Project Footlight Festival & Network Site Launched

Last week Collabowrite launched the site for Project Footlight Festival & Network. Project Footlight serves musical theater writers and directors in the New York City area. Projectfootlight.com has a blog for news and uses ning for the social network. The site, a fully XHTML-compliant, tableless CSS-based design, has a dark gray background with the names of famous musical theater collaborators and riffs on the typewriter motif to speak to the role of the writer, meaning the creator, in the development of musical. Collabowrite also developed a facebook fan page for Project Footlight.

The Project Footlight festival is a camp for emerging musical theater writers that focuses on the developmental process and the art of collaboration. This year the festival performances will take place on February 6 and 7 in the new Dixon Place theater at 161 Chrystie Street. The festival and other events will work in concert with the social network, which enables New York lyricists, composers, bookwriters and directors to find partners and projects, discover new resources, promote their shows, and generally socialize with their peers

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Welcome to the new Collabowrite!

Another server move, another face for Collabowrite. But we are not just prettier and hipper (though we thought our old site was awfully pretty too), we are all simplicity under the hood. No longer on Joomla! CMS, collabowrite.net has stripped down to the bare essentials the Web 2.0 way for the company information site. We also wanted to focus development energies on our demo sites for Joomla! series 1.0 and 1.5, while maintaining design flexibility for the informational site. You should still be able to find everything you need and stay tuned for updates about Joomla!, Joomla! plug-ins like VirtueMart, sh404SEF and EventList, and other open source or free web technologies essential to non-profits and small business.

Sidling Up to Search Engines

Want your pages showing up in Google? You can increase the likelihood with SEF URL's and sh404SEF. sh404SEF has great support for all the top Joomla! plug-ins, like VirtueMart and Community Builder, offers enhanced security protection, and features fast caching and low overhead. He updates frequently though so be prepared for maintenance on this plug-in.

Security and Joomla

Recently many Joomla! sites, particularly those that have not performed the 1.0.13 upgrade, have attracted hacker attacks. While using open source software has many advantage and is especially well-suited to non-profit organizations, OSS content management systems like Joomla! require special attention to security.

If you have not upgraded your Joomla! installation to the latest version and checked all your plug-ins for security patches, you may want to do so as soon as possible - hack attacks cost time, and sometimes data as well as users. In addition to upgrading, several server features, like a hardened php.ini (including turning off register globals, magic quotes, and safe mode) and htaccess file, as well as other settings, should be in place. Regular backups outside the www folder should also be part of any good security plan - joomlacloner is a good bet for backups and has a chron tab for scheduling regular backups. Any time you or the webmaster uploads files to the site, he or she should use SFTP not FTP as FTP is not secure.

Elegant Additions SEO

Elegant Additions is looking to move up the ranks in keyword phrases like designer kitchens and baths, european and contemporary faucets, and related industry terms.After a revamp of the Elegant Additions site a year ago, where we put them on the Joomla platform and added a product catalog, Collabowrite is doign search engine optimization for Elegant Additions. We will be adding a blog on design ideas and product trends, and other content, putting in search engine friendly URL's, as well as going through the usual SEO paces. Look at elegantadditions.net for more great content on bath and kitchen plumbing and hardware in the coming months.

Leaves Leaving Trees

Since Central Park is once again aflame in color - "L'automne est un deuxième printemps où chaque feuille est une fleur" (Camus) - Collabowrite follows suit with fall imagery and colors.

Better Image Galleries

RSGallery2 is well-supported and has the most useful features that zOOm did without the epic bloat and bugs of that application. Here are some of the features in addition to general gallery management:

• Random thumbnail for gallery image
• Working slideshow
• Watermarking
• Download image link
• Permissioning
• Voting, hits, and comments

Collabowrite has just moved Southwest and Young Learners Schools to RSGallery from zOOm. Now if only the migration tool from zOOm 2.5.1 RC1 worked!

Update Time

Joomla 1.0.13 came out in July and many components have upgrades available now. According to Joomla.org, "Joomla! 1.0.13 is a minor security release that addresses several small security vulnerabilities, bugs, and long-awaited features. "

Because Joomla! 1.0.13 is a security release, it is important that you upgrade but we strongly recommend that you take extra precautions when performing this upgrade. This release features several improvements to the password storage system designed to help protect the future security of your Joomla! powered website. These changes will cause compatibility issues with some 3rd Party Extensions, especially bridges. If your Joomla! site utilizes bridges to other applications or extensions that have their own login system such as Community Builder, Virtuemart, or others you should not upgrade your site until those extensions have also been updated.

Joomla! 1.0.13 features:

• Several low-risk security fixes
• Improved password storage system
• Easier control over Register Globals Emulation
• An Itemid backwards compatibility setting
• Improved administrative session security
• Improved HTTP/HTTPS switchover support

JoomlaCloner

During a complex client transfer to a new server, Collabowrite discovered a gem of a new tool - JoomlaCloner. While proprietary, JoomlaCloner makes backing up and transferring sites a snap.

Seasons of Collabowrite

"As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age." - Henry David Thoreau

With the snap of a digital camera and the flick of a switch (practically), Collabowrite ushers in the lush beauty of spring in New York City. With new banner photos taken in the West Side Community Garden and Central Park and a greening of the CSS, the website has an all new face for the season. Contact us today to find out how easy updating the look of your site can be when you are using Joomla! for content management.