Jojo CMS

FireFox download day

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +1200

Today is the FireFox 3 download day. Mozilla are having a crack at setting a Guiness world record for the most number of downloads within a 24 hour period.

Go on. you know you want to.

Long live FireFox.

Source: FireFox download day

Jojo CMS 1.0 RC1 released

Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 +1200

We are pleased to announce the first Release Candidate version of Jojo CMS. Very pleased.

We feel we are now at a stage where we will not be making fundamental changes to the Jojo framework or plugin API, and have been running the latest release of Jojo on our own sites long enough to consider it stable. While there are still a large number of features we plan to implement, they are largely user interface and additional functionality changes, unlikely to have a serious impact on custom plugins.

Upgrade

The upgrade path from the beta is considerably easier than with our previous release - the most notable change since the Beta1 release is that all queries now require braces (squigglie brackets) around table names. However, if you miss a query or 2, it won't break your plugin unless you are using table prefixing.

Plugins

We have a number of exciting plugin developments on the go at the moment, personally I have spent the past month developing the jojo_cart plugin and additions to our affiliate system (this would have made a great Summer of Code project). This is a configurable shopping cart plugin for Jojo, which makes it much easier to run online shopping websites and accept payments via PayPal or a number of other payment providers. I'll be making an announcement about this shortly.

You may notice our plugin pack now contains 51 plugins - we have been busy adding a newsletter plugin, the shopping cart plugins, a weather widget, the facility to customize your CAPTCHA, PHP 5.1 support, and many improvements to the existing plugins.

Download

The Release Candidate version of Jojo can be downloaded from our download page. Be sure to grab the plugins pack as well, as all plugins will also need to be upgraded.

Support

I'd like to point out that the forums are our preferred method of support, especially after a new release. All the core developers have the Forum RSS feed in their readers, so messages posted to the forums will be read just as fast as emails. However, when we reply in the forums the information becomes available to the community and others can benefit from the reply.

Thanks for your continued support.

Harvey & the Jojo team.

Source: Jojo CMS 1.0 RC1 released

Video - XML sitemaps for your plugin

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +1200

XML sitemaps are a way of telling search engines about the pages on your site. Their most important function is to prioritize pages on large sites. Because GoogleBot has limited time available to visit/spider your site, you want to make sure it's spending it's time on the important pages, not the rubbish ones.

XML sitemaps are a way of telling search engines:

What pages you have on your site
When each page was last modified
Which pages are more important than others
How often a page is likely to change

Search engines can use this information to do a better / more efficient job of spidering your site.

XML sitemaps in Jojo

If you have the jojo_sitemap plugin installed (it is by default) then you already have an XML sitemap eg <a rel="nofollow" href="sitemap.xml">www.jojocms.org/sitemap.xml - this includes entries for all the main pages in Jojo.

Plugins

But not the pages that are created by your plugins. If you have a plugin that creates new pages, for example a product listing plugin, then these pages aren't automatically included in the sitemap. This isn't ideal, because these custom pages could well be the most important parts of your site.

This video tutorial shows how to configure your plugin to add entries into the XML sitemap.

[[shadowbox]]

View video

PS. Apologies for the text being a little hard to read - I made this video on a higher-res screen than usual, I figured it would be better to release the video anyway rather than re-do the thing from scratch.

I'll follow up on this post with some example code in the docs that can be copy-pasted into your plugin.

Source: Video - XML sitemaps for your plugin

Contribute: Help us populate the demo

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1300

We have been really busy coding on Jojo in recent weeks, but everyone knows it takes more than good code to make a decent software product.

One of the areas of Jojo we feel is letting the team down is the demo - it's more or less a default install and it's largely empty.

We could use some help to populate the demo with example data, and make sure there is enough data in the demo for each installed plugin to reasonably show-off the various features. Also, we would like to see most of the available plugins installed and working in the demo, as a lot of Jojo's functionality is kept within plugins.

Can you spare a couple of hours to help?

Please don't make changes directly to http://demo.jojocms.org - these will get lost as soon as our reset script runs. Instead, if you are able to contribute, please let us know and we will give you a password for the master demo site.

We have a lot of good features to share, but we need to tell people about them - any help from the community appreciated.

Source: Contribute: Help us populate the demo

No Summer of Code this year

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1300

So Google has just published their list of accepted projects for Google Summer of Code 2008.

The list is approx 2 1/2 hours later than expected, and my F5 key has taken a fair hammering in anticipation.

Unfortunately, Jojo isn't on the list of approved open source projects. Silverstripe isn't either, so the Kiwi CMS offerings won't be getting the same boost this year as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and 175 other open source projects.

