Anything Digital Development

Recently, we added to JCal Pro fully integrated support for users to create and manage their own private events. It is only natural then that JCal Pro ships with two Community Builder plugins so that users can view their private events and private calendars right in their Community Builder profile.

Read more about: Celebrate and save with JCal Pro, your community calendar

Due to the overwhelming interest we've received over the holidays, we've added the Flex module for JCal Pro (demo) to the Developer Special subscriptions at no added charge.

In addition to Theme Club subscribers, all existing subscribers of the Developer Special 1 and Developer Special 2 plans can log-in and download Flex right away.

Read more about: Developers, get your Flex for free

Any good CMS calendar will generate URLs for dates from now until ... well ... infinity! All these URLs can be a problem as they can all be indexed by the search engines and can dilute your page rank, and also affect performance when using a URL manager such as sh404SEF.

The latest version of JCal Pro, 2.2.5, tackles these problems head-on to maximize SEO and performance on your Joomla web site.

Read more about: Is your web calendar killing your SEO campaign?

Spambots and e-mail harvesters are an important tool for the spamming community as collecting e-mail addresses from web sites provides a ‘market’ for all that junk you get in your spam folder and often in your inbox.

Like any good content management system or blog, Joomla protects any e-mail addresses in your site content by using javascript to encode the emails in source code of your site. This prevent the harvesters from recognizing them as an e-mail address but allows the end-user to click the e-mail address on your site and trigger your default mail client to start composing a new message with the 'To:' field pre-populated.

The email cloaking feature is delivered via the aptly-named ‘Email cloaking’ plugin which makes protecting your email address available to 3rd party extensions such as JCal Pro that support content plugins.  However, I have had to disable this plugin in the past on some sites as end-users would sometimes report the following error when they clicked on some e-mail links

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Read more about: Email Protection Plus for Joomla – its not just for text anymore

One of the big buzz-words on the internet is ‘search engine optimization', or SEO, that describes the non-exact art of optimizing your web site so that it shows up higher in search engine results.

One of these SEO techniques is to make sure the search term of interest (i.e ‘keyword') appears in your URL, and of course one way to do this is to use keyword-rich or ‘search engine friendly' URLs such as:

http://www.mydomain.com/apple-pie-recipe.html

If you ask 10 SEO experts wether search engine friendly URLs affect search engine ranking, you are likely to get many different answers ranging from "maybe a little" to "it's the most important factor".

The real answer is that no one knows the secret formula for high search engine ranking. However, experts agree that having keywords in the URL is an important part of the equation.

Read more about: Do search engine friendly URLs really matter?