Joomla 1.5 Removing the Generator Meta Tag

Posted on by

We still have some clients on Joomla version 1.5. By default Joomla creates the following Meta tag when it renders the web page:

<meta name="generator" content="Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Management" />

This meta tag tells tools that crawl websites that the website was created with Joomla version 1.5. This is great for tools that aggregate data to assess the market penetration of different CMS tools like Joomla. But this also tells hackers what tool and version you’ve used to create your website. If there are vulnerabilities for that version of the CMS you’ve made it that much easier for them to hack your website.

For those that are comfortable with editing code files, just comment out the following line with double forward slashes in the /libraries/joomla/document/html/renderer/head.php file:

// $strHtml .= $tab.'<meta name="generator" content="'.$document->getGenerator().'" />'.$lnEnd;

WordPress localization and the double underscores

Posted on by

If you’ve purchased a premium WordPress theme before you may have run across PHP code that contained a double underscore and wondered what it was doing. For example:

<!--?php next_posts_link( __( 'Older posts', 'the_themes_name' ) ); ?-->

You may have also seen the _e() function in action:

<!--?php _e(“Blog Archives”, “the_themes_name”); ?-->

The __() and _e() functions are localization functions, meaning they’re there so the theme can support multiple languages. They do this by passing the phrase in the first parameter, “Blog Archives” in the example above, to a function that looks up the translated phrase in the language that needs to be displayed.

The translated phrases are store in .mo and .po files found in the languages folder of your theme. Looking in the fr_FR.po file, which stores French translations, you may find the following:

#: archive.php
msgid "Blog Archives"
msgstr "Archives du site"

When one of the localization functions is called from the archive.php page, and passes in the “Blog Archives” phrase to be translated into French, the returned phrase will be “Archives du site”.

There’s obviously more to it than what I’ve explained above. If you’re interested in adding localization to your theme you can read more about it in the following articles:

WordPress Codex
How to make a translatable WordPress theme – CatsWhoCode.com
How to localize WordPress themes and plugins with GetText – ICanLocalize.com

Adding Google Analytics to WordPress

Posted on by

A typical task we do for most clients when their new website goes live is to add their site to Google Analytics. Even if the website is a simple brochure website to give their small business an online presence, and they’re not going to take advantage of GA’s analytic tools, it’s still nice to know that people are actually visiting your website.

There are already a number of articles out there on how to do this, usually detailing the numerous options there are.  For example, here is a pretty good article: 5+ Ways to Add Google Analytics to WordPress

We’ve been using Joost’s Google Analytics for WordPress plugin recently. It’s array of configurable options may seem daunting, but they’re well worth it if your serious about using Google Analytics. Otherwise, the old “cut/paste Google’s code into the template” always works!

WordPress Static Front Page

Posted on by

WordPress has quickly become our go-to tool when creating brochure websites for our clients, and those websites usually have a static page, or splash page, for the website’s home page. This is typically done by creating a “Page” in WordPress instead of a “Post”.

You can override WordPress’ default behavior of displaying a list of your recent blog posts as the home page by creating a page called “Home”, then going into the Administration > Settings > Reading panel and setting the ‘Front page displays:’ setting to ‘a static page’ while choosing your “Home” page as the Front page.

This is how the home page for our website was done.

What about blog posts?

Usually our company brochure websites consist entirely of pages, but some clients also want blog functionality to enter recent news about their company. This is what the ‘Posts page:’ setting in the image above is used for. We’ll create an empty page in WordPress called “Blog” and point the ‘Posts page:’ setting to it.

You can read further details about this in the WordPress Codex here.

What is SEO?

Posted on by

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of making your web pages more relevant to search engines so they’ll rank your website and its pages higher in search results, driving more traffic and hopefully customers to your website.

SEO best practices involve properly using “title tags”, “heading tags”, “meta descriptions” and “meta keywords” in your pages. Of course the content of your page is important as well, especially when used in combination with the before mentioned tools.

Title Tags

The Title tag of a web page is an extremely important tag. You see this tag in search results and on the top of your browser window. On this page, the Title tag is “What is SEO | Fifth Cup LLC”. See it at the top of your browser window?

Search engines use this tag as one of the primary ways of determining what your page is about.

Heading Tags

Heading tags (H1 through H6) are also very important in helping search engines determine the topic and content of your page. The H1 tag is usually the title of your web page (and on your home page it’s typically your company’s name.) On this page, the H1 tag is the bold green words “What is SEO?”.

If you think of the H1 tag as the title of a book, then the H2 tags are the chapters in your book, and the H3 through H6 are further divisions of your chapters. Examples of H2 tags on this page are the bold section headings, “Title Tags” and “Heading Tags”.

Meta Description

Meta Descriptions, while debatable for their relevance and impact in search engine rankings, are extremely important as they define what appears on the search results page. The orange bordered areas below are the meta descriptions for those pages:

Meta Keywords

Also debatable for their importance in search engine ranking, meta keywords still contribute to your overall ranking by helping search engines further understand the content of your page, so don’t forget about them. Pick 8 to 12 words or phrases that describe the content of your page, comma separate them, and add them as meta keywords to your page.

 

We’ve explored just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to search engine optimization. Getting your website to appear in the first 3 results of the first page of Google’s search results is both an art and science. If your topic is very unique, you may get lucky. If your company or topic is in a competitive space, it takes a lot of thought and work to craft your pages to help the search engines understand their content.

There are plenty of books and websites that can provide you guidance, and in future articles we’ll even show you how to apply the above concepts to your WordPress or Joomla based website. For those that don’t have the time to do it themselves, we can do it for you through our online presence services.

What is a CMS?

Posted on by

A CMS, or Content Management System, is software that simplifies the publication of content (web pages, images, news articles and blog posts) on websites. Think of using a word processor/editor that resembles a simplified Microsoft Word to type up your webpages and save them to your website.

Here’s a picture of the editor as I wrote this blog post:

Pretty simple to use, huh?

A CMS is the opposite of what we call “static” websites, wherein the content is “coded” into the webpages themselves. Static websites require you to use a web developer to edit the code of the webpage(s) every time you want to change a picture or the wording of an article. Since the philosophy of Fifth Cup is to empower our clients to be able to maintain their websites themselves, we prefer to always create our websites using a CMS.

Of course there’s more to a website then just the words and images on the pages. The design needs to be created and applied to the CMS. There are menu links, logos, “contact us” forms, etc and these require web designers and web developers to build and implement them for you. Once your website goes “live”, most updates and changes you may want include adding pictures or adding/changing the wording of the web pages, or even the need to add more web pages as your website grows. For this, the self-service capability of a CMS is a clear winner for our clients.

Fifth Cup Philosophy

Posted on by

Our philosophy is simple: build turn-key websites and provide education to allow our clients to maintain their website themselves, if they so choose.

We build websites using industry leading content management systems (CMS) which are user friendly and for which you could head down to your local book store and pick up a book or two to learn more. That said, while we are always here to help you and would be more than happy to maintain your website for you, we are NOT the kind of website design firm that builds a website in some proprietary or convoluted code creating a dependency on the firm for every single change you’d ever like to make to your own website. That’s just not our style.