Book Image

Joomla! 1.6 First Look

By : Eric Tiggeler
Book Image

Joomla! 1.6 First Look

By: Eric Tiggeler

Overview of this book

Release of the much awaited Joomla! 1.6 is just round the corner. There is a lot of hype and curiosity about the new features Joomla! 1.6 will provide and how it will affect existing users.Joomla! 1.6 First Look is a concise guide to the new features of Joomla! 1.6, targeted at existing Joomla! users and developers. If you want to see what's new in Joomla 1.6 and how it's going to affect you, this is the book for you. This book will give readers an insight into the new features of Joomla! 1.6, showing them what has changed, how the changes will affect them, and how to upgrade to Joomla! 1.6 from existing Joomla! versions. It begins with general changes in interface and basic articles, and then takes you through the changes in menus, control levels, templates, extensions, and SEO features. It explains the new features and how to use them, drawing attention to significant differences from how things used to behave. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with the consequences these changes will bring to you as a Joomla! user or developer.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Joomla! 1.6 First Look
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

The SEO bonus of well structured layouts


In Chapter 6 on templates, you've seen that Joomla! now outputs clean code, using semantic HTML layouts. Joomla! 1.5 wasn't up to web standards in this respect. For one thing, it used tables to create page layouts, which is generally regarded nowadays as one of the biggest no-no's in semantic coding terms. Another drawback of the 1.5 output was that HTML heading elements, such as H1 and H2, weren't used as they should has been (notably, to properly structure the HTML document).

In Joomla! 1.6, HTML elements are used with respect to their intended purpose within the document. Tables aren't used for layout purposes anymore; headings now define the main structure of the HTML document. This is great, as it will make it easier for search engines to unravel the structure of the web page and to find out what content is relevant and worth indexing.

The new semantic HTML layouts are a big step forward towards a SEO friendly site—and the great news is that you...