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vBulletin 4 and Joomla 1.5 Compared

sniranjan — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 05:22:54 GMT

Well to start with.... Is this a fair comparison in the first place? Technically yes, with vBulletin into the CMS zone with its vBulletin 4 CMS

Infact we have the distinction of having used both Joomla 1.5 and vBulletin 3.8 and 4.x versions (we use it today too). Our site was hosted on Joomla 1.5 initially, but we found poor choices of forum software for it. There are good ones like fireboard, which integrate with Joomla seamlessly, but we somehow felt that they lack the power of a large board. So we searched and obviously vBulletin became our choice of forum. We found it literally impossible to blend the styles of vBulletin and Joomla with single sign on. Here again, we had the choices of bridges, but mind you... these only add overheads on maintenance. There is nothing like a complete CMS + forum solution built into one.

Considering the fact that support is very critical for our customers, we decided to move to vBulletin 3.x (at that time) and it was a great decision. vBulletin 3.8 was excellent in performance and provided us with all the utilities to run a very successful large forum.

But soon we realized that, it lacked ability to create custom pages. The default home page is a table based style, which was not ok for a home page of a site. vBulletin 3.x lacked the style factor in it. It was looking very ordinary. Going back to Joomla was not a solution again. That was exactly when vBulletin announced its CMS with vBulletin 4.0.

vBulletin 4.0 is pretty costly (almost around $200+). But then we foresaw that this would be the ultimate solution for us. We waited for vBulletin 4.0 for a very long time and finally it was released. With a good experience of Joomla CMS, we started exploring vBulletin 4 CMS.

CMS Comparison:

Our experience with vBulletin 4 CMS has not been very good till date. vBulletin 4 CMS is buggy and if you observe the bug report page, you will observe hundreds of bugs still in open state. The features like the permissions settings for usergroups, article editing options are not well designed and thought of.

Please note that, vBulletin 4 CMS is a paid product, while Joomla is free. vBulletin 4 was released into the market with hundreds of known bugs. Having paid $200+, we expected them to release a product that is less buggy and atleast usable. Some of the features of vBulletin 4.0 could not be used at all, in the initial stages of the release. With vBulletin 4.0.2 (at the time of writing this post), things have certainly improved, but there are still hundreds of known bugs. And the worst part is that, for a paid product, we dont find even the minimal documentation, even after 3 months of its release. The support at the forums are not very responsive too.

Joomla is 100 hundred times better than vBulletin 4 CMS at this point. vBulletin 4 CMS is not matured and it will take years for vBulletin 4 to even get to a comparable level with Joomla. The gap is only set to increase, with Joomla 1.6 and future versions.

Forum Comparison:

When it comes to the forum side of the products, Joomla lacks a serious forum component (no offence to Fireboard here) that can handle medium to large sized boards. This is where vBulletin 4 outrightly scores over Joomla 1.5. vBulletin 4 forum is not doubt, still the best forum software available.

So you want a combination of a forum and CMS? Make you pick based on your priority needs. Which takes more precedence for you - CMS or forum? For us, we need a powerful forum software, backed with a decent CMS. So we decided to continue hosting our site on vBulletin 4 CMS and Forum, assuming that, atleast in the months (and hopefully years!) to come, vBulletin team will sort out the issues in CMS and continue their dominance in forum zone.

So heres our conclusion:

Joomla 1.5 = Excellent CMS + Decent Forum (Fireboard)
vBulletin 4 = Decent CMS + Excellent Forum

Use .htaccess to redirect your http://yoursite to http://www.yoursite

sniranjan — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 04:38:32 GMT

Often you get necessities to have your website URLs as http://www.yoursite.com, though you would have configured your website URL as http://yoursite.com.

The difference seems to be very naive, but in reality this affects lots of factors. Some search engines identify them as two different sites. Javascript libraries like mootools throw access denied errors when they are different and so on...

You can force the search engines, users and website visitors to ultimately see the www prefixed pages, by doing the following change to the .htaccess file on your website.

