SEO patch for Joomla release 1.5 Stable

Joomlatwork SEO patch for Joomla release 1.5 Stable and above

Although the Joomla 1.5 release offers a very good application / CMS framework the basics of the framework is not optimized to perform optimal SEO. Although some improvements are made in regards to the page titles is still lacks of customized titles and other SEO settings. From SEO perspective you will have no full control over the SEO settings in the Joomla generated pages. This free patch solves this issues for the 1.5 release.

You can improve the SEO settings of Joomla 1.5 with this free SEO patch for Joomla 1.5 . This patch solves the issues in regards of the settings within the html head section of your html page. The patch allows you to gain fully control over the META and title settings in the http header settings in Joomla 1.5 generated pages.

To apply this functionality you must replace some core files listed below, reason is that the core code within Joomla 1.5 doesn’t allow the implementation of a good SEO component and plugins.

You can download the SEF patch 1.5 from our download section

Please read this document further of how you can install and configure the patch....

Why is this patch not included within the core code line of Joomla 1.5?

For the inclusion of the SEO functionality within Joomla 1.5 we had contact with the core team of Joomla and we had the patch available from may / june 2007. Due to the time frames of releasing the new Joomla release the SEO functionality wass skipped and is set for the roadmap for Joomla 1.6. To support the Joomla commiunity on the SEO part we have released the patch publicly. We will deliver support on this free Joomla 1.5 patch on best effort bases on our forum:

We still believe that eventually these improvements will (or should) be included within the core of the Joomla code line. Therefore we ask your support by submitting your opinion about this functionality within the Joomla forums. The reason for this patch is that we from Joomlatwork believe that the patch should be available within the current code line of Joomla. Therefore we will support this patch within the coming releases of Joomla 1.5 and higher until it’s included in the main code line.

So what is this patch all about and what did we have changed?

Actual this patch solves the same issues as described in our free component for Joomla 1.0x document which is currently downloaded more then 80.000 times the last year. So take a look at the changes:

Additional SEO tab within the global configuration

Once you have applied the patch first take a look at your global configuration settings. You will see an additional SEO tab as showed in the picture below. From this tab you can control the settings of the SEO fields within your HTML settings. You can apply the following settings:

HTML title setting	You will notice that when you open the SEO tab for the first time this field is empty. This is because the setting is not saved within the global configuration file. To display the title on your pages you should put at least the [TITLE] tag within this field
Default title	The value of this field will be showed once there is no title available for a specific page. You can either put a text string into it or apply the [SITENAME] tag to the field.
META tag robots settings	The standard setting of joomla is that the robot tag always contain the value ‘index,follow’ on pages which you can not set the robot meta tag. This field overrules the default setting of Joomla and you can either show no robots tag or you can assign another default value depending on your needs
Show title META tag	This field allows you to set a META tag title in the HTML head section with the value of the title.
Show author META tag	This field allows you to set a META tag called author within the HTML head section. This field will be set when an author parameter is available within the article or menu settings
Show Joomla generator tag	The patch will also remove the default generator tag that is included within each HTML page that is generated by Joomla. You can set an own value to the META tag generator in the field below in the configuration. Although we are a big fan of the Joomla CMS and the community itself we encourage you to remove this meta name by installing the patch. First of all it will not have any effect in improving your search engine rankings and it will add content to all of your pages that is not in line of the content of your webpages self. Therefore it can have a negative effect on your rankings within search engines. Beside this we believe that you must not advertise on this way that your site is realized with the Joomla framework. This in case security issues are discovered within the Joomla environment: it’s easy for others to find your website with the search engines available: Google, msn, yahoo…

Metadata Settings section
In this section you can assign the default META tags settings for Joomla 1.5. With the META tag description settings and the META tag keywords settings you can set the default behavior of the global META tags field description and keywords. Default Joomla shows these values when no description / keywords are assigned to an article or a MENU element. With this value you can overrule this and the global settings will not be showed when selected.

The last setting is for the custom fields default setting. You can add custom META fields through a XML file as describe below. Within the XML field definition you can set a default value. With this setting you can show the specific custom META field when an requested page doesn’t have the specific META field set, for example by using third party components.

How to use these SEO settings?

The usage of the settings is done through the standard parameter settings of the specific menu settings and the article settings. You can apply custom META settings and a custom HTML title for the following Joomla elements:
1. Articles
2. Joomla Frontpage
3. Menu -> blog category / section
4. Menu -> archive blog
5. Menu -> weblinks categories overview.

Create custom HTML meta fields through a XML file

You can add custom HTML head META fields with a XML file located within the root of your Joomla installation: metaconfig.xml See the example below of the current applied metaconfig.xml file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<config>
<params>
<param name="html_title" type="text" size="40" default="" label="HTML Title" description="Enter the HTML title tag" value="" />
<param name="meta_description" type="textarea" default="" label="META tag description" rows="5" cols="30" description="META tag: Description"/>
<param name="meta_keywords" type="textarea" default="" label="META tag keywords" rows="5" cols="30" description="META tag keywords, please seperate your keywords with a comma"/>
<param name="robots" type="list" default="1" label="Robots meta tag" description="Set the value of the robots tag">
<option value="index, follow">index, follow</option>
<option value="noindex, follow">noindex, follow</option>
<option value="noindex, follow">index, nofollow</option>
<option value="noindex, nofollow">noindex, nofollow</option>
<option value="0">Don't display the robots tag</option>
</param>

<param name="googlebot" type="list" default="" label="Google settings" description="Settings for the Google crawler">
<option value="">Do nothing</option>
<option value="noarchive">noarchive => don't include in Google cache</option>
<option value="nosnippet">nosnippet => disallow a summary display</option>
<option value="noodp">noodp => disallow a summary from dmoz.org</option>
<option value="noarchive, nosnippet">noarchive, nosnippet</option>
<option value="noarchive, noodp">noarchive, noodp</option>
<option value="nosnippet, noodp">nosnippet, noodp</option>
<option value="noarchive, nosnippet, noodp">noarchive, nosnippet, noodp</option>
</param>
<param name="copyright" type="text" size="40" default="Joomlatwork" label="Copy right" description="Copyright META field" value="" />

</params>
</config>

How to install this patch?

Installation of the patch is simple. Download the patch here Extract the patch zip file within a directory and you can upload the files to the specific directories (for example with FTP). Please notice that if you have made any adjustments to the listed files below these changes will be lost (notice that these are standard Joomla files). If you are not happy with the patch you can download the redo patch file, which contains the joomla standard files and will bring your joomla installation back into the default Joomla installation setting.

Which files are affected by the patch?

The following files of the Joomla 1.5 must be patched or are new files:
/robots.txt
/libraries/joomla/document/html/renderer/head.php
/includes/application.php
/libraries/joomla/document/html/html.php
/administrator/components/com_config/controllers/application.php
/administrator/components/com_config/views/application/tmpl/config_seo_metadata.php
/administrator/components/com_config/views/application/tmpl/navigation.php
/administrator/components/com_config/views/application/tmpl/config_seo_custom_fields.php
/administrator/components/com_config/views/application/tmpl/config_seo_metafields.php
/administrator/components/com_config/views/application/view.php
/administrator/components/com_content/admin.content.html.php
/administrator/components/com_content/controller.php
/administrator/components/com_menus/models/item.php
/administrator/components/com_menus/views/item/tmpl/form.php
/administrator/components/com_menus/views/item/view.php
/components/com_content/views/archive/view.html.php
/components/com_content/views/article/view.html.php
/components/com_content/views/category/view.html.php
/components/com_content/views/frontpage/view.html.php
/components/com_content/views/section/view.html.php

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