[jcms} Let's Talk About The Future

[Aaron Wood]

One of the main things I think developers are missing when it comes to Joomla! being a major player as a professional CMS is the poor quality and lack of SEO support. When you can't have a URL (article from a category Blog or List) without the article ID number, and no native way to add expires headers, or to bump Javascript loading to the bottom of the page (and yes, page speed quality does affect SEO), then people trying to build truly competitive online commerce sites will turn to another solution.

    Incorporating things like a native CCK, multisite capability, and an incorporated backup are important, yes. But the one major drawback I see listed on most all the CMS comparison site's out there is the lack of SEO support. The current SEF URL's don't cut it. I mean, who wants to make menu items for thousands of articles!

    To be completely honest, if it wasn't for the great community surrounding Joomla when I was initially making my choice, I probably would have went with a different CMS myself, at least for the business efforts I work on.

    Let's send a message to the team that the internet floats on the sea of e-commerce, and if we don't catch up to the needs of businesses, we're sunk.

 

Sincerely,
Aaron Wood, Creative Director
The Fresh Ink Group, LLC

[Nick Weavers]

Hi Aaron, picking up on your point below 

"The current SEF URL's don't cut it. I mean, who wants to make menu items for thousands of articles!"

We recently had this problem. Using a CMS is a good way to store hundreds of articles that each incorporate a search phrase and it's variants. These of course can then be used as search engine landing pages. However, we really wanted to maximise chances of a conversion from each landing page so having a form on the page was desirable. In the end, we wrote a component to display a page with an article on one side and the form on the other, and adopted a convention of putting our articles in certain fixed categories. The component also creates our front page and puts the most recent 100 articles in a list at the bottom of the home page. The URL convention used is that a single hyphenated string to uniquely identify the article, where the first hyphen delimits the category from the article alias. So for instance in https://www.dealdirectfinancial.co.uk/news-buy-to-let-mortgage-market, the category is news and the article alias is buy-to-let-mortgage-market. Our component has a custom router and since it is in control of the home page, that router is called when a news links is clicked. It is then a fairly simple matter for the router to translate the URL into a call to the components subcontroller task that displays our article form. If you want to see it working in action, click on a news or blog article at the bottom of this page https://www.dealdirectfinancial.co.uk/

My point is that Joomla probably isn't going to do everything everybody wants right out of the box, but it has so much flexibility in it that it really doesn't take much to develop a solution that meets your requirements. If you are not a programmer yourself, then recruiting one to assist you to do this sort of thing may help?

Nick 

SiteWeavers Web Solutions Ltd   

[piotr_cz]

I agree,
ID's in URI's suck and make Joomla CMS look ancient. Customers ask me,
why they have these `codes` in URI's when on other websites there
aren't. I know exactly why, but don't know what to answer. When page
is loading, URL is the first thing everybody sees.

On mobile URI's are even more understood rather as breadcrumbs.
Ordinary people don't type in the address bar anymore, but type in
google (bookmarked/ quick-dialed) instead and check the address bar to
see where they are as this is the thing that shows at the top of the
browser. You can laugh at it but this is the de facto standard
behavior.


So, we need new routing mechanism (http://ideas.joomla.org/forums/
84261-joomla-idea-pool)

Routing issue comes back regularly, but somehow just gets forgotten
shortly afterwards.
Hannes Papenberg did some work on it:
http://www.joomlager.de/joomla-17/3-joomla-17-rewrite-jrouter
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-platform/pull/354


There is a need, there is foundation for change but doesn't happen