1. Create/Edit .htaccess on your public_html folder

2. Add the following lines to .htaccess after the "RewriteEngine on" statement
Code:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yoursite\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
For example for google.com, the entries would be:
Code:
 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.google\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.google.com/$1 [R=301,L]

JV-Extensions is now "Shopper Approved"

sniranjan — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:43:43 GMT

JV-Extensions is proud to have recently got associated with "ShopperApproved", the ultimate customer ratings and review network for products and services.

Using the Shopper Approved rating/review service, you will be able to provide us with valuable feedback, ratings, and reviews automatically during and after the purchase. We have also displayed an exclusive 'Shopper Approved' trust seal at the top of all the pages, to showcase our brand building information.

This Shopper Approved Customer Rating and Review Certificate, was generated using independent survey information gathered by ShopperApproved.com. These reflect real ratings and provide us with the opportunity to concentrate on making our customers happy and satisfied.

We hope to get maximum positive reviews in rankings and surveys from our customers with this service. For more information on this rating and survey service, please visit, Shopper Approved website

JV-LD 4.4 Beta Testing, Issues, Solutions and Downloads

sniranjan — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:55:31 GMT

We are glad to inform that, the beta version of JV-LD 4.4 has been released. Packed with numerous features, we expect JV-LD 4.4 to be a major milestone for our directory software. We request JV-LD customers to help us in beta testing and submit their issues in the thread at http://www.jv-extensions.com/jv-link...downloads.html
All the latest news about this beta, as it progresses, will be provided in the thread

New versions of beta, if required will be released, in the thread

Please do not use Beta versions in production or live environments and websites

You may please report issues and suggestions in the thread. We do not guarantee that, suggestions can be taken at this stage for JV-LD 4.4, but issues will certainly be investigated into and fixed, based on the criticality

We are yet to update the documentation section for all the new features that are introduced in JV-LD 4.4. In the meantime, if you have any queries, please post them in this thread

JV-LD has undergone a change to a great extent to incorporate the numerous new features. The features introduced include,
New "Directory Statistics" Module

New "Most Voted Links" Module

Option to display number of links in categories and sub categories

JV-LD compatibility for JomSocial (2 new plugins are introduced)

Search facility based on url, for links manager in backend

Advanced UTF-8 compatibility

Record IP address of submitter

New breadcrumb options (Joomla breadcrumb or JV-LD breadcrumb)

Replacement variables in category pages for advanced SEO

Auto populate link add fields

Advanced JV-LD installation routines

Performance improvement (will continue to be tested parallely by us during beta)

Query usage fine tuning

Include JV-LD link details in sitemap

Styles Manager

Option to disallow link submission to defined categories, but still allow submission to their sub categories

Twitter Social bookmarking button in link detailed page

Directory slogan for JV-LD

Sample Data installation during fresh installation of JV-LD

Title for banner profiles

Notes field (private records) for admin, for links in backend

RSS feeds for categories pages

Ajax link ratings

Limit the number of sub categories that are shown in frontend for categories

Option to enable/disable display of directory statistics

Google Maps integration with JV-LD

Dashboard integration for taking action on pending link reviews

Display latest links for selected categories and sub categories

Display featured links for selected categories and sub categories

Reset buttons to add link and banner forms

Option to order categories automatically (alphabetically) or manually

New 4-column display of categories (style #4)

Automatically create thumbnails for categories as images for them are added

Display images for category in category description in frontend

Option to prepend directory titles to page titles in each screen

Option to hide/show website URL in link detail page

New statistics - "Todays Links" and "Number of Categories", "Number of sub-categories" in Directory Statistics

New options in featured links

and numerous bug fixes.

We expect to run the beta testing for a week till March-5th 2010 and our plan is to go GA on March-6th. Thank you in advance for your cooperation and participation.

We hope you will like JV-LD 4.4. Please also share your feedback with us in this thread on JV-LD 4.4.

