Today I will look at the Joomla CMS built in contact management component.
Joomla includes the ability to list contact information on the site. The website owner/manager can determine what information will be displayed, when entered. The basic contact information that can be gathered and displayed for a contact includes: address, city, state, zip, phone, fax, mobile, email address, description, image or avatar per contact. Contacts may be grouped into categories, and then the categories can be displayed, showing how many contacts are in each, search facilities, ordering functions, and selected display fields in list form.
Menu items can be setup to link to a contact or a category. Optionally links from with these can go directly to other categories or contacts.
Email addresses can be displayed or hidden. If they are included in the contact information, then a contact form will automatically be displayed, thereby protecting email addresses from spammers. The concept is that a contact may be reached through a form, then subsequent emails can happen directly between the parties. This reduces the ability for spammers to harvest email addresses through the site.
VCards, as well as email copies can be activated through the site, however both of these provide ways for spammers to collect email addresses, and I recommend to clients that they do not use them.
Anywhere where an email address to a contact is to be displayed, a link to the contact page for that contact can be used as an alternative. This further reduces spam potential, by never displaying an email address on the site. This may seem like an inconvenience to the contact-or, but as time goes on and it becomes more regular as website operators seek ways to stop spam, people looking to contact others through websites, are realizing that this is a necessity. I have been able to reduce my spam to virtually nothing using these methods.
Joomla's built in contact management component can be further enhanced using plugins, modules and components. Modules can be used to display specific contact information, plugins can cloak email addresses and components can add additional information to each contact's file. See the Joomla JED for details.
My quest to be listed first in Google's search results under the phrase best web designer in Canada continues. Lately I have been bouncing between 6th and 8th place. I will continue following my plan of discussing my thoughts on the Joomla CMS for websites, and watch how my ranking goes.
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