Meta Matters

Online entrepreneurs who are observing a sharp decline in their sales may need to re-structure their site to make it conducive both to traffic and conversion rates. But no matter how easy as it sounds, revamping a website can be daunting especially when webmasters are running low on creative juices.

This is where A/B Testing becomes their saving grace.

I've often been asked if it's possible to automatically switch languages in Joomla 2.5.

Why might you want to do this?

• to correlate languages and templates, so that forcing a certain template also forces a certain language
• to correlate languages and domains, so that going to a certain domain (e.g. mydomain.de) forces the site into German
• to correlate languages and domains, so that if the user switches to a certain language, this will redirect to a certain domain (e.g. clicking on a the French flag in the language switcher will also redirect the browser to mydomain.fr)

The latest version of MetaMod (v2.6) for Joomla was released today, 29 November 2010.

All the changes are in the included JomGenius support. There are a few bugfixes and a few new features. The official release notes can be found here.

There are a couple of notable new features, in VirtueMart support:

How Christian missions have changed. When Hudson Taylor sailed from England to China on his first missions journey in September 1853, it took over 5 months to make the trip to Shanghai – the fastest clippers and their cargo (including mail) could reduce that to just 4 months at best.

Today, a message from China may take just milliseconds to arrive.

At the same time, expectations about the quality and speed of communications have skyrocketed. For someone requesting information about a missions opportunity, a 2-day wait for a reply is barely acceptable. Paper forms and snail mail are so last century.

The organisation I work for*, OM (formerly Operation Mobilisation), is a large, inter-denominational Christian Missions organisation. We have over 5500 workers, many serving cross-culturally, in over 110 countries.

The IT needs are enormous. Let me tell you something about the part I am involved with – web.

A compatibility release of MetaMod Pro was released today, 15 November 2010.

All MetaMod Pro customers are recommended to go to their My Account page on MetaModPro.com, view their completed order, and download the new version.

Over the last couple of days I have been doing final testing on an update to MetaMod Pro, introducing compatibility with JoomlArt’s wonderful T3v2 template framework. Something I noticed was that pages were taking 5-10 seconds longer to load in the T3v2 template than they were with any of the other templates I have installed.

If this was Java I’d be reaching for the Java profiler in NetBeans. But Joomla is in PHP... I’d never come across that kind of profiler for PHP before...

This is how I tackled the problem and found a great new tool for site diagnostics in Joomla.

A couple of days ago, out of the blue people started complaining that they couldn’t download updates of MetaMod Pro and MetaTemplate Pro from this site. After quite a lot of searching I found that the hosting company has added a new PHP default parameter to the server, which was breaking lots of things...

A great update today — finally MetaTemplate is starting to crack the thorny problem of how to manipulate which menu items show in the menus at any given time...

Four updates in one day!

• MetaMod v2.5
• MetaMod Pro v2.5
• MetaTemplate v1.6
• MetaTemplate Pro v1.6

MetaMod Pro and MetaTemplate Pro customers: download your FREE upgrade! Go to your My Account page, view your order, and download the new version.

A bug-fix release of MetaMod Pro was released today.

This release fixes a bug introduced in MetaMod Pro 2.2, which caused duplicate and unpublished modules to appear on any page that did not have an associated “Itemid”.

All MetaMod Pro customers are recommended to go to their My Account page on MetaModPro.com, view their completed order, and download the new version.