CP Communications

The developers at Joomla this week announced the release of the latest version of the open source content management system (CMS), Joomla 2.5. This latest release features many enhancements and additions including advanced search, multi-database support using SQL Server, and automatic update notifications.

The President of Open Source Matters, Ryan Ozimek, discussed the release, stating that “Multi-database support is a huge step forward for Joomla, which is already powering more than 1.6 million websites worldwide. It ensures companies and organization, both large and small, will save even more money and time by adopting Joomla. No longer will Joomla developers be tied down to a particular database or have to spend more money and time integrating other software to get Joomla to communicate with their database. This enhances Joomla’s scalability immensely.”

Until this release, Joomla was only compatible with MySQL databases. This release is only the second version to adhere to the recently-adopted six-month release cycle, which began in July of 2011 with Joomla version 1.7

The company avers that other key features in Joomla 2.5 include:

• Automatic notification when a Joomla or extension update is available. When logged into the control panel, site administrators will instantly have access to new notification buttons that allows them to see and act on the latest updates. In addition to updates for the Joomla CMS, a second button offers third party extension notification updates.
• A better natural language search engine to the Joomla core. Complete with auto-completion and stemming, it is faster and more versatile than the standard search.

It says that Joomla 2.5 adheres to its newly-adopted six-month release cycle that began with the previous Joomla CMS release of Joomla 1.7 in July, 2011. Downloading the latest version of Joomla is the best way to ensure organizational and personal security needs are being met since it will have the most recent updates to protect against the latest security threats.

“Multi-database support is a huge step forward for Joomla, which is already powering more than 1.6 million websites worldwide. It ensures companies and organization, both large and small, will save even more money and time by adopting Joomla,” said Ryan Ozimek, President of Open Source Matters, a non-profit created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. “No longer will Joomla developers be tied down to a particular database or have to spend more money and time integrating other software to get Joomla to communicate with their database. This enhances Joomla’s scalability immensely.”

“We literally received thousands of pieces of input at ideas.joomla.org into what functionality should be added to Joomla 2.5, and overwhelmingly enhanced notifications and more elegant search topped the list,” said Mark Dexter of the Joomla Production Leadership Team. “In fact, the automatic notification for core and extension updates received the most votes for a feature that people wanted in 2.5. But we didn’t stop with just those two. Joomla 2.5 is a major overhaul with more than 24 new features that we have highlighted at joom.la/25features.”

Contact CP Communications for website development services.

Acknowledging that some searches were giving people stale results, Google revised its methods on Thursday to make the answers timelier. It is one of the biggest tweaks to Google’s search algorithm, affecting about 35 percent of all searches.

The new algorithm is a recognition that Google, whose dominance depends on providing the most useful results, is being increasingly challenged by services like Twitter and Facebook, which have trained people to expect constant updates with seconds-old news.

It is also a reflection of how people use the Web as a real-time news feed — that if, for example, you search for a baseball score, you probably want to find the score of a game being played at the moment, not last week, which is what Google often gave you.

“This is the result of them saying we need to find a way to more effectively get fresh content up,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land and an industry expert. “It does help with the issue of people thinking, ‘Wow, if I need to find out about something breaking, I’ll go to Facebook or Twitter for that.’ ”

Timeliness has long mattered to Google and its search results. Nevertheless, the company said that it always looks for improvements, and the latest change goes much further in freshening search results. Google tried once before to create real-time search, in 2009, when it introduced google.com/realtime, a service that incorporated Twitter posts that Google paid Twitter to use. But that contract expired in July and the two companies could not agree on terms to renew it, so Google disabled the site.

Americans still turn to Google for two-thirds of their Web searches, but for people who want the latest chatter about events happening now, it competes with Facebook, Twitter and Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, which includes more Twitter and Facebook posts than Google does in search results.

“The biggest source of the very freshest information is Twitter, and Google doesn’t have anywhere near the access to that kind of data as it had before,” Mr. Sullivan said. “But when people do those kinds of searches, they’re looking for a lot of reactions, looking for Twitter itself. So even with these changes, this doesn’t really solve that problem.”

