Devizes Solutions Small Business Blog

A change is gonna come – What’s new at DevizesSolutions.com

Written by Chris Collins

Wednesday, 27 May 2009 09:58

If you’ve been a regular visitor to DevizesSolutions.com in the past couple months you will have seen a number of changes to the site. For everyone else here are a list of new features that have been added in the last six weeks.

Page Layout

- Date format on breadcrumbs section changed to ‘day of week’ ‘month’ ‘dd’ format

- New left menu item ‘Blog’.

- New right position created.

- Recent Articles added to right position.

- Meet Us Here added to right position.

Blog Page

- Archived Articles added to left position.

- Follow My Feed added under page heading.

- Add Your Comment added under each article.

- Only the first article is displayed unabridged. All subsequent articles have 'Read more’ link.

How we did it

- Date format changed by modifying the HTML in the template.

- Recent Articles uses Joomla’s native mod_latestnews module.

- Meet Us Here uses the GCalendar component and the modules mod_gcalendar and mod_gcalendar_upcoming. It works as designed, it’s free and can be found in the Joomla extension library or direct from the creator’s website.

- Archived Articles uses Joomla’s native mod_archive mod_archive module. The ‘trick’ is that you also have to create an ‘Articles » Archive’ menu item on a hidden menu to get this to work otherwise clicking on the Archive menu item 404’s on you.

- Follow My Feed was the subject of a blog article and can be found here.

- Add Your Comment uses the yvComment plugin and component. Again it works as designed, it’s free and can be found in the Joomla extension library or direct from the creator’s website. The only problem I have with it it that there is a link to the author’s website coded into the module. I’ll have to break out the editor to get rid of this later. The captcha functionality requires an additional plugin, I used BigoCaptcha that can be obtained here.

Finally I added and configured the MovableType XML-RPC Plugin (for some reason this has been removed from the Joomla extensions, I hope its only temporary). This enables me to author posts in Word or Windows Live Writer and is just awesome. Hope this helps.

This content is © Copyright Devizes Solutions 2009. If you quote it or find it useful please credit and link back to www.DevizesSolutions.com.

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Don’t tear it down – Accepting and accommodating information silos

Written by Chris Collins
Monday, 18 May 2009 15:10
OK, I've had this post sat simmering for quite a while, time to get it off my chest. I recently read a white paper by Sheryl Kingstone of the Yankee Group published through InformationWeek entitled 'SMBs Must Eliminate Information Silos to Improve the Customer Experience' (registration required). It was an interesting read stressing the importance to small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) of having a single source of information and fully integrated systems such that information is complete, consistent and always up to date,
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Open Source smackdown Drupal vs. Joomla – Attending BarCampBirmingham

Written by Chris Collins
Monday, 11 May 2009 11:49
On Saturday May 2nd I attended a rather unconventional conference at the Innovation Depot. BarCampBirmingham is in its third year and by all accounts is hitting its stride. I estimate there were over one hundred attendees and more than twenty sponsors. What makes the conference unusual is that the presentation schedule is made up on the day by attendees requesting a presentation on a given subject and others offering to present what they know. This necessitates that the presentations themselves are short and somewhat improvised. The essential idea is to provide a forum for the local tech community to meet and share information from the bleeding edge of new technology and innovation. As an admitted noob, I had been curious to see one of these unconferences in action, wondering if it would actually work or descend into chaos. But what really drew me to attend was the preconference discussion
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My Latest Monster – Recruiters are looking to LinkedIn as their primary source for identifying candidates

Written by Chris Collins
Wednesday, 06 May 2009 20:46
Well things have gotten really busy in Devizesland recently with two conferences last week. Saturday saw the third installment of barcampbham, the first one I had attended and the subject of my next post, but parts of Thursday and Friday were spent at the New Horizons Expo Training Fair. Although really targeting traditional job seekers, I felt attending could help me tune my marketing efforts for Devizes Solutions and be a good networking opportunity and
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Feed Me – Adding a FeedBurner feed to a Joomla! Site

Written by Chris Collins
Tuesday, 21 April 2009 15:49
OK, a *really* technical post today and I author it simply because it has taken me so long to get here that I hope this post may save someone else some of my pain. It all started first thing this morning as I was checking my Google Analytics report for my site. Because I’ve started blogging, I was hoping there will be a bump in traffic this week. Indeed, I did have a few hits on my blog page which made me ask myself the question; ‘How many people are subscribed to my blog’? As background, this site is built on the Open Source content management system (CMS) Joomla!
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