Creating a Joomla! Demo Website that is recreated periodically

sniranjan — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 09:12:57 GMT

Often you will find Joomla! based demos at programmer and developer's websites, which are automatically recreated every hour or so, to make sure that the demo site is available for new visitors to get a clean environment to try out things. Here is a tutorial on how you can create your own demo site using Joomla that is recreated automatically and periodically

You will need the following to proceed:
Root access using terminal software like Putty or Nexus or something similar, to your server, where the website will be hosted or FTP access or File manager access to your website

Control Panel access to your website

In the following example, we will create a demo website for http://www.yoursite.com/, which will be accessed using the URL - http://www.yoursite.com/mydemo and accessed by absolute path at /home/{username}/public_html/mydemo

Step-1: Create new MySQL databases
Create a new database by name mydemo

Create a new database by name shadow

Create corresponding mysql users for each of these databases and associate them with these databases with necessary priveleges. For example, create usernames as mydemo_user with password pass1word and shadow_user with password pass2word

Step-2: Create the shadow demo website
Create folders named shadow and mydemo under public_html (or httpdocs as the case may be) of your main website

Download and install the latest version of Joomla! 1.5 on http://www.yoursite.com/shadow. Make sure that you install Joomla 1.5 on the shadow database

Install additional components, modules, plugins and create the required menu items as needed in this Joomla! installation and finally check everything for completeness and correctness

Configure your extensions the way you want them to be used as demo. Remember that, the visitors in the demo are supposed to be editing the configuration of your component at backend and play around with it. So make the configuration as minimal as possible.

The http://www.yoursite.com/shadow should have everything configured as you will need in the demo website

Step-3: Secure your shadow website
Login to admin backend of http://www.yoursite.com/shadow, go to Global Configuration and disable FTP

Using User Manager, change the username of the Super Administrator account. Do not have this as admin. Rename it to something only you will know. Also make sure that, you change the password to something very obscure and known only to you

Using User Manager, create a new user account with username and password as demo. Please note that this user must have Manager level access to the website.

Now browse through the frontend and backend pages and make sure that everything is fine about Joomla and your extensions

Step-4: Create and Edit configuration files
Using file manager or root access, create a copy of configuration.php in /home/{username}/public_html/shadow. Name this file as, configuration_mydemo.php

Using file manager or root access, create a copy of the htaccess.txt in /home/{username}/public_html/shadow. Name this file as, htaccess_mydemo.txt

Open /home/{username}/public_html/shadow/configuration_mydemo.php and edit the values for the variables - $log_path, $tmp_path to reflect the paths for mydemo, instead of shadow website.

In configuration_mydemo.php, edit the values for $user, $db and $password to values associated with the mydemo database and save the file

Step-5: Create restoration scripts and folders:
Go to your home directory on your server - /home/{username} and create a folder by name demo_restore. Its very important that, this folder is not accessible by URL or is not under public_html folder.

Create a file by name restore.sh and add the following contents to it:
Code:
 
#!/bin/sh
ACCOUNT_PATH=/home/{username}
DEMOR_PATH=${ACCOUNT_PATH}/public_html/shadow
DEMOR_SQL_UN=shadow_user 
DEMOR_SQL_UP=pass2word
DEMOR_SQL_DB=shadow
DEMO_PATH=${ACCOUNT_PATH}/public_html/mydemo
DEMO_SQL_UN=mydemo_user
DEMO_SQL_UP=pass1word
DEMO_SQL_DB=mydemo
TMP_PATH=${ACCOUNT_PATH}/demo_restore
 
rm -rf ${DEMO_PATH}/*
cp -pr ${DEMOR_PATH}/* ${DEMO_PATH}/
mv -f ${DEMO_PATH}/configuration_mydemo.php ${DEMO_PATH}/configuration.php
mv -f ${DEMO_PATH}/htaccess_mydemo.txt ${DEMO_PATH}/htaccess.txt
 
mysqldump -u${DEMOR_SQL_UN} -p${DEMOR_SQL_UP} ${DEMOR_SQL_DB} > ${TMP_PATH}/shadow.sql
mysql -u${DEMO_SQL_UN} -p${DEMO_SQL_UP} ${DEMO_SQL_DB} < ${TMP_PATH}/shadow.sql
 
echo `date +%s` > ${TMP_PATH}/restored_on.txt
Save the file and chmod restore.sh to 755.