Google became dominant by finding archived Web sites and showing links to them. But today people sometimes expect years-old links, like the best banana bread recipe; week-old links, like the last episode of “Gossip Girl”; or seconds-old links, like this morning’s presidential campaign news.

Google makes more than 500 changes to its algorithm a year, but most affect only a small percentage of results. With its new formula, which Google calls a freshness algorithm, Google tried to teach itself the difference between those types of requests, Amit Singhal, a Google fellow who works on search, wrote in a blog post announcing the changes.

“Depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old,” he wrote.

“This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need.”

Google last announced a significant change to its search algorithm in February, when it said it would raise the rankings of high-quality sites to fight low-quality ones, often described as content farms, that were flooding the search engine with mindless articles tied to popular search queries.

The new formula, which affects search results globally but will not change nearby ads, will bring up minutes-old results for recent events, like an unfolding news story, and for recurring events like the Oscars or a political campaign. It will also show fresher results for topics that are often updated, like reviews of a new iPhone. It will understand that unlike breaking news, reviews from a few weeks ago are also useful, the company said.

These are “queries we don’t think we’re doing perfectly well on,” said Rajan Patel, a Google software engineer who worked on the new algorithm. “We just realized that people expect Google to return the most up-to-date results for all kinds of queries, from hot topics to more general queries like a TV show.”

For evergreen results, like recipes or how to change a tire, Google said the algorithm would know to show the best results no matter when they were posted.

The algorithm uses technology that Google built last year in response to the greater speed at which people were publishing updates online. It is a Web indexing system it calls Caffeine, which crawls the Web more quickly, updating Google’s index of Web sites continuously instead of every couple of weeks. Thursday’s revision changes how Google ranks those links now that it has them in its index, Mr. Patel said.

Google’s main competitor, Bing, has also developed a way to index Web sites that change often, like blogs and news feeds, and analyzes Twitter posts to identify popular topics, said Stefan Weitz, senior director at Bing.

Mr. Patel said that Google planned to incorporate posts from Google+, its new social network, into its search results to further improve their freshness.

Skype deepened its partnership with Facebook today by adding Facebook video calling to both its Mac and Windows applications.

With the just-announced Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows, you can initiate a Facebook video call without having to open up your browser and log in to the social-networking site. Just connect your Facebook account to Skype, select a Facebook friend, and hit the Skype video call button. Your friend picks up the call directly from within Facebook. While the feature isn’t exactly a game-changer, we do think it’s super-convenient. Since you can already see your Facebook Wall, update your status, and make comments from within the Skype interface, it only makes sense to be able to initiate Facebook video calls from there as well.

But Skype’s news for today doesn’t end there. The company claims to have improved its video rendering, giving all users a smoother video experience. Also, Windows users with a Premium subscription now get the Group Screen Sharing feature, which was previously only available to Mac users.

Skype 5.4 Beta for Mac and Skype 5.7 Beta for Windows are available for download now.

The Launch of the New .XXX Registry Has Companies Thinking About Brand Protection.

You acquired the perfect domain name. You launched a great website. You’ve built your customer base. Life is good.

There’s just one problem: someone else may be profiting from your hard work. With the launch of the .xxx registry many businesses have moved to secure this version of their brand name in order to avoid any possible brand taint from cybersquatting and or creating a www.YOURWEBSITE.xxx  adult site that might not fit into your plans .

But there are lots of extensions (“tld’s”) out there. Do you own the .net, .org or other versions of your domain? If your domain is singular, do you own the plural versions? You should!

In addition to protecting your brand, acquiring alternate versions of your domain and setting 301 redirects (which point those domains to your main site) can solidify your position in the search engines.

Whether you want to promote your adult entertainment website or protect your brand from being registered as a .XXX, pre-registration helps you stay in control of your online reputation. Choose the phase that’s right for you and we’ll submit your application as soon as it starts, so you’ll have the best possible chance of securing your domain.

Take a quick moment to do an assessment of your web presence today: you may spot a new opportunity.

• Acquire .XXX domain name to protect your brand
• Acquire  any other domain name to protect your brand