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Three Hidden Features of JomSocial 3

Three Hidden Features of JomSocial 3

JomSocial 3 comes packed with new features and enhancements. We added responsive design, a new template, cover photos and a whole lot more. The response has been terrific but the new version of JomSocial also has a number of new features that have received a lot less attention. They’re not as obvious as many of the other improvements but they are just as important.

Modulized Home Page

When you install JomSocial 3, you’ll find the old home page zones in their familiar locations. But there’s an important difference. Those zones are now Joomla modules. If you want to move them or delete them, you no longer have to hack the code to create the home page you want. You’re free to place them anywhere your template allows.

Simply navigate to your Module Manager and search for the following module titles:

  • Community - Events Module
  • Community - Groups Module
  • Community - Members Module
  • Community - Photos Module
  • Community - Quick Search Module
  • Community - Videos Module
  • Community - Whos Online

Or simply filter by module position ejlxm_side_frontpage to find all the modules that are currently displayed on the JomSocial front page.

Open those modules, change the module position and replace the module suffix with a suffix supported by your default template. So you could put the search box at the top of your site and the “latest videos, groups and members” at the bottom of the page, if you wish. With JomSocial 3, your home page is more flexible than ever.

Plugins and Modules Are Installed Automatically

The JomSocial installer will now install all your plugins and modules automatically. You won’t have to add them one-by-one any more. That’s a real time-saver.

Once you’ve finished installing JomSocial 3, visit the “Module Manager” and enter “community” into the filter. (You can also visit “Plugin Manager” and filter the “type” dropdown menu by “community.”) You will receive a list of all the JomSocial plugins that you can disable or enable.

SEO Improvements

No more duplicate contentAt iJoomla we created the first ever SEO tool for Joomla. The iJoomla Meta Tag Generator was launched in 2006 and has since evolved into the more robust iJoomla SEO. For a few years, it was our bestselling product until Ad Agency, our advertising suite, roared ahead.

Publishers who buy iJoomla SEO also get access to my own comprehensive Joomla SEO Video Course.

So SEO with Joomla is something I care about a great deal! But SEO has been a weak point on JomSocial for a long time.

Every one of the hundreds or even thousands of profiles on a site using JomSocial used to have “profile” as the title tag. For Google, that looks a lot like the kind of duplicate content it tends to penalize in search results.

That was an easy fix. JomSocial now puts the user’s name or username inside the title tag to make it unique.

We’ve gone a bit further than reducing duplicate content though. Events, groups and videos use to lack identifying keywords in their title tags. Now the keywords “event,” “group” or “video” are added automatically, allowing search engines to easily identify the subject of the page and to include them in relevant search results.

Those are good first steps in improving SEO for JomSocial and you should start to see the benefits soon.  You can read more about these SEO improvements on our wiki.

These three hidden features of JomSocial are easily missed but they really as important as all the others. I hope you enjoy them!

Any comments? I’d love to read them, please comment below.

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