Welcome to Alledia - the Joomla SEO Experts

We've just sponsored Daniel and his team at Ninja Forge to create a new version of their Ninjamonials component for Joomla 1.5. Ninjamonials allows you to easily add customer testimonials to your Joomla site. Ryan over at JCE sponsored the other part of the conversion. You can see a live demo at JoomlaTraining.com.

Why a sponsorship? There's been a double-whammy for Joomla developers recently with the recession and the need to move to a GPL license. Now is definitely a time to be trying new business models and looking for extra sources of income, so we were very happy to help test Daniel's idea.

If I know one thing at the beginning of 2009, it's that Joomla developers with only one source of revenue are in an even vulnerable position than normal. More thinking like Daniel's is needed. My advice is to diversify, diversify, diversify:

Last spring the North American Joomla Day was in Vancouver. This time its down in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Joomla! Day Las Vegas is going to be an one-day conference of Joomla! experts presenting on Joomla! basics, design, development and advanced topics.

Presenters will include almost the entire Joomla core team including Andrew Eddie, Anthony Ferrara, Louis Landry and Rob Schley. Registration costs $45 and includes a personalized Joomla! Day Las Vegas t-shirt.

This is a post that's been lying around in various forms as a draft for over a year. I've dusted it off and decided to publish after the series of announcements made by the Joomla team over Christmas.

The announcements were about decisions concerning the Joomla Extensions Directory where I'm an editor. The decisions were to remove extensions that were for Joomla 1.0 only, weren't licensed under the GPL or violated Joomla's trademark.

Over the holidays, I've been talking closely with people who agree with the decisions and those who don't. There are a good number of people on both sides. After listening carefully, I'd like to make several proposals in order to help us move forward effectively.

In June this year we reached 2000 comments on the Alledia blog. It took us about 18 months and over 400 blog posts to get there. We're now nearly at 3000 comments, and it took only another 6 months.

As with the 2000 mark, whoever posts number 3000 will get a free lifetime SEO Club membership. We're at 2975 right now, so 25 more to go ....

Thanks to everyone who has commented and guest-posted over the last 2 years. Enjoy the holidays!

Ho-ho-ho, and happy holidays to everyone. Here's a round-up of this year's holiday offers from lots of Joomla companies.

• Alledia - 25% with coupon "allediaxmas" extended until New Years Day
• Joomla Training - 25% with coupon "allediaxmas" extended until New Years Day
• SEF Advance - 25% until New Year
• Simplweb - 33% until 300 members
• JoomlaPraise - 25% with coupon "jollyfellow" until New Year
• JoomlaBamboo - 20% with coupon "xmas08"
• JomSocial - $30 with coupon "hol8day"
• Phil Taylor - 33% off everything until New Year
• Open Source Support Desk - 10% with coupon "HOLIDAY08"
• XHTMLSuite.com - 20% with coupon "joomla-xmas-holiday" until New Year

Have you found other coupons or do you have one for your own product? Feel free to post it in the comments:

Getting ready for New Years Eve? We've got the perfect Joomla site for you ... TimesSquare.com.

The site ranks #1 in Google for "Times Square" and is a 1.0 site using JomComment, SEF Advance and Tagbot among others. The site has information on a lot more than just New Years Eve, but they do have a whole section of the simply dedicated to that night.

Our goal for you is simplicity.

For this first time ever in the Joomla-world ... we're offering a 100% money-back guarantee if our template has script conflicts with any Joomla extension.

I hope this doesn't make us broke, but hopefully its a useful and practical promise ... You don't want to waste your time figuring out what works with what. You just want to get up and running.

We guarantee Bolt will work first time with any extension ... or just ask us for a refund.

We're not aiming to compete with other template developers when it comes to features, options and plugins, but hopefully we can provide you with something that's fast, optimized and easy-to-use.

This is a guest blog post by Steve Moseley of Hannisdal Express. He previously blogged here on alledia.com, discussing his new site www.simliteraturemedia.org. That project led him to discover a problem with Search Engine Friendly URLs and IE6.

This post is dedicated to Andy from Rockettheme.

Alright, I'm obssessed - I love seeing Joomla used for large mainstream sites.

Here's a tasty Burger King promotion called BKHotKicks.com. It used the "Hot or Not" extension for people to vote on their favorite sneakers. The site was done for a 6 week-long competition and has not been taken offline.

Hat tip to Steven. See the full list of Joomla sites for major companies here. Feel free to e-mail with any sites you see to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

My favorite discussion at the CMS Expo was during the basic SEO class. We ended up talking about bland, happy talk on websites:

"We provide first-class widgets to satisfied clients", "We offer premier widget solutions to our clients" and other such meaningless, corporate text.

People came up with some great examples and we saw that webdesign companies are the often the biggest offenders:

Here are my three presentations from the CMS Expo. There was a flow to the presentations from basic to advanced so I've ordered them accordingly.

For my and other people's thoughts on the Denver Expo, please click here.

1) Organization

Wow - outstanding. Both Expos have run like clockwork. If you think Open Source people are flakes, you haven't seen an event organized by John, Linda and their team from Chicago.

2) Core + Commercial

It was great to see Anthony from the Joomla core in attendance. Hopefully we'll see commercial developers at April's Joomla Day in Las Vegas.