JoomlaWorks

A couple of months ago I stumbled upon a website in which the source code included some funky tracking events of Google Analytics (GA) inside the site's links... To be honest, I didn't know at that point Google Analytics could be extended like that, so I dug deeper to learn more.

If you're not an SEO expert using buzzwords like ROI, SEM, CPR etc., you're probably using GA for browsing page views, visitor count, browser percentages etc. Turns out, GA offers at a "basic level" the option to track unique events on your website, e.g. a click on a link or a file download. Which makes statistics viewing way more interesting...

2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

A common error most people do when finishing up a webiste with Joomla is forgetting to change their site's logo link from e.g. domain.com/index.php to just domain.com.

The community of K2 has spoken through the poll I got up yesterday on the frontpage of the K2 Community website. An email was previously sent to all our members letting them know of this poll, as well as the reasons we chose to resolve into such a poll.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: A poll is now setup in the K2 Community for people to voice their opinion more properly

First, some facts...

Joomla 1.6's life cycle is very short. Just 6 months. By July 2011, the Joomla team will end development and proceed to releasing Joomla v1.7.

This is very disturbing for many big projects like K2, considering all the big changes that 1.6 has introduced in its framework (language files, content elements, classes, functions, ACL etc. etc.) and the unnecessary workload added (see language files going back to Joomla 1.0 days), especially for free extensions like K2, Virtuemart and many more...

Many developers have expressed doubts about 1.6. Jen Kramer also nailed it in her recent blog post: Joomla 1.6 and Beyond: Should I upgrade? Should I build my new sites in it?

So did Andy Miller of RocketTheme fame on: Should I upgrade to Joomla 1.6?

Back to the title of this post...

If you run a popular Joomla (or WordPress, Drupalor or any other PHP based CMS) website on either a dedicated server or VPS running WHM/cPanel, chance is you may have stumbled upon performance issues at some point.

Although improving Joomla's performance is a task that requires in-depth analysis, I thought I'd just write a couple of words on improving one aspect of your site's performance quickly and efficiently: PHP execution by using the APC or APCu opcode caching modules. Keep in mind that APC is compatible with PHP up to version 5.3.x. APCu replaces APC for PHP versions 5.4.x or newer and it's currently under active development.

Since PHP 5.3.x is considered obsolete, I'll cover the steps to have APCu installed on your server. If you run PHP 5.3.x either consider updating to 5.5.x/5.6.x or follow the steps below making sure you replace any "apcu" reference with just "apc" (minus the "u").