its name and logo were accepted and published. This week, I'll attempt to answer questions about what this means for Joomla and for people running Joomla sites. This first post lays out facts about the trademarks:

You may have noticed that I've been blogging less lately. There's probably a dozen reasons for that (family visiting from England, new projects, running the SEO Club, the hot summer making my brain tired) but theres been one stand-out ... I just haven't come across many things I really, really had to post.

If you read this blog often, you'll know I love building sites with sh404SEF. However, its such a powerful extension that it can be complex. There are several issues that people keep asking me about. So instead of giving the same answer every time, I've written up the answers in a single document.

This is a free article from the SEO Club's guide to sh404SEF. Club members can look forward to the release of a full guide to Artio JoomSEF within the next couple of days. If you're not a member, we're still offering a free two week trial.

Are you looking to learn Joomla 1.5? There are Joomla training sessions coming up in Atlanta, Boston (MT), Manchester (NH), Hartford (CT) and Albany (NY).

We have a special offer for Alledia blog readers today ... $50 discounts for all of those Joomla training sessions:

• $50 Atlanta Discounts: Use the coupon "allediablog" for a $50 discount on August and October training sessions.
• $50 New England Discounts: Register in the next two weeks and get a $50 discount.

To find out more about the Atlanta training, please click here. To find out more about New England, keep reading:

Google launched their Knol site last week. Despite the slightly silly name and Google's failure to get Knol.com from a Joomla site, I though it would worthwhile to take some time and write a couple:

• Joomla - a general introduction to Joomla
• Joomla SEO - a rewrite of my general guide to Joomla SEO