Is Joomla! aimed at helping build great websites?

Submitted by Martin on Thu, 11/02/2006 - 02:07

Post I made to Joomla! forum, 7 September 2006:

For all I complain about out-of-the-box Joomla! coming with Search Engine Unfriendly URLs, I find my site with Joomla does well in Google - but after some changes.
Main change being adopting OpenSEF.
Also have the SEF patch (free version), from http://www.joomlatwork.com/products/components/sef_patch_extended.html [haven't seen much difference in results with this - perhaps an increase, but I'm not obsessive stats checker, and it should help]

Unlike Mambo when I first started with it, can have individual page titles and descriptions for regular articles.

Simpleboard/Joomlaboard upgraded to set page titles from forum posts - a v good change I think; but descriptions still identical [I've posted in forum or two about whether there's solution to this, but no reply as yet], which not so good. Yes, a third-party component issue; but more help could surely be given to developers of such components, so pages created can be readily optomised for SEO - which after all, means making the best web pages possible.

So, Mambo and now Joomla gods have shown a little interest in SEO; but with problems cited re URLs being calls to databases , perhaps worth asking a question that's lately occurred to me:

Is Joomla! aimed at helping people create great websites?

(I haven't seen re cms that beats Joomla! for SEO yet can also create pages with a look I like; Drupal seems main contender, but more for techies? So, hoping the Joomla! gods come to understand SEO as much as they do databases )

early March 07: seems great URLs on the way for J 1.5:
Joomla! 1.5 Accessibility - Look Ma no Itemid’s

Post edited by: Martin, at: 2007/03/06 05:18

‹ Fireboard page titles from thread titles good for seo and hu Wish: Joomla by coders n webmasters for webmasters ›

Comments

Joomla! for newbies?

Submitted by Martin on Sat, 12/16/2006 - 05:50.

post I've just made to webmasterworld thread, where poster asked above question:

Joomla (1.0.xx) has problems with "itemids" left over from Mambo, resulting in duplicate URLs problem. These add to URLs; can get fresh itemid for every link you create to an item (page) - so can get www.domain.blahblah.1, www.domain.blahblah2 etc etc - all for same page.
Also, can't create individual meta tags for pages (tho some improvement here).
There are some 3rd party fixes: I use OpenSEF for URLs (tho doesn't work for all third party components, like my photo galleries); SEO Patch helps with meta tags and some other issues.

Sadly, Joomla core team seem to be code gurus rather than website creators; when it comes to SEO issues, prone to downplaying their importance, and even explaining why various SEO features aren't in basic Joomla. (I've just responded to one such post on J forum; found this thread after searching webworld, lest there might be nifty alternative: I looked at drupal some time ago, couldn't get my head round the "nodes" etc and didn't see site designs I liked.)

But, with help such as OpenSEF, I think Joomla is very helpful for creating sites.
The security issues seem ok for now, partly as Joomla now running with globals.php off, whatever that means (! - apparently should make it a good bit safer)

Plenty of third party add-ons, tho development of these uneven, and at times become abandonware.