Step-6: Add cron job to run restore.sh periodically
Go to "Cron Jobs" facility in your hosting control panel

Add a cron job, such that, the restore.sh is invoked or run once every hour, or as per your desired interval. Following cron job entry fires restore.sh, once every hour
Code:
0 * * * * /bin/sh /home/{username}/demo_restore/restore.sh
With the above changes, you will find that, your demo site (http://www.yoursite.com/mydemo) will be recreated every hour from the content (database and files) available in http://www.yoursite.com/shadow website. So any changes that you want to make to the demo site after it is up and running, must be made to http://www.yoursite.com/shadow. The changes will be available at mydemo website with in the next 1 hour!

We hope this steup will help you in creating a demo website for your business. For any comments or questions, please add your comment to this blog post.

If you really appreciate us sharing this, you may even sponsor us a donate a few dollars by using the donate form at the right hand side of this page

PS: We provide the above procedure with no cost or fee and do not guarantee that this will work always. We request you to take a backup of existing home directory on your server, before you attempt the above setup. Please use this at your own risk.

Important subscription and payment related changes at JV-Extensions

sniranjan — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:51:27 GMT

First of all, we apologize for the inconvenience caused due to the recent 24 hour downtime of our website. We had to take our website offline, due to some emergency operations that we had to do, that was caused due to un-expected and sudden developments at Paypal. Paypal has recently put a hold on payments to all accounts based in India and we suspect that, it would take months for Paypal to sort this out with Indian regulators. As our business is based in India, we have been severely affected due to this sudden development.

In the last 24 hours, we have worked out on an alternative. We have chosen Plimus to be the authorized reseller and payment processor, to process online orders and collect payments for all products and services at JV-Extensions. With the PLIMUS hosted e-Business platform, companies worldwide market, sell and distribute online digital goods and services securely and confidently

With this tie-up with Plimus, our customers now have variety of ways to purchase our products. Plimus accepts payments via, bank transfer, credit cards, debit cards, phone orders, payments via Paypal and more...

We have also worked out on simplifying the pricing and payment models for our customers during the last 24 hours. Based on numerous feedback from our customers, we have decided to remove the concept of subscriptions and automatic renewals of subscriptions for our products. Each of our products will still be given in 3 plans (Silver, Gold, Platinum), to enable us to cater to all types of customers. The only difference will be that, a subscription will not be created anymore.

In-fact, as a part of this, we have already canceled all our existing active Paypal subscriptions of our customers. Access to downloads, docs and support will continue to be there for existing customers who have purchased these subscriptions, till the expiry date of the subscription. By canceling the subscription, we have only made sure that, these subscriptions are not automatically renewed.

If any time, you need access to product downloads, documentation and support, after the purchase plan expires, then you need to re-purchase the same product plan or higher or lower plan again! We will also be sending you reminders when there are only 3 days left for your current purchase plan to expire, so that you can visit our Purchase page at jv-extensions.com and purchase the same or higher or lower plan again!

With things set up now again, we observe that, we have a backlog of support issues to work on. We assure our customers, that, we will look into each of your questions as soon as possible and will answer them.

New! Page Rank Updater Software for JV-LD Released!

sniranjan — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:41:40 GMT

We are glad to inform the release of our first windows and web based utility software named "JV-RankUpdater" for JV-LinkDirectory community. This utility is used to update google page ranks in JV-LD tables in your JV-LD tables in your websites.

As everyone is aware, page rank (PR) is a Google proprietary metric that indicates the quality of a website. Though there is wide spread notion that, PR has lots it's importance over a period of time, it still is being used by many websites, advertisers and publishers for various purposes.

