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Month: July 2013

2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors

Published by admin on 11 Jul ’13

– Posted by Matt Peters to Analytics

Yesterday at MozCon, I presented the results from Moz’s Ranking Factors 2013 study. In this post I will highlight the key takeaways, and we will follow it up with a full report and data set sometime later this summer.

Overview

Every two years, Moz runs a Ranking Factors study to determine which attributes of pages and sites have the strongest association with ranking highly in Google. The study consists of two parts: a survey of professional SEOs and a large correlation study.

We’ll dive into the data in a minute, but some of the key findings include:

  1. Page Authority correlates higher than any other metric we measured.
  2. Social signals, especially Google +1s and Facebook shares are highly correlated.
  3. Despite Penguin, anchor text correlations remain as strong as ever.
  4. New correlations were measured for schema.org and structured data usage.
  5. More data was collected on external links, keywords, and exact match domains.

Joomla! 3.0 and loading jQuery / Migrate Joomla template from 2.5 to 3.1

Published by admin on 9 Jul ’13

If you need to migrate yout Joomla template from Joomla 2.5 to Joomla 3.0 or 3.1 maybe you will need this info as I did.

The Joomla! 3.0 core ships with jQuery, and previous Joomla! versions did not. Extension developers like us therefor included a custom call to load jQuery in the past, whenever it was needed. However this standard needs updating. Here’s our proposal.

Loading jQuery only once

Because jQuery could be loaded in the past more than 1 time (and loading jQuery twice leads to unwanted errors, plus it makes no sense to load it twice), extension developers more or less agreed to use a flag in the Joomla! application-class:

$loaded = JFactory::getApplication()->get('jquery');

If the flag was not yet loaded, it could simply be loaded by your own extension, after which the flag needed to be set for other extensions to pick up on:

JFactory::getApplication()->set('jquery', true);

Joomla! 3.0 changes this

The Joomla! 3.0 core changes the JApplication-class in such a way that the get() and set() methods can no longer be used – the class no longer extends the JObject class which provided these methods. Simply put: Using the code above under Joomla! 3.0 throws a PHP Fatal Error.

But Joomla! 3.0 has also introduced jQuery as a core feature. Third party extensions no longer require to load jQuery, because it is already shipped with Joomla!. The only thing that extensions require is a simple call to the JHtml-class:

JHtml::_('jquery.framework');

Code proposal

So what is our proposal? Simple: Use the old method for Joomla! 2.5 and older, and use the new method for Joomla! 3.0. The version of Joomla! can be checked using framework-calls as well, so the code would look a bit like this:

JLoader::import( 'joomla.version' );
$version = new JVersion();
if (version_compare( $version->RELEASE, '2.5', '<=')) {
    if(JFactory::getApplication()->get('jquery') !== true) {
        // load jQuery here
        JFactory::getApplication()->set('jquery', true);
    }
} else {
    JHtml::_('jquery.framework');
}

Original article – http://www.yireo.com/blog/1556-joomla-30-and-loading-jquery

Full list of possible conflicts between Joomla 2.5 and Joomla 3.x here – http://docs.joomla.org/Potential_backward_compatibility_issues_in_Joomla_3_and_Joomla_Platform_12.2

Probably there are more things to know when migrating Joomla Templates from 2.5 to 3.x and if somebody get something please post a comment to this article.