A few weeks ago I didn’t know what to think of Nooku… I heard of it, read the Blog posts at Joomlatools.org but still saw it as a new Joomfish component.
But then I got to the eduvision Joomla conferentie were Johan Janssens and Mathias Verraes did a presentation on their new Joomla Content translation component Nooku.
Although Johan warned us about the fact that "Live demonstrations have a tendency to go wrong" theirs run without any noticeable problems.
For you who havent heard about Nooku yet a short introduction.
Nooku is a Joomla component that helps you to build a multi language Joomla websites and does that in a way that it is really simpel for translators to do their work.
You can even track how they do their work, see how far your translations are and how long they worked on their translations.
Well, You have to pay them, so you want to check that what they charge your for is what you are got…. with Nooku you can!
Hold on, I can here you think, what about the language specific URLs? Strange formed URLs, Not translated Titles, not translated Meta-tags like descriptions, keywords etc etc…
An Impressive Component
Now this is where Johan and Mathias really impressed me!
They showed in a live demo how Nooku not only showed the percentage of a page translation that was done on the standard language, but they showed allot more….
The title that was translated was indeed translated also in the HTML Title, but also the URL itself was automatically rewritten to that language title version.
You also get the possibility to translate your meta tag description and keywords into the translated version… so you really get a translated version of a content page in a SEO Friendly (might I say a real Search Engine Optimized way).
There is more.. look at these (real life) URLs
http://html.knowyourrights2008.org/en/childrens-corner.html
http://html.knowyourrights2008.org/nl/kinderhoek.html
http://html.knowyourrights2008.org/es/el-rincon-de-los-ninos.html
Can you believe they did that for Eight (8) different languages… with Nooku version 0.5… what do they have in store for use when they hit version 1.0?
Multi-language and Search Engine Optimization
Lets look at some other things Nooku does when it comes to SEO, the first thing you say was the URL rewrites.
That wasn’t done by a component like sh404SEF or any other component, that was done by Nooku…
Speed is also a concern when it comes to Multi language Joomla sites, they can be really slooowww. Nooku (according to the tests they ran) even speeded up the Joomla 1.5 website on which it run because Nooku brings in its own Caching system.
Last but not least is the content translation handling (you do know SEO it all about content for your users, right?).
Once the standard page is written (you can choose your own language standard) you don’t have to go into some strange component cpanel, you just select the language you want to translate to from a small selection box in the right hand corner of your content menu and you can start your translation!
Thats right, you don’t even need to leave your content editor screen… now wouldn’t you want that for your multi language Joomla based website?
How to get it!
From an SEO point of view I even would like it for my single language Joomla website…it has a lot of my wishes right in one component…
So why don’t I have it… because it is not on the free market yet…sigh….
At this moment it is only available for partners of Joomlatools.org but that has its advantage in requesting features, getting support and more.
I ams just a singly person writing about Joomla, SEO and building just a few sites a year, so the partnership price is not an option for me.
If I was a full time Joomla website builder with some clients that needed Multi-languages websites, then I would be the next to sign-up! The partnership price is not that high that it is unaffordable, it is just for me not an option.
Like I said: If you run a Joomla website building company and have customers that need multi-language Joomla websites you owe it to yourself to get in contact with the Nooku team and partner-up…
And No, I don’t get paid for this post, and don’t have stocks in Nooku or Joomlatools and yes, I really, really like this component…
Here is video from there website that explains even more about Nooku and how it works.
P.s. Reminder to myself, send Mathias the example of the HTML Title feature we talked about that is one part of the Joomlatwork patch.
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Hi Hummerbie,
thanks for the kind words, I’m glad we made a good impression with Nooku at the joomla conference :-)
Just a small rectification:
>> Nooku (according to the tests they ran) even speeded up the Joomla 1.5 website
That’s not yet true, but we think it soon will be. At the moment Nooku 0.5 adds about 3-4% performance overhead to joomla, which isn’t too bad compared to joomfish’ 20-23% : http://blogs.helion-prime.com/alexshapovalov/2008/06/30/performance-testing-of-new-joomfish-20b2-for-joomla.html
Nooku 0.5 is not using any caching yet, and we have some ideas we’re working on to boost performance. That’s why we said we believe we can get it to a point where Joomla actually becomes faster with Nooku installed!
—
Mathias Verraes
Nooku Senior Architect – http://www.nooku.org
Joomlatools – http://www.joomlatools.org
@Mathias: It is good to see developers like your team also looking at performance of their applications.
Speed is also a factor in SEO, but you know that!
Also good to see you monitor posts about Nooku and responding to rectify (at least for now) wrong information.
I am looking forward to the first 1.0 relase and I hope you get the caching in there.
A warm Thank You for pointing out that the spam security field did not show….corrected now, so now comments are open to everyone again (not spammers!)
This is a really interesting article. I found Nooku a while ago and it looked good then. However, I hadn’t caught on to all of the url rewriting magic.
I want it and I want it now.
Nick
@Nick: My Too, but we have to wait on the final release which will probably by in 2009 and that still seems so far away.
But I think it will really be worth the wait.
Thanks for the resource…good to know of new resources as the Joomla Developer Community continues to grow.
@Hummerbie: Any idea when in 2009. Q1 is one thing Q4 is something else again.
Nick
Really looks nice this component. We need it. JFish don’t are a good solution.
Hi Hummerbie, Empresas,
We’re one of the Nooku partners and we’re lookig to do some more test implmentations using the latest release 0.6 if you’ve got some sites that need multilingual we can assist with an implementation.
It would be great to incorporate your feedback and comments for me to relaty to the development team.
We’ll soon be running a campaign to target Joomfish users that are frustrated and need a better solution.