However...

We will be working through our ideas list over the coming months. Our project ideas are just as good as they ever were, so this won't be stopping us from continuing to make Jojo a great product.

We'd love to hear from anyone wanting to contribute code to any of the ideas on the list, or anything else.

Source: No Summer of Code this year

Jojo & Google Summer of Code

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Jojo are keen to be a part of Google Summer of Code 2008, and our beta2 changelog and jojocms.org site design have been getting a flogging as we try to prove to Google that we are up to the challenge.

Summer of Code 2008

For the last 3 years, Google has helped open-source projects grow and improve by offering university students USD$4500 each to spend their summer contributing code. Last year, Google helped Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Silverstripe, and around 130 other open source projects by providing keen young minds to help code. We are looking forward to being included in this list for 2008, if Google approves our application.

Part of the application process involves providing an ideas list - a few suggested projects that students can take on. Projects that will help Jojo CMS grow and improve, while providing plenty of learning opportunity for students and mentors. Our ideas list contains some tasks that we have been aching to implement, and tasks that users are wanting to see operational.

Next update March 17

Google will announce the approved mentoring organisations on March 17, and student applications start shortly after on March 24th.

Source: Jojo & Google Summer of Code

Jojo Workshop - March 4th 2008

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

The first developer workshop will be held on Tuesday, March 4th 2008 from 12 noon. As discussed in our previous post on Jojo workshops, we will start off with some prepared material covering recent changes in Jojo and what you need to get your plugins consistent with the latest format.

Then, we will work through whatever topic people most want to hear about. We will have a projector and internet access and can look at live sites. Please bring your FTP details if you would like us to have a look at any code you have on a live site.

The workshop will be approx 3 hours in length.

Who

This is for web developers who are using Jojo, and perhaps developing their own plugins. The workshop will be run by Harvey Kane and Mike Cochrane, Jojo core developers.

Price

Free.

Register

If you would like to attend, please send us an email beforehand or post a comment here, so we know how many people to expect (we don't have unlimited space). Also, it may be helpful to send a list of what topics you would most like covered, so we know what to expect.

Where

GardyneHolt
18 Beresford Square
Auckland City

Parking is available outside on the street at $4 per hour (and you need to top up each hour), but we recommend the K-road carpark which is only a few minutes walk.

Source: Jojo Workshop - March 4th 2008

Some notes on the Beta

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

We will be launching the Beta within the next 24 hours, pending some final testing and tweaking. We figure our self-imposed deadline of Feb 5th is achievable, providing we don't go with New Zealand's GMT+12 timezone :)

The Beta is structurally quite different to previous versions, and this means that upgrading is not as straightforward as usual.

In the interests of making a better application, we have broken backwards compatibility in a few key areas. These are...

PHP5 only

Jojo will no longer work on PHP4. Because we won't be doing any further development on the alpha version (which does work on PHP4), we strongly recommend you run your Jojo sites on a PHP5 host.

PHP5 opens up a number of new programming techniques that we can use to make Jojo simpler, faster, and with better error reporting.

Webdrive is still our favourite PHP5 host in New Zealand.

parsepage.inc.php for capturing URLs

If your plugin uses this file to capture traffic from custom URLs, then this code will need to be changed. parsepage.inc.php is now gone, and we have an api call instead. The api call is considerably easier to follow, and means less regexes for everyone concerned.

.htaccess is simplified

We have moved code from .htaccess into PHP, where we have more control over things - This means existing sites will need to use our new .htaccess file bundled with the download. Be careful that any of your own custom .htaccess rules are preserved when doing this.

pg_link field behaviour changed

The way pages are linked to plugins has changed, to fit into our API model better. Documentation will be available around this with the beta launch. If your site uses any custom plugins, this change probably effects you.

Menu navigation changed

A lot of people lost a lot of hair over the menu generation system bundled with the themes. And I can understand why. We have now created a number of standard navigation layouts, which should suit most websites. The standard nav code only produces HTML in a bullet list format, it's still up to you to write your own CSS and JS to get the exact look / feel you are after.

Stable developer API

We don't have any immediate plans to change the developer API from that in the beta. So we will begin proper documentation of this, something which we have been reluctant to do while the API was changing.

This version of Jojo should make the system much more accessible to developers.
We will be going over these new features in our up-coming workshop.

Source: Some notes on the Beta

Video - Random Header Images

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

With a small amount of custom coding, you can have random header images appearing on your website. This is something that is used reasonably often, and is a good way to give the impression that your content is kept fresh and up to date (even if it isn't). This 4:20 video covers the process of adding random header images in Jojo. Keep an eye out for more Jojo videos as we add them.

