Systems Cowboy

This is an annoying thing about Joomla 1.5 and I always change this tag.

The default setting for the generator tag in Joomla 1.5 is:

<meta name="generator" content="Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Management" />

I usually change this to:

<meta name="generator" content="The Name of My Site Here" />

Here’s how to do it…

FTP into your site and navigate to libraries/joomla/document/html/renderer and find the file called head.php.

On line 83, find this line of code:

$strHtml .= $tab.'<meta name="generator" content="'.$document->getGenerator().'" />'.$lnEnd;

and change it to:

$strHtml .= $tab.'<meta name="generator" content="The Name of Your Site Here" />'.$lnEnd;

That’ll do the trick.

Intuitive, huh?

Recently I moved a couple of Joomla sites over to new domains using 301 redirects. This has confused Google a bit, and both the new site and the old site are ranking for the targeted keywords.

I’ve already done the normal things required to make this type of move work properly: set up a proper 301 redirect for all pages and notify Google Webmaster Tools of the “change of address”, etc.

But thing thing I didn’t do right away was to add canonical meta tags to my pages.

The easiest way to add canonical meta tags to all the pages of your Joomla site is to use the Auto Canonical URL plugin. It’s free. Just install it and enable it on a module that is displayed on your site (it won’t “display”, but it will work).

Auto Canonical URL plugin for Joomla.

Making Joomla banner links nofollow should be built into Joomla, but it’s not. So here’s what you have to do:

1) Navigate to: modules/mod_banners/helper.php

2) Find this line:

case 1:
// open in a new window
$a = '<a href="'. $link .'" target="_blank">';
break;

2) Change it to:

case 1:
// open in a new window
$a = '<a href="'. $link .'" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">';
break;

It should be easy to center your Joomla banners, but it’s not as easy as you’d think. Here’s how to do it:

1) Navigate to modules/mod_banners/tmpl/default.php

2) Find the place in the code where it says:

foreach($list as $item) :
?><div class=”banneritem<?php echo $params->get( ‘moduleclass_sfx’ ) ?>”><?php
echo modBannersHelper::renderBanner($params, $item);
?><div class=”clr”></div>
</div>
<?php endforeach; ?>

3) Change it to:

foreach($list as $item) :
?><center><div class=”banneritem<?php echo $params->get( ‘moduleclass_sfx’ ) ?>”><?php
echo modBannersHelper::renderBanner($params, $item);
?><div class=”clr”></div>
</div></center>
<?php endforeach; ?>

That’s it!

By default, Joomla 1.5 puts in a meta tag that says the following:

Here’s how to get rid of it:

1. Navigate to libraries/joomla/document/document.php and go to line 86

2. Then, change the following code:

/**
* Document generator
*
* @var string
* @access public
*/
var $_generator = 'Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Management';

…To this:

* Document generator
*
* @var string
* @access public
*/
var $_generator = 'Yourtext';