Starting out exclusively as an SEO firm in 2001 under the name of Anna Tulchinsky Web Consultancy, Joomla Bliss was launched to help small business owners market their services on a shoestring but without sacrificing quality or professionalism.

Joomla Bliss appreciates that a website design project involves multiple stakeholders; it requires clear and consistent communications and disciplined project management practices. We understand that some rework is unavoidable and will work until we are ensure that the client is fully satisfied with the results. Based on our experience and client feedback we developed what we believe is a “ZERO-RISK” strategy for our clients:

Designed-in quality:

• Use cases are mapped out in granular detail and discussed with the client
• Live prototype of a website and navigation/usability flow is created early in the project (design-from-the-end strategy)
• Coding and QA are conducted by a professional software developer

Prompt communications protocol:

• All emails are acknowledged
• Replies are provided promptly
• Meetings are scheduled upon client request at no additional charge

Granular project management:

Fixed-cost all-inclusive contract:

Client involvement in the design process:

In order to get success in developing PHP sites it is necessary to have a good development environment. While producing websites it is often necessary to edit HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. That is why usable IDE should supply all those file types and provide full set of tools for effective development.

This article includes reviews of the most popular IDEs: Codelobster PHP Edition, Eclipse PDT, Komodo IDE, NetBeans IDE, PHPStorm, NuSphere PhpED.

How to Create Product Catalogues Using Standard Joomla Blog View?

There are many product galleries extensions created for Joomla but it is always nice to see just how flexible Joomla! is if you know how to use it. Take a look at this product gallery, it was created using Joomla's standard blog view (Joomla 1.5)

Joomla Website Hosting Requirements

Many website hosting companies claim to support Joomla, but in reality they only support a plain vanilla version of Joomla, so when you add third-party components and extensions to your website to enable more complex features, it often happens that server configurations are not set up to support those advanced components properly.

When selecting a hosting company for your Joomla website, go for a specialized hosting companies like Rochen and Hostgator. Rochen is the official Joomla hosting company. They own their data centers. Hostgator is known to offer very good support and they own their own data centers as well. There are also companies like Cloudaccess and Hostpapa, but we can't vouch for them personally. Hostpapa is a reseller company, they don't own their data centers. We can't say much about Cloudaccess. Their packages seem very good but when we sent them an email inquiry, there was no reply, which is not a good sign for a hosting company. If they don't reply to a sales enquiry, then we don't have much hope for their support. 

In any case, at the very minimum, check that your hosting provider offers the following:

Moving to a new hosting company is very troublesome. So before you make your decision about where to host your Joomla website, please review our detailed Joomla hosting requirement page as well as the official Joomla's technical requirements page.

Optimising Web Design for SEO

Here is what Google has to say about the file extensions: "At Google, we are able to index most types of pages and files with very few exceptions. File types we are able to index include: pdf, asp, jsp, html, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri, swf.“

Details on file types:

• Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (.ps)
• Atom and RSS feeds (.atom, .rss)
• Autodesk Design Web Format (.dwf)
• Google Earth (.kml, .kmz)
• Lotus 1-2-3 (.wk1, .wk2, .wk3, .wk4, .wk5, .wki, .wks, .wku)
• Lotus WordPro (.lwp)
• MacWrite (.mw)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt)
• Microsoft Word (.doc)
• Microsoft Works (.wks, .wps, .wdb)
• Microsoft Write (.wri)
• Open Document Format (.odt)
• Rich Text Format (.rtf)
• Shockwave Flash (.swf)
• Text (.ans, .txt)
• Wireless Markup Language (.wml, .wap)

If you are going to have a Joomla website, you will need to install several components to enable functionalities not supported by Joomla natively (not yet). For example, a Site Map is a must for SEO. Newsletter subscription is a must for lead generation. Google Analytics is a must for your understanding of your visitors' behaviour on your website. And there are a few more functionalities that most small business owners would find very useful. So we compiled a list of 10 free must-have Joomla extensions that even a toddler can get installed and enabled independently:

