basics

• Joomla 1.5 ACL explained

  Despite claims to the contrary Joomla 1.5 does have an ACL system. It may be rudimentary but when fully understood can be very useful.

• Joomla 3.x - How to create a multilingual site in 6 steps

• Joomla ACL

  ACL stands for access control levels. It refers to who has permission to do what on the website, including read, create, edit, delete, or log in, among other permissions.

  Many think of ACL as relating to the front end of a website only. For example, when I log into the website, what articles do I have available to me? And if someone else logs into the site, do they see the same articles, or do they see different ones?

• Joomla and Windows file permissions

  As I said elsewhere on the site one of key issues of running Joomla on a Windows server is to understand and apply correctly the Windows files and folders permissioning system to your Joomla install. Instead of writing my own compilation of how-tos, I reproduce here the excellent tutorial written by Russell Winter on the Joomla tutorials site. All kudos are going to him!

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  For those of you that are either developing or delivering your Joomla! Web-Sites from the Windows environment, it is sometimes difficult to obtain relevant information regarding permissions. Unfortunately, it is a fact that most Web-Serving is offered under Unix and that Unix is pretty well documented within this environment. Hopefully the following information will go some way to clearing up any confusion and provide a little guidance.

• Leverage browser caching

  One of the most easy ways to make your Joomla website faster is to leverage Joomla browser caching. This is one of the high priority tasks recommended by Google to make your website load faster.

• Load module position in component layout template

  What if you need to load a module inside a Joomla component?

  Simple, not? Theory says, that you need to add this code to the template override of desired output, and you're done!

  <jdoc:include type="module" name="mymoduleposition" />

  Well, not allways..

• Modules In Content

  Modules are typically displayed on the left and right sides of the page... in module positions everywhere . It's not uncommon to also find modules on the top or bottom of a page. The display location for a module is controlled by the site administrator through the Joomla administrator panel, and it's limited by the template's internal structure. Generally you can insert modules only in the pre-defined module positions. The module management screen provides several options as possible locations for a published module. But Joomla does not provide an easy way if you want to display these modules in the main content area of the site.

• Navigation

  To find your way around the website, you will need navigation with corresponding links. In Joomla! we call this a menu. You may create as many menus as desired and nest them into as many different ways as you wish. Each menu is a module which can be positioned on a provided area in the template.

  Important note: Joomla! is a genuinely menu driven system, the most important behaviors: as what module when to be shown, what template to be used on a certain page, etc all can be controlled using by associating behaviors to menu items. So, plan carefully your menu - it is the core of your site's end user experience!

• Register Globals

  Many of you probably had seen already the red warning in Joomla's admin interface, that you need to have the Register Globals set to "on", otherwise your site is exposed to security treats.

  And also many of you haven't a clue how to do it...

  So, let's see what an average webmaster can do about this problem.

• Setting up an automatic Smart Search indexing

  In another article I've praised the Smart Search core extension and recommended you to use it. But there is a problem with this extension - you need to re-index your site after you add new things manually to get the most out of it. Although the Smart Search index is automatically kept up-to-date whenever content items are amended, there are some circumstances where you need to re-run the indexer. You can do this manually using the Index toolbar button in the Manage Indexed Content screen. Or there is another way to do it?

• Special considerations to make your Joomla site secure

  Joomla, as most CMS's excells by making it easy to manage a website page. Offers a pretty easy way to manage Web-based publishing, format management, history editing and version control, indexing, search, and retrieval. Joomla has an impressive suite of features, but these features require some special considerations.

• Stop image hotlinking

  When other people link to your images directly this can put an unwanted, additional strain on your servers - it is not just an annoying, unfair practice to use your intellectual property.

  That practice is called image hotlinking and you can disable it by adding some code to your .htaccessfile.

• Style your tooltips

  A tooltips is a piece of text that pops up when you hover the mouse over a region on a website. If you use the Joomla! back end, for example, tooltips are used to help explain the action of different parameters. The tooltips can add functionality and fun to your site, but just inserting them without styling them accordingly can have an unusable or "just" boring result. And you want to avoid both, I guess...

• Submitting content from frontend

  Indeed, what's needed for a user to submit a new content item from the frontend, and how he/she should proceed?

  First of all the user must have the privileges corresponding to the authorization level of "author" or above.

• Sucuri's Hacked Website Report 2017

  The most comprehensive analysis of trends in the website security finally is out. There are couple of interesting fact worth highlighting.

  Most important is something we expected: Joomla is emerging as the most secure CMS.

• The return of classic Joomla blog view

  Did you already seen that since the advent of Joomla 1.6 the blog view has been changed? Let me refresh your memory! In Joomla 1.0 and 1.5 the Leading Articles - the articles on the top of Blog view - where shown on full by default, and for the rest of articles only the Article Intro part was shown. With Joomla 1.6 this has been changed, for all articles in a Blog view is shown only the introtext. You didn't even noticed that, right? Me either, until one of my clients has specifically requested the feature.

• The site name/title

  There is a setting in the Joomla site configuration, which is often overlooked or used to hold allmost nothing, in best case the URL of the site, the Site Name. You're asked during the install to fill the respective field, and you generally have no clue what to write in that box.

  So, what's wrong with that? The site is working, regardless what you wrote there...

  You may think one can wrote here anything crosses his mind, right?

• The ten commandements of SEO for beginners

  Why don't have Joomla in the title of tis article? Simply because these are the basics, the cornerstone stuff any webmaster must learn and respect. If you want a successful site, you must follow these Ten Commandements.

• Turn caching on!

  To improve your Joomla website's performance, just turn on "caching" on the "Cache" tab from Joomla's Global Configuration. When caching is turned on, Joomla creates a static file or "cache" of your website data on the disk. When the static file is found, the system retrieves the data from the disk rather than from the database. This improves performance because it saves system resources by not making redundant SQL calls to the database. And it will also speed up the display time of the pages.

  You can set cache refresh rate in seconds. If you don't constantly update your contents, you might want to set it longer. And to further improve it, go to all your modules configurationand select "yes" to cache option (not available in all modules).

• Video resources

   

  An ever groving collection of video tutorials found on the web and recommended by me for anyone interested in this magnificient content management system.

  These videos aren't created by me, owned by me, I am not affiliated with any of their creators and I don't get any advantages by helping them gain visibility.

  Great resources I have selected and recommend for you, wholeheartedly!