JV-LD introduced the capability to fetch and display PR for websites that are listed in its directory from one of its earlier versions. But due to the proprietary nature of this metric and dependency on Google, the feature does not work always for everyone. Possible reasons are blacklisting by Google, forbidden error by Google, IP addresses used by the website etc...

We have made yet another attempt at refining this feature to get it working for everyone. JV-RankUpdater is windows based utility that will run on your desktop, fetch PR for urls listed in a text file (fed as input to it), and will automatically update PR in your JV-LD tables in your website database.

JV-RankUpdater has 2 parts:
JV-RankUpdater Desktop Component - Is packaged in a windows based installer and will run on Windows XP/Vista/7 environments

JV-RankUpdater Web server Component - PHP Script that will run on your website that contains your JV-LD installation

Quick FAQ

Is this software free for everyone?

JV-RankUpdater is NOT free and is commercially licensed

Is this software free for those who use JV-LD or for those who have a valid license of JV-LD or for those who still have access to downloads area at jv-extensions.com?

This software is an add on for all JV-LD customers, and is not free. The software has been written from scratch, as a utility tool to help our JV-LD customers in updating page ranks on their websites. Considerable effort has been spent in creating this software and has been decided to charge a fee to offset the development cost.

How much does this software cost?

JV-RankUpdater costs USD 20 per license

If I purchase JV-RankUpdater, can i use it on all my websites and PCs?

Yes. You can use JV-RankUpdater web server component on all your websites. At any point of time, you can install JV-RankUpdater desktop component, only on one desktop. (It is not really be required to run desktop component on more than 1 desktop :))

What does this software exactly do?

JV-RankUpdater uses its two components - desktop component and web server component to update PR values for list of selected URLs in your JV-LD tables.

Do you offer support for this software?

Certainly yes. We will certainly investigate problems that are reported, but we cannot guarantee that, all issues can be solved, due to dependencies on other components, which are not in our control.

Is there a refund policy for this software?

Yes. We do provide a 3 day refund policy, in the following cases:
You are unable to install the software

Software does not work at all - That is, PR is not fetched for even a single URL in your list anytime.

What are the restrictions in using this software?
You may not distribute the software to anyone, anytime. The software is under the copyright of JV-Extensions and all rights are reserved with JV-Extensions.

You can use JV-RankUpdater web server component on all your websites. At any point of time, you can install JV-RankUpdater desktop component, only on one desktop. (It may not really be required to run desktop component on more than 1 desktop :))

Can anyone buy this software?

No. This software is specially written for JV-LD customers only and not anyone else. Only those customers who have access to downloads area at www.jv-extensions.com for JV-LinkDirectory product, can purchase this software

What is the upgrade policy for this software?

By purchasing this software, you become eligible to get all future upgrades and updates for free, till the lifetime of this software, for all versions, as long as you hold an active JV-LD subscription or have purchased lifetime option for JV-LD. All upgrades and updates packages will be sent to you by email ,which you used during purchasing this software.

How to buy this software?

First please ensure that, you have access to downloads area at jv-extensions.com for JV-LinkDirectory product. If yes, then you may continue to purchase this software.

Please use the Buy now link below to purchase this software. You will be taken to Plimus, where you will complete the payment.

The order will be processed and instructions to download the product will be sent to your email address.

Buy JV-RankUpdater now at Secured Site at Plimus

I have access to JV-LD downloads area at jv-extensions.com and I purchased JV-RankUpdater. Subsequently i cancelled the JV-LD subscription. Can I still use JV-RankUpdater?

JV-RankUpdater can be used as long as your JV-LD subscription is active or if you have purchased a lifetime option for JV-LD

What is the disclaimer?

We provide JV-RankUpdater to JV-LD customers with the sole intention of updating PR values for their links in their JV-LD databases. JV-Extensions does not guarantee that, the software will work for all urls all the time. JV-Extensions cannot be held responsible for any misuse of this software or for mass/batch querying of any type. Please use this software at your own risk.

