Kevin's Papers

With the release of Joomla 3.6 we have seen welcome progress and new features that have been asked for are now part of the core. However as with anything new there are bound to be some growing pains and this release is no exception to that rule. One of these and one that perplexed me, more because of all the issues I have experienced this one was something I had never seen before. The issue comes after updating some sites to Joomla 3.6 and while I have not been able to assertain any particular configuration that might cause this, it is not something that happens to every site. In rare cases I have found after performing the update if I try and go to the install manager instead of getting the familiar choices to upload a file, input a directory or location I see an error message that simply says:

Google has released a new way for us to market on our YouTube videos. It is called Cards and from what I can tell it is a huge improvement from the old style grey box that they used to have. Cards allows you to add a new layer of interactivity to your videos and the good news is unlike the old way of doing it cards are rendered for both desktop and mobile views.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the past few weeks you already know about the new changes Google will be implementing on April 21. In case you have not heard Google will be rolling out a mobile optimization algorithm According to Google's Zineb Ait Bahajji of the Webmaster Trends Team, she was quoted as saying that the algorithm will be used to expand their use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal and this change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in their search results. This is set to be the largest update we've seen from Google to date in terms of how many sites will be affected. Bigger than Panda and Penguin! This algorithm is an expansion of their mobile ranking demotion algorithm em that they launched back in 2013.

We are constantly trying to keep our Joomla sites out of the hands of the low life scum that would do us harm for no other reason than their personal kicks. There is one way to help in that endeavor that is easy to setup with a minimal side-effect.

When I first started working with Joomla nearly 6 years ago the update path was different than it is today. Up until 2.5 it seemed to work just fine and while it always felt like the odd ball to me it worked. So the general rule was until a version reached .5 it was considered a short term stable release (STS), which meant you could still use the .x version prior to .5 but you did so at your own risk. If you absolutely needed what was coming in the new release you installed it and dealt with the constant struggle of updating it and fixing everything that broke along the way. Otherwise we was told to wait until the long term stable release (LTS) was out.