basics

  • Accessing the administration panel

    Okay, you've installed your Joomla site, and want to began to master it. You click on the administrator link in the frontend and instantly hit the wall: a blank page is showing up. What's the deal? The cause is generally simple: This is happening almost always because your 'live-site' setting in your configuration.php file doesn't correspond with your Administration URL. You either have a www in your live-site setting in your configuration.php file and you are accessing your administration backend without the www or vice versa. It's highly recommended to correct this, the problem can impact even your site's Google rating.

  • Add a Favicon to your template

    Websites can include a small image called a Favicon that appears in your web browser generally on the left of URL field and also in the bookmarks to help visually identify a site. Many are saying that is among the few real good things coming from Redmond, since the Favicon was introduced with IE3, and initially supported only by Microsoft's browsers. But now the support for Favicons became widespread and is one of differentiating factors of a website, essential part of the general look/corporate identity.

  • Add article title to Read More links

    the competition for SERP's (Search Engine Ranking Positions) is fierce. The slightest advantage you can gain can make the difference. Good navigation is key here - and part of this is to give some extra info to your visitors of what they will see if they clicking on a given link. Adding the article title to your Read More links is a way to make this happen.

  • Can I just paste content from Word?

    The most likely complaint you can get after launching a Joomla site is, that the owner calls you or mails you, saying, that the page is looking weird after he added his first content item. Blindly you can bet, that he (sometimes despite your warnings) just copy/pasted that content from a Word document, another web-page or some other word processor. The order above isn't an arbitrary one, BTW! What you can do? Humm, you can clean his content item, but you must make them understand, why isn't a good idea to do this, and you must provide them with an alternative: an easy way to paste from Word without damaging (badly) the site.

  • Change the default Joomla database prefix

    Every hacker in this world knows, that by default all Joomla database tables have the "jos_" prefix. Is that well known, than even automated defacing scripts are using this, and there are a lot of "tools" which are capable to automatically probing your site having this presumption built into them.

  • Did you missed the Guest access level in Joomla 1.7?

    After struggling for years to set up menu items shown only for guest visitors in various Joomla/Mambo versions prior Joomla 1.7, was a real relief to have an easy and foolproof way to do it. No hacks needed, no scripts to add, no configuration trickery... you simply selected from the Access Level dialog the Guest access group for anything qualifying for this settings (modules for example, but not only..) and you where set! And if you upgraded your site from Joomla 1.7 to Joomla 2.5 the feature where still there. Recently I had a big surprise, I needed the feature in a brand new Joomla 2.5 site... and don't found it!!

  • Dynamic vs. Static URLs

    Joomla, as a PHP/MySQL powered solution is inserting the content into a webpage by way of a script. This type of site is considered to be dynamic. The advantage is obvious - that's why you and me have been chosen Joomla Tongue out. But what's the drawback?

  • Emptying the trash in Joomla 1.7

    As you may experienced already, Joomla 1.7 has simplified much of the Joomla content work-flow, making things easier and faster to do. However, one of the things that has gotten slightly more complicated is finding and emptying the trash.

  • Enable Content History in Joomla 3.2

    For any website administrator, having a content version history is an important asset. For Joomla, until recently, you had to find and install a third party add-on. But not anymore, finally content versioning is part of Joomla since Joomla 3.2.

  • Enable HTTPS and make your entire site secure

    Life is full of surprises. One of these days I got a job offering with a consistent budget, one of my former clients approached me to "make his site secure".  I said yes, but when turned out what he wanted in fact i had a surprise: he wanted nothing else, just to make the browser warning about "unsecure site" go away. He actually purchased a security certificate and hired someone to install it onto his server - with no success.

  • Enhanced User Profiles in Joomla 1.7+

    One of the problems many users are facing when start they Joomla based site is, that the user information Joomla collects during registration is scarce - username and password often is not quite enough for their purposes. And the first reaction usually is to install a community solution, like Community Builder, JoomSocial or other, fancy user management tool - a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

  • Frontend

    The Frontend is a collective term to name the areas of the website as visitors or registered users see it. A registered user normally works only in the frontend. It is like in a store, where the goods are displayed in shop windows and on shelves. Here you can have a look around.

    So, in nutshell: it's everything an unregistered user (Guest) and all other registered users, withouth administrative user rights (the members of main Registered group and it's subgroups) can see.

  • Give a boost to your Joomla site

    One of the problems any webmaster is facing that the site may be not fast enough to meet his expectations. How you can squeeze up that last drop of extra speed from your site? We published lots of tips on this theme, but let's reorganize and update them with possibilities of the latest Joomla implementation (1.5.10 as the original article was written, 1.7.3 on last update I wrote this). I try to present them in decreasing order of importance/effectiveness, but the actual order reflects mostly my personal experience - which may be different from yours - and not some rigorously measured facts. But, believe me, I have a good nose for this. Some of the tips are easy to implement - and some may need advanced knowledge. But I mixed them up there to let you know what you may need to check - or what you may need ask from your programmer/web developer.

  • Help! My editor background is coloured!

    Yep, that's something you can experience with any of your new templates, especially the ones with colored/dark background. Why this happening? And more important, how you can fix it?

    The answer to the first question is simple: the 'WYSIWYG' editors used in Joomla are just doing what the name implies: are taking the template's CSS file and rendering the newly entered content to be as close to what will be shown on the site as possible. And if your template's background is colored or an image file is used to fill your background, then that will be used there too. The fix is relatively easy in the case of most current editors. Almost all of them have the possibility to use a special CSS file in the editing pages. Here we will show you the recipe that works for the family of editors based on TinyMCE editor, delivered by default with Joomla (as JCE), but the solution is similar or can be easily adapted for all such advanced editors.

  • How an author can submit a story?

    We all know that Joomla is all about collaboration. And anyone who had set up at least one instance of Joomla knows, that there are multiple levels of access in Joomla, among them one called Author who is supposedly able to submit an article to a Joomla site from the frontend.

  • How deep linking can give you an edge in the competition for better ranking

    You knows the basics, right? Great content and a good number of incoming links are necessary for gaining the top SERP (Search Engine Ranking Points) for a particular keyword phrase. The good old way to reach this goal was to build an attractive landing page and add to it as many links as possible.

  • How to remove 'Welcome to the Frontpage'

    I did not realised until recently how hard may be even for some seasoned Joomla webmasters to get rid of that 'Welcome to the Frontpage' text from their Joomla site. But talking with couple of customers and being even hired for do this Tongue outmade me curious, and I Googled for 'Welcome to the Frontpage'...

    The result may be surprise you... my last attempt ended on 25.000.000(no kidding...) hits.

    So, there is the free-for-all recipe:

  • How to turn on the "?tp=1" trick in Joomla 1.7+?

    In a previous tip I enumerated couple of methods on how you can make visible the template positions in Joomla 1.7+.

    But there seems to be at least two different problems for some users.

  • How to upload pictures to the site?

    The use of pictures in Joomla is a bit different from the methods you are used before, so you need to learn new habits here. But the first problem is usually not that, but how to upload those pictures to the site.

    First of all we strongly recommend some additional components to your Joomla site, if you don't have done allready.

    On the top of these recommended add-ons are the file/FTP managers joomlaXplorer/Ninja eXplorer/OSE Filemanager and the WYSIWYG editor JCE. We will use both recipes here.

  • How you can hide the Home menu item?

    Why you should want to do that? Dunno, but it's an evergreen question asked time-to-time from the first day I started to work with Mambo..., so let's take it methodically, to see how one can solve this problem!

Page 1 of 3