Source: Video - Random Header Images

Video - Basic SEO Tutorial

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Jojo CMS is what we call a "search engine friendly CMS". What this means is that we have spent a vast amount of time making sure that Jojo won't throw up any barriers to getting indexed like many CMS systems do.

On-page SEO

However, having a search engine friendly CMS means nothing if you don't optimise the content of your pages. The formula for on-page optimisation isn't that complicated, yet we hardly ever see it done properly. This 11 minute video walks you through the basics of optimizing a page within Jojo, enough so that most websites should be able to see an improvement in rankings by following these steps.

Only the basics

It's worth noting that SEO is far too complicated to fit into an 11 minute video, so there are plenty of important elements of the process that have been left out. If you are targeting a competitive phrase, then you will need more than this video to get ranked. However, if you are currently not doing any optimization to your pages, then you will benefit from watching this video.

More information

Search engine optimization is a vast and complicated field, but important to get right. If you have a Jojo website and want to rank better, there are plenty of ways we can help you get the best out of your site. Contact us to find out how we can help you get better rankings. If you are in New Zealand, you would be well advised to attend Michael Brandon's SEO seminar, a full day on all aspects of SEO.

Feedback

We would love to hear about the results you get from optimising your website - start with some simple phrases and you will be amazed at what can be done!

Source: Video - Basic SEO Tutorial

Jojo working on lighttpd & IIS

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

In our recent development version of Jojo, we simplified the .htaccess rules in an attempt to, well, simplify things.

Because the complicated .htaccess rules were difficult to replicate on other webservers, this meant that Jojo was only supported on Apache.

Mike has been testing Jojo out on lighttpd and IIS and has managed to get Jojo working without too much fuss.

While Apache is still the most popular web server out there, it's always nice to have a bit more choice.

Source: Jojo working on lighttpd & IIS

Video - Custom sidebars

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

A lot of people have been asking me how to use a different sidebar on each page of their site. It's normal to want say Testimonials on the homepage, and product photos on another page etc. There are a few ways to do this in Jojo, but I have made a short video showing my favourite approach. Keep an eye out for more Jojo videos as we add them.

Source: Video - Custom sidebars

Nice URLs for articles

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

In the last release of Jojo we added the functionality to have your own choice of URLs for the article / blog plugin.

Previously, the URL was based around the ID and the title, and although it was nice and search engine friendly, we were finding they were getting a bit long on some posts.

Now there is a new field for article URL. If you like the URLs how they were, simply ignore this new field. Otherwise you can choose any URL you like for the article - typically something shorter and simpler than the article title itself. Jojo URLs should contain no spaces, and words separated by dashes rather than underscores.

If you need to change one of these new URLs after publishing a page, make sure you setup a redirect so you don't lose any traffic (this happens automatically with URLS that include the ID).

Source: Nice URLs for articles

Au revoir PHP4

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Earlier in 2007 we signed up for the GoPHP5 initiative - an agreement between a number of software packages to discontinue support for PHP4 from February 5th, 2008.

The goal of this is to encourage web hosts to upgrade their systems so that developers can take advantage of the goodies available in PHP5.

February is nearing, and we have decided to push back the release date of our beta to coincide with this date. Our current development copy of Jojo (which will become the beta) already has some PHP5 only code in there.

If you are still running PHP4, we recommend you encourage your web host to make the upgrade.

This doesn't effect just Jojo - other PHP packages including Cubecart, Drupal, Moodle, OScommerce, phpMyAdmin, Typo3 and Zencart are all dropping PHP4 support from the above date.

We do apologise for any inconvenience with this, but overall we can deliver a better product with the new PHP5 functionality available.

Source: Au revoir PHP4

Jojo Workshops - Feedback please

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +1300

One of our goals for 2008 was to start some regular workshops, where developers can work through plugins and code together with the core team. The goal being to help everyone make better sites.

Workshops will be...

Free.
Held in Auckland, New Zealand.
Approx 2-3 hours in length.
Aimed at web developers rather than end-users, though we may do end-user workshops in the future as well.

Have your say

Before any firm plans are made - we are asking for feedback from the people who will likely attend the workshops:

Would you prefer during business hours, in the evenings, or on a weekend?
Would you prefer a presentation format where a core developer talks about a particular topic, or a more open discussion where we discuss each other's latest work? Or a combination of the 2.
How regularly you would like to attend? We would consider a monthly workshop if there was enough interest.
Any other thoughts on how you would like the workshops to be run?

Feedback please

We would love to hear your thoughts, either in the comments below, or via email.

Source: Jojo Workshops - Feedback please