Buy JV-RankUpdater now at Secured Site at Plimus

Improving Link Popularity, the right way

nvijay — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:48:38 GMT

Link popularity is a term, we come across very commonly, when we discuss about online business and website promotion. This is a measure of how your search engine takes your response to various problems. Through link building websites are linked from one to another.

You should be able to understand the concept of link popularity easily. Google ranks you based on the quality of the website that has linked to you. So if a good quality website of good page rank has linked to your website, then your website will also receive a high rank.

Link popularity actually reflects in the Page Rank of your website. Also, you cannot always think that others will get back to you to link to your website. If you need back links for your website you need to get them created on your own. As the number of back links you create to your website increases, the better it would be for your site. Similarly, if the back links are from popular websites, your Page Rank would also improve as a result of link popularity.

The following are three steps that can help you to make an improvement in your link popularity:
You need to see to it that your website is worth linking to. In the flow of wanting to create enough links, you would have not given this point much importance. But, if your website has good content, which is relevant to your niche of readers, then, you stand a chance to get natural back links, without having to create them on your own. Also, if the content about that particular niche that you have included in your site is unique, then the number of visitors and the number of links would increase.

The quality of website that has linked into your site is very important in determining your link popularity. So, if a site that has the same niche as yours and a high Page Rank gets linked to you, it is always better for your website. There are several ways of getting the top links publish a link into your website, one of them being to buy the link.

The next point you need to consider is to build a large selection of link backs. Even if it is not based on sharing the same niche, links from other sites into yours is also valuable. You can view forums, blogs and activities in other websites and lave your comments there. This will help to create more links into your site, even if it is from not so relevant websites

Being listed on as many Internet directories and search engines as possible will bring your website many visitors and new customers. Even if a single search engine might not bring you many visitors, it all adds up and you'll benefit from increased link popularity and higher rankings in other search engines.

One final piece of advice - Please do not artificially inflate link popularity of your website, by creating a network of smaller websites, that all point to your same website only. Instead, focus on the content of the main website and increase its ranking.

We are back after a major upgrade!

sniranjan — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 12:49:07 GMT

We have just completed, a major upgrade maintenance today at JV-Extensions. We have successfully upgraded to the latest and newest version of vBulletin with it's CMS as well. We hope our users enjoy the new look and feel of our website now.

All the major operations in the upgrade are complete, while we still have a little bit of fine tuning to do. In the meantime, we request all customers to share how you feel, about the new look of our website.

Going forward, we will be moving the documentation and release info information for all our products, to the articles section, there by using the forum section for support, feature requests and product discussions.

With this upgrade and further changes, we hope to increase the usability of JV-Extensions website a lot more for our users

JV-LD and JomSocial

sniranjan — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 07:09:24 GMT

Towards the end of October, JV-Extensions released JV-LD 4.3 and came with it the beta package of JV-LD plugin for JomSocial, the popular social networking extension suite for Joomla, from Azrul.

There have been number of responses for the JomSocial-JVLD beta testing since then. Initially, we had developed the plugin for JomSocial just for displaying the user's links in JomSocial profile.

But then from then on, we have made great advances. Following are some of the features that we are going to introduce in the JV-LD - JomSocial integration. We are sure, JomSocial users will love this and start embracing JV-LD for their links and directory needs.

Adding activities/events to JomSocial Activity Stream - when new review is added, new listing is added, new site recommendation is given and when a user bookmarks a listing

Adding userpoints for events like recommend a site, write a review for a listing, submit a link

Ability to show thumbnails and rate links from inside JomSocial profile

Some more useful features may be added as well, en route to the release. Both JV-LD plugin and the component are undergoing changes to this effect. All these features will be released as a part of JV-LD version 4.4.

We want to thank all our customers, who have responded to the beta testing call. We would like to make a special note of Alialavian, for his excellent contribution to this effort and really appreciate and thank him for his prompt testing and responses to us.