1. Xmap - automatically generates a Site Map element on your website. Every time you add or delete a page, your site map will get updated automatically.
2. AcyMailing - a simple newsletter component with subscriber list management capabilities. The free version has limitations, naturally, but those limitations might not be important to small businesses or individual consultants. To get more features, you can purchase the next levels starting from around $30 in total (without any monthly fees).
3. SimpleCalendar - this one is a darling! If you need to post a calendar of events on your website, for seminars, trade shows or whatever - this component is a sweetie pie. It even allows you to select your own colors. The only two things we found would have liked to change is a link back to the author (a tiny one, not invasive) and a "back" arrow icon displayed next to each listing. Those two are not necessary and should be displayed on demand only.
4. JComments  - this is a very popular component in the Joomla user community. It is used on this site, right here, in the blog section. It works well and looks well, so we highly recommend it to anyone having a blog on their Joomla site.
5. JCE editor - this is a very nice and simple article editor component. There are other - fancier - editors available for Joomla, but we love this one for one convenience it offers: ability to add links to your own articles via a drop-down drilling through your content as well as by copying a URL. The same goes for images too! The extension is very lightweight as well, a factor favoured by many website designers.
6. Gtranslate - this component provides translation of your pages into 50+ languages. It does not translate modules and plugins, but it works well. It might not work much better than Google translate, but it seems to be more customizable.
7. Akeeba Backup - this Joomla component is an absolute must. It allows you to backup your website online. Don't forget to click on the backed-up file and save it to your hard disk. The restoration of the backed-up file is not easy as the actual backup, but it works very well when you learn how to do it. Read the website instructions and use the kickstart file!
8. MassContent - if you need to publish several articles at once or simply have a lot to publish on a daily basis, this Joomla component is a must. You can publish a blog, a news release, a static article - all from one place. Sweet!
9. Google Verify - this Joomla plugin allows you to verify your Joomla website on the Google webmaster central. Google will generate a line of code for you which you will need to paste inside this plugin - and voila, you can get statistics about your website the way Google sees them (your links, your pages, your coding error, things like that).
10. BIGSHOT Google Analytics - this Joomla plugin allows you to enable Google Analytics website statistics tracking on your Joomla site.

Would like to add a free, very easy-to-use and very useful Joomla component to this list? Don't be shy, add your comment below.

The standard contact form in Joomla is used very frequently by most Joomla designers because it is so convenient, and it is already there! But have you ever noticed that the capitalization is a little flaky? For example:

• Enter your Name:
• Email address:
• Message Subject:

In other words, there is no consistency in the capitalization of these labels. Fixing this is pretty straightforward.

First I would recommend that you install the component eXtplorer for easy navigation of the file structure. The, go to the folder components > com_contact > views > contact > tmpl and edit the file "default_form.php".

You'll notice that the text in question is wrapped around the function call JText::_. Simply remove the function call and edit the label text to display as you prefer. Then save the file. That's it!

IMPORTANT: This does not work with the Joomfish component. It causes Joomfish to stop working on the Contact form, i.e. no translation of the Contact form will be available.

If you would like a fancier Contact form on your Joomla website, check out Breezing forms. NB: Use the 'Quick Mode' if you want to play with sleek display options. This component is not idiot-proof, but it is not difficult either. Once you get a hang of it, you'll love it.

As with any software, a new release often has bugs in it and it takes a couple of months to get it stabilized. In addition, it takes time for the Joomla website development community to upgrade existing extensions. There are over 6000 Joomla extensions! Granted, the most reputable and popular Joomla extensions do upgrade quickly, but this is software, and designers are only human, so mistakes always happen, bugs are always present, so it is wise to wait until the newly released version gets stabilized. 

With all that said, upgrading from Joomla 2.5+ to Joomla 3.0 is not difficult. And futher, from Joomla 3.0 to its subsequent sub-versions is promised to be a breeze.

If you have a Joomla 1.5 site, it is necessary to upgrade to Joomla 2.5 first and then from it to Joomla 3.0. The only alternative is to re-creare your site anew using Joomla 3.0. If your site is more than 3 years old, this maybe a good excuse to get a new website.

In other words, with new Joomla 3.0 version, upgrades should be fast and easy and can be done from the Joomla admin back-end. Joomla is saying they will be releasing a new version every 6 months. It will be hard for the extensions community to keep up with these new versions, so upgrading once a year should be sufficient. Note that not each new major Joomla version is good to upgrade to. Sometimes it is best to wait until it matures.

For a new modern website a Content Management System (CMS) is a must. A website CMS allows you to update content on your website without knowing HTML, CSS, PHP or any other web design elements. You can access your website via your browser and update its contents the way you work with your GMail or Yahoo or Hotmail applications. 

What most clients ask for is a CMS recommendation for their future website. Expert opinion is highly sought after because most marketing folks do not have first-hand experience with more than one CMS.

