CAVEAT: ALWAYS MAKE A BACK UP BEFORE YOU DO THIS KIND OF STUFF.

Problem: I had a site with 1200 articles and every one of them had hard coded inline styles. Fonts, font sizes, colors, underlines, you name it. It was a 6 year old site with multiple contributors all using every button available in the text editor.

Of course I wanted the articles to use the styles in my css file, but inline styles override style sheets. What to do? I tweeted @NoNumber_nl Peter Van Westen from NoNumber and asked him if there was a way to use his excellent tool, dbReplacer to find and replace all of the styles and he kindly responded with the code below.
Hack:
With regular expressions, use: \s*style="[^"]*" or \s*style=".*?" (also grabs the extra whitespace before the style attrib)
If memory serves, I might have been left with style=" ", but I simply used the dbReplacer again to remove all of those. I was then left with all of the <em><strong><p><br> tags in place, but no fonts or sizes.

Since taxonomy is important to Search Engine Optimzation, I also used it to find all of the mis-used <H1> tags and replace them with a more appropriate tag.

p.s. I'm also using his Sourcerer plugin to add source code to my articles

This is another of my favorite extensions.  The TinyMCE editor that comes standard with any Joomla installation is so very limited and I immediately replace it with JCE on every site I build. JCE is free, but for about $30 you get all of their plug-ins for a year. The plug-ins I use are:

• Captions
• File Manager
• Image Manager Extended
• Media Manager

The feature I couldn't live without is the ability to link to existing menu links or content.  The links are relative, so turning on or off search engine friendly urls is reflected in the JCE link, as well as moving an article or renaming a menu item.

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

What is Joomla?

• Corporate websites
• Online commerce
• Small business websites
• Non-profit and organizational websites
• School and church websites
• Personal or family homepages
• Community-based portals
• Magazines and newspapers

What Can I Do With A Content Management System?

• Add pages on the fly.
• Create newsletters.
• Blog til your heart's content.
• Create a gallery or portfolio.
• Add e-commerce and maintain your products and prices easily.
• Import and export RSS feeds.
• Mass mail.
• Create a link directory.
• Dynamic Forms
• ...just about anything you can imagine.

Do I Need a Website Designer?

How Much Does it Cost?

How Do I Select A Website Designer?

• Look at their portfolio and determine if the website designer has the artistic skills to project the image and emotion of your product or company.
• Determine if their fee structure is within your advertising budget.
• Make certain the website design firm is reputable by contacting a few of their previous clients for a referral.
• Sign a mutually binding contract that protects your purchase just as you would with any other product you would buy.
• Decide if the website designer has the ability to understand your advertising objectives. Can you work well together to create a product that will draw clients to your business?
• Finally, compare the final product. A typical 5-6 page website is a great place to start advertising on the web, but a content management system will grow with your business.

Can Montano Designs Handle All of Our Company Needs?

Montano Designs has creative solutions for your website design objective. We are imaginative and have the technological know-how to make your website not only visitor friendly but optimized for excellent search engine placement. As a business owner you know that there is a sea of advertising objectives. We work hand in hand with you to determine your needs at a cost effective price and to design a website that will draw and retain visitors.

See, now wasn't that easy? Now that you're ready to get started call us today at (704)-544-0678 or send us an email. We even have a snazzy Request A Quote form you can fill out here.

Why Should I Choose Montano Designs?

We've been designing websites for over 10 years and we're really good at it. We're a small freelance firm and our overhead is low. We pass the savings on to our clients. Our website designers & website developers use the most up-to-date website design techniques, scripting and programming to make certain that each website Montano Designs creates stands out from the millions of websites on the Internet today. The websites we design are not only exceedingly functional, but fun and interactive for your visitor. And isn’t that the key to retaining visitors to your website?

To forum or not to forum, that is the question.  Many, many of my clients tell me they want a forum on their website.  Not a problem!  There are some great components out there for Joomla that make it very easy to start a forum on your site.  I personally like Fireboard, but there's a new up-and-coming forum called Simplest Forum. I like simple stuff.

Here's the dilemma: Do you have the time and manpower to maintain the forum?  Do you have a large enough audience to make your forum interesting?  Are your topics of interest?  Because you build it doesn't mean they'll come.

I've run my own forums in the past and I'll tell you the truth, they are a royal pain to maintain.  Pardon the rhyme. Spammers are so sophisticated these days they have programs that crawl the web looking for free places they can post their adds for drugs, websites of ill repute and the like.  When you run a forum you need to keep it cleaned up.  You're visitors get enough of this junk in their email boxes and don't want to see it on forums.

Flame wars, FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Dread) and Trolls.  Sounds a bit like Lord of the Rings doesn't it?  These are people with nothing better to do than cause trouble on forums.  You have to make allowances for freedom of speech, simultaneously reining in the trolls.  If your forum becomes acrimonious people will stop coming.

Forums are a great way to get people to your site.  A by-product of an interesting  forum is people will visit your other pages.  You can also earn money from sponsored ads and increase your page rank by having people link to your forum.  The bottom line is forums are work with reward.  You have to make the call to determine if you have what it takes to maintain it.

This is the very first 3rd-party extension I install on every Joomla site Montano Designs develops. Akeeba offers a free version of this extension and a paid version. I purchased a license which the developer generously allows me to install on unlimited sites. For a mere $55 I can offer my clients easy to use back-up utilities. Included in this fee is the professional version of Akeeba Admin Tools (the second extension I install on every site).