Use JV-ContentLinks and JV-Relatives to improve internal linking

sniranjan — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:26:43 GMT

There are numerous benefits of internal linking that JV-ContentLinks (JV-CL) and JV-Relatives (JV-REL) provide independently. This is one in the series of threads aimed at using the power of both these extensions to improve SEO through enhanced link building and quality internal linking.

We assume that you use both JV-CL and JV-REL. Objective is to link keyword meta tags of articles (using JV-REL) with other articles in the website (using JV-CL).
JV-REL provides keyword meta tagging display option. Enable this option in JV-REL plugin configuration first.

In JV-REL, set "Link each tag to Joomla search results" to No

Doing the above will ensure that, JV-REL will display all the meta tags or keywords configured for the article, when the article is viewed in front end.

Now do the following in JV-CL:
Go to JV-CL keyword links screen in admin back end and add the article keywords one by one

Provide links as desired - preferably linking to other internal pages of your website. These articles will likely be listed in the related articles section already!, but thats fine. Linking again will give huge SEO benefits, because we are using the keyword itself as the anchor text, which is good for SEO.

Now go to plugin screen and rearrange the order of invokation such that, JV-REL is set to be invoked earlier than JV-CL.

Thats it!. Now refresh the article in front end and you will see that the keyword tags in the article that are displayed by JV-REL are now linking to pages, that you have defined in JV-CL

Filter keyword conversion to link with in HTML tags

sniranjan — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:50:10 GMT

With new versions of JV-LD (4.3 released in October end) and JV-Relatives (3.2 in beta currently), one must be wondering about JV-ContentLinks (JV-CL). JV-CL is not far behind.

We are introducing a very important feature in JV-CL in the coming version (v2.5) - the ability to filter or not link keywords which appear with in specific html tags. Like for example, keywords in h1 or h2 or b or strong or whichever is defined in configuration. This will add a new dimension in usability to JV-CL and will be a great value addition to all our customers.

We are also working on other features, which we will post here as we progress on them.

Updated on Nov-29-2009:

The following new features are also being added to JV-CL 2.5:
Import of keyword links from a CSV/Txt file

Ability to link to blog or different layouts

JV-CL 2.5 will be available for beta testing for our customers from Dec-1-2009 onwards. Please feel free to contact us (with your username) for the beta package.

PHP-5 will be a minimum requirement for JV-CL 2.5 onwards to run

Update - In the making of JV-LinkExchanger 2.0

sniranjan — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:15:24 GMT

JV-LinkExchanger (JV-LE or formerly known as JV-LinkExchanger Basic Edition), the completely free and GPL product is currently being rewritten by us, for Joomla! 1.5 native mode. In the process of doing this, we are making a few changes to the layouts and features as well. Only a couple of new features will be added though.

Some of the changes that we are making to the existing ones are,
- Making the layout more professional, with ability to introduce easy customizations for end users with css
- Retaining only the 2 column layout for directory categories
- Single column layout for featured links
- Link exchange check algorithm will be advanced

and more...(more will be updated in this blog post in the coming days)

Objective will be to make it simple and easy for people to use JV-LE to do link and banner exchanges with other users.

The final release will be 2.0 of JV-LE and will be ready by the third week of November '09 and will continue to remain free in cost and freedom!

Updated on Nov-10 '09:
JV-LE 2.0 will have AJAX implementation for rating of links!

Updated on Nov-11 '09:
Approval and rejections for link exchange requests can be given via email itself by site admin!

Updated on Nov-12 '09:
JV-LE 2.0 will have a new fresh look for frontend!

PHP 5 will be a minimum requirement for JV-LE 2.0 to function

Updated on Nov-13 '09:
JV-LE 2.0 will be able to generate SEF URLs on its own. It will use Joomla's API to generate SEF URL for its pages! This means that, you will not need any SEF URL component for JV-LE...

Updated on Nov-14 '09:
JV-LE 2.0 will have a directory title and slogan, which can be configured at backend

The development has been completed and we are already in the testing phase of JV-LE 2.0. If you want to help us or try out our pre-release package, then please reply to this thread!

