Archive for September, 2008
Nooku Content 0.6 puts focus on SEO
At the beginning of the month we announced our survey results from our August survey. One of the most interesting feedback we received was the request for better search engine optimization and search engine friendly URL support in Nooku Content.
Today, if you want to create a multi-lingual search engine optimized Joomla website you need to install a multi-tude of different extensions (multi-lingual, search engine friendly URLs, metadata, etc…) . Not anymore ! Nooku Content 0.6 will offer all these features out of the box. What can you expect to see in our 0.6 version :
- Improved search engine friendly (SEF) URL’s. Nooku Content 0.6 will be able to remove any numeric information from the URL’s resulting in very clean and fully search engine optimized URL’s.
- Alias validation. Nooku Content 0.6 will be able to prevent duplicated aliases for content items (articles, weblinks, categories, etc…). It will also be able to correctly convert a title into an alias on the fly for almost any language.
- Improved metadata support. Nooku Content 0.6 will allow you to define keywords, description and author information for menu items and translate them. This feature will allow you to translate not only what the user reads but also what a search engine reads.
- Redirect support. Nooku Content 0.6 will offer a new menu type called ‘redirect’, which will allow you to create a search engine friendly URL that will redirect to an external website.
- Smarter page titles. Nooku Content 0.6 will optimize the way Joomla! 1.5 creates its page titles to help improve your search engine rankings.
Joomla SEO expert praises Nooku Content
Hummerbie, after seeing Nooku Content in action at the Dutch Joomla conference, was so impressed he wrote an elaborate post about it on his Joomla SEO blog:
“Hold on, I can hear you think, what about the language specific URLs? Strange formed URLs, Not translated Titles, not translated Meta-tags like descriptions, keywords etc etc…
Now this is where Johan and Mathias really impressed me!
(…) The title that was translated was indeed translated also in the HTML Title, but also the URL itself was automatically rewritten to that language title version.
You also get the possibility to translate your meta tag description and keywords into the translated version… so you really get a translated version of a content page in a really Search Engine Optimized way.”
Read the full post at hummerbie.com
How Nooku helps the United Nations
The United Nations has gone live with its first Nooku Content powered site. They first got in touch with us in January 2008 when they were looking for a professional multi-lingual solution to migrate their European portal to Joomla 1.5.
“We evaluated many open source software solutions and found Joomla to be the best for us,” says Philippe Chabot, ICT coordinator at the United Nations. “When we looked at our two options, Drupal did not perform as well as Joomla. Now that we have a lot of experience with Joomla we are no longer looking at other applications. Of course, from time to time, for risk management best practices we will evaluate all available options.”
Nooku hits the road
Last week we were invited by Eduvision to their annual Joomla! Conference to talk about setting up a multi-lingual website with Nooku Content and Joomla! 1.5.
During our presentation we touched on the how’s and why’s of multi-lingual websites and demo’ed Nooku Content 0.5.
The overall feedback from the crowd was very positive. People were excited about the many advantages Nooku Content offers over existing multi-lingual solutions in areas like usability, simplicity, performance etc …
Also, we were pleasantly surprised to hear how much people appreciated our effort to not only create a next generation multi-language solution for Joomla!, but also to demonstrate that a funded business model can be a great way to create GPL’ed solutions in true spirit of the licence.
Partner Spotlight
We are pleased to announce that 7 new companies have joined the Nooku Partner Program. Our new partners are from all over Europe, the US and Asia.
- Ciboodle – A global provider of customer oriented business software and services with offices in the USA, Europe & Asia.
- Cowie & Fox – An interactive, branding & web design agency with offices in Canada.
- Discouri – A design firm specializing in PHP and MySQL, with a particular emphasis on the open source PHP package, Joomla! Offices in the USA.
- Fohlin – a web design agency that focused on European companies and organizations.
Offices in Sweden. - Johnson Diversy – a leading global provider of commercial cleaning and hygiene products and solutions for food safety, food and beverage hygiene, floor care, housekeeping, laundry, hand hygiene and industrial cleaning. Offices in the US, Europe & Asia.
- Masterhomepages – is one of the best known internet agencies specialised in Joomla with offices in Switzerland.
- Marvellic – provide open source cms solutions, web development service and cms training throughout Asia with offices in Thailand.
- Xd Net – a specialist in open source cms and e-commerce solutions focusing on development services. Offices in Mallorca.
Survey Results
A couple of weeks ago we sent a survey to the subscribers of our Nooku newsletter asking the community to tell us a bit about themselves, how they use Joomla and also help us with planning the roadmap for Nooku Content. We got a great response to the survey and wanted to share some of the results with you. By the way, you can still fill out the survey by clicking here