CMS Evaluation and Recommendations

Our approach to any task is simple and always the same: provide the best quality at the best prices and make things work well in the long-term. Our approach ensures that future scalability of features and functionalities as well as support is easily attainable and that a website’s future is as “predictable” and scalable as possible. These were the reasons why we decided to specialize in open-source software in general, and Joomla CMS in particular.

There are many open-source Content Management Systems (CMSs) for websites, but the two leaders nowadays are Joomla and Drupal, with Wordpress still being predominantly used as a bloging platform. There is also a rising use of Sharepoint as a website CMS.

Sharepoint

In our view, Sharepoint is not an appropriate CMS to build for websites. Sharepoint was designed to be an intranet document management system and when used for websites it presents a very high learning curve for users. Furthermore, Sharepoint requires the skills of an Architect and Business Analyst to set up a proper infrastructure – and this adds cost to the total cost of ownership (TOC) of the project.  Customization of visual skins (templates) via Sharepoint requires more programming time as well. Overall, while any software can be adapted to do whatever is necessary, and so can Sharepoint be adapted to build websites, we do not recommend "forcing" software to do what it was not meant to do and hence, we do not recommend Sharepoint as a website CMS. 

WordPress

WordPress was designed to be a blogging platform and for simple websites. While its functionalities have been improving greatly and may one day become on par with Joomla and Drupal, as of now, it is safer to avoid using WordPress if more than static content is required and if scalability is important.

Improvements in WordPress require changes to the core, and hence, when version upgrades are implemented (which needs to happen much more often than with other CMSs), existing components often break.

The interface, while being famously simple, often becomes confusing when various functionalities are added into the site. The blogging features are always on the way. A lot of "simple" management ends up being done at the code level.

WordPress requires less training time, but in the long-term, its total cost of ownership is on par with Sharepoint. The available out-of-the-box extensions are numerous, but their features are not as granular and require manual programming and customization even for very simple things. We speculate that this is, perhaps, the main reason why so many web designers push WordPress to their clients – more customization generates more revenue.

Drupal

Drupal is one of the best open-source website CMSs. It competes head to head with Joomla in all key areas: performance, speed, security, maturity, quality of extensions, etc. Even the infamous “difficult” user interface and admin flow of Drupal is gradually improving and might soon become history.

However, compared to Joomla, Drupal’s total cost of ownership is significantly higher. Drupal developers are also more expensive, 15-20% more expensive than Joomla developers, when all costs are factored in. Furthermore, quality of available templates is much lower and the development community is much smaller than that of Joomla. The number of extensions is also not as vast and as a result more specialized knowledge is required to source the right set of components and plugins to enable future scalability.

With Joomla, one can type a question in Google and find an answer to it with a screen shot to illustrate every step within seconds! Not so with Drupal, hence support needs to be purchased more often and even small tasks will require more time to learn. So the learning curve is rather high with Drupal and, again, more training and support will be required in the long term.

Overall, Drupal is a great CMS but the total cost of ownership as well as the still-not-so-easy interface makes it less attractive than its main competitor Joomla.

Joomla

As of 2012, Joomla is officially considered the most popular open-source CMS. It is also the fastest growing one. Over 12 years old, Joomla is very mature and stable. It has the largest and strongest design community, offers the best templates, and the largest number of quality third-party extensions that often require no customization at all – all of which together allows for a fast development, cost-effective scalability, and minimum support.

Joomla has no technical or usability disadvantages if compared to any other CMS, and yet it offers the lowest cost of ownership the long-term.

The learning curve for new users is minimum. Training can be conducted in a swift and efficient way and usually takes 1.5 hr, and maintenance SLA required is usually one of the lowest. 

We believe that Joomla is the best choice for 90% of websites. It offers the highest quality and the safest implementation of all types of requirements, even some very complex ones, and yet it bears no compromises in any aspect of the web design and development project. Joomla is exceptionally powerful, scalable and yet easy to use, and its total cost of ownership is the lowest.

Below is a CMS comparison table that summarizes the information we presented in this section. Note that rating is on the scale from 1 to 10 wherein:

• 10 stands for the best performance or the lowest required expenditures in time and/or cost, and 
• 1 stands for the worst performance or the highest required expenditure in time and/or costs.

More stars means better performance

Note that for some items, such as, frequency of upgrades required, for example, more stars means better performance, which means "upgrades required less often". Likewise, for the architectural design skills item, fewer stars means worse performance, which means "more architectural design skills are required, hence higher costs".