Updated on Nov-15 '09:
JV-LE 2.0 is ready for final testing. To enable our users to catch a glimpse of what is in store in JV-LE 2.0, we have installed it in our demo website as well. You may now play with JV-LE 2.0 in our demo site

We plan to go live with JV-LE 2.0 latest by Nov-18th 2009

Updated on Nov-18 '09:

JV-LE 2.0 has been released today

Beta Testing for JV-LD 4.3

sniranjan — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:27:33 GMT

We have just completed our alpha testing for JV-LD 4.3 and are now starting with the beta testing today. Version 4.3 introduces the following new features to JV-LinkDirectory:
Custom Fields - You can now add custom fields - text fields, text area, radio button fields, checkbox group fields, drop down fields as custom fields for every partner link!

Ability to include JV-Extensions affiliate ID in Powered by text

Ability to add partner url to Myspace and Facebook, like you have setup for digg, furl and others

Integrate Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank with JV-LD

Option to show "Add your link here" for public or registered users in category pages

Menu position alteration option (bottom or top or both places)

Utility to import categories and links from Linx component

JV-LD Plugin for Community Builder (needs a separate plugin from JV-Extensions)

JV-LD Plugin for JomSocial (needs a separate plugin from JV-Extensions) - Not alpha tested yet. JomSocial users are requested to help us with this.

Ability to decide and change order of categories display in admin backend for JV-LD

Mass import of links using "Import links from CSV file" into JV-LD

Ability to approve and reject links from front-end

Sticky Links - You can stick links in category browse pages and all links pages of a category. The sticky links will always appear at the top of the links listing irrespective of the sorting and listing order. This is a unique concept which will help boost SEO for chosen links. Also useful if you want to permanently position a few links at the top!

Option to upload .png images in self profiles

Option to allow guests to report broken links

Minor Bug Fixes

Anyone who is interested in helping us with BETA testing may please contact us ASAP. You must hold a valid license of JV-LD to participate in beta testing.

Joomla Extensions Types Explained

sniranjan — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 12:28:41 GMT

Joomla is a very user-friendly, feature-rich, content management system. You can use Joomla to build your websites and portals. If you are making use of Joomla for a full-fledged website, you might not have all features that you need readily available in Joomla. Or, in other words, you may need many more features than the ones available to you in Joomla. You can make use of Joomla extensions for this purpose.

A Joomla website can have five types of extensions. They are Components, Modules, Plugins, Templates and Languages. There are different features or functionalities that each of this extension is supposed to handle.

Component:
The largest and the most complex extension in a Joomla website is the Component. In fact they themselves are small applications within your website. A component consists of two parts - Administrator part and Site part.

When a Joomla page loads, it calls a component gives the webpage the main page body. Components are definitely, the most important portions of your webpage, because, they are driven by a menu item. In fact each menu item runs a component.

Modules:
Modules are much more flexible extensions when compared to components. These extensions are used for page rendering and provide small blocks of functionalities in various positions. Modules in Joomla are linked to components such as the �latest news� module which links to the com_content. It displays links to the latest content items.

Modules in Joomla are usually known as �boxes�. These boxes are arranged around a component. The login module is an example for this. The footer is also another module. In Joomla, you can assign modules for each menu item. Also, you can decide if you want to show or hide your login module, based on the component (menu item) that is used. It is not mandatory that modules should be linked to components. They can even remain as just static HTML or text, without being linked to anything.

Plugins:
Plugins are much more advanced, and they actually act as event handlers. An event can be triggered at any part of execution of Joomla, like component, module or core. When an event is triggered, plugins are made to handle the event.

Templates:
Templates represent the design of your Joomla website, and help to provide a new look and feel to your website.

Languages:
Languages are the simplest and most basic extensions in Joomla.
There are several extensions that are available with Joomla or which can be bought from service providers like JV-Extensions, to make your website look, feel and behave the way you want it to.