Blog Entries

Building a Blog from Joomla "Out of the Box"

rituy@sas.com — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

So let's go back to the drawing board and look at what extensions you might need to pick up to duplicate the whole effect of a blog.

Flexible Layout

Joomla is probably the easiest CMS to "skin" or "template" which means you can have your blog looking like anything you want.
Conclusion: Out the box.

Browser-based Editing

One of the whole points of Joomla is to be able to maintain your site and edit your content in a browser.
[...]

Add a static text in the title

rituy@sas.com — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Open the file: libraries/joomla/document/html/renderer/head.php

Search for the next piece of code:

$strHtml .= $tab.''.$lnEnd;
'.htmlspecialchars($document->getTitle()).'

Add your statict text for example:

$strHtml .= $tab.''.$lnEnd; All about Canada - '.htmlspecialchars($document->getTitle()).'

The text into the
tag is very important for the search engines.

If you need obtain a great search result [...]

How To Edit Joomla Templates

rituy@sas.com — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

First you'll have to ask yourself the question: what do you really want to change? If you're just making one website, you have a great looking template and you only want to change some images on the template, then this article will be more then enough for you. If you want to change more, like how the titles look, changing the size of a part of your template, etc ... then this article will just point you in the right direction. In this case you will have to learn at least the basics of css and [...]

Creating a Module Position in Joomla! 1.0

rituy@sas.com — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

First, navigate to Mambots>Site Mambots and make sure "Load Module Positions" is published/active. If there is a red "x" beside this Mambot, click it to make the mambot active.

The mambot you just activated will allow you to use a syntax such as "{mosloadposition left}" in your content item(s) in order to render modules. So now, we want to create a custom module position for EasySSP.

Navigate to Site>Template Manager>Module Positions and in o [...]

Creating a Module Position in Joomla! 1.5

rituy@sas.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

First, navigate to Extensions>Plugin Manager> and make sure "Content - Load Module" is published/active. If there is a red "x" beside this Plugin, click it to make the plugin active.

The plugin you just activated will allow you to use a syntax such as "{loadposition left}" in your content item(s) in order to render modules. So now, we want to create a custom module position for EasySSP.

To create a module position for EasySSP, you [...]

Creating Content Pages in Joomla

rituy@sas.com — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Creating Content Pages in Joomla 
In order to build a website you usually have a navigation bar containing a menu that links to specific pages. In Joomla there is a menu system that allows you to link to specific articles. This tutorial will show you how to create a content page for your web site and link to it using Joomla’s menu system. 
Log in to the Administration Panel 
Click the Add New Article Button in the administration [...]

Changing Options and Positions for Modules

rituy@sas.com — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

In Joomla, there are several ways for you to administer modules on the site. Modules display small amounts of content on every page of the site. An example of a module on a site is a menu. It is available from every page of the site and contains the same content so that a visitor can navigate around the site. You can set access on levels so that modules can only be made available to users who are registered users of your site (for example). You can change the position of a module, and you [...]

Creating a Poll for your Site

rituy@sas.com — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Creating a Poll for your Site
There are 2 steps you need to complete in order to create a poll and display it on your Joomla site. First you need to create a poll component and then you need to create a module in which to display your poll. Once someone votes in your poll the results are available for viewing, the poll component displays the results to visitors when they click on the results button in the module.

Step 1 – Create a Poll Component

First go to [...]

Redirecting non-SEF URL's from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5

rituy@sas.com — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

You may have noticed that Joomlashack is now running on Joomla 1.5. We did a stealth migration yesterday.

We had one problem we needed to address, and it took a while to figure out, so we thought we would share the solution for others.

Our old site used Joomla 1.0, as I have mentioned before, we wanted to make sure we did a 301 redirect of the Joomla URL's so Google would quickly pick up the new ones and pass the pangerank to the new pages. The problem however was that [...]

How To Change Joomla Welcome to the Front Page Title?

rituy@sas.com — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

One of the highly asked questions for Joomla Content Management System is how to change the ‘Welcome to the Front Page’ Title. At the time of writing, Joomla is at 1.5.9 and the way to change the title is as follows:

1. In the administration panel, go to Menus >> Main Menu.

2. Select the Home link.

3. Expand the option list, Parameters (System), on the right.

4. Change the field, Page title.

5. It’s done =)

Top 5 Reasons to Use Joomla

rituy@sas.com — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Since its introduction in 2005, Joomla has become the first choice of PHP based web site developers. More and more developers are turning to open source CMS products, and Joomla is their first pick due to several reasons. Some of them are listed below -

1.Joomla is free and its source code is available

Joomla’s most striking feature is that it is completely free for personal and commercial use, it doesn’t have any hidden costs, and it is open source. Many people [...]

Module editing at the frontend

rituy@sas.com — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

I've now completed editing of module parameters in a modal popup. Edit icons appear next to the module titles which can be clicked to edit the module parameters. I've deliberately disallowed editing of advanced and other parameters from the modal popup at the front-end to avoid complexity. If it is a custom HTML module, then its content can also be edited via the modal popup.

Name: Name of the component that you want to link
Component: Select the desired component tha [...]

How to implement and generate Tag Clouds

rituy@sas.com — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

How to generate Tag Clouds?

The idea is to automate the process of Tag Cloud generation as soon as user writes a post or content on a page. It can be divided into two steps:

Generate Tag Clouds from the content.

Ideally, we would like PHP code to extract relevant tags (keywords) fr [...]

How to Change and Customize Joomla Templates

rituy@sas.com — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Instructions -

Step 1 - Search through the numerous available Joomla templates, and download one that suits your needs. This download will be a compressed zip file. Save the template to a specific folder.

Step 2 - Next, log in to the administrator panel of your Joomla website. Click on the link for the Installer’s menu.

Step 3 - Click on the Templates-Site option. Click Browse on the page that opens up.

Step 4 - Select the Joomla installation file that you had downlo [...]

How to setup a Joomla based Blog

rituy@sas.com — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Setting up a Joomla Blog is not that difficult, you just need to be aware of some things before your start to crate your articles.

First thing your need to do is to crate a section that will hold all the categories of the topics you want to blog about.
In my case that is a section called Joomla Blog....pretty cool he?

After that, create the categories for you blog section.

Start out with the basic topics you want to write about.
For me it starts witj [...]

Custom Joomla Backend MVC Component

rituy@sas.com — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

In this article we discuss the outlines of building a custom backend Joomla component structured on the MVC model.

The details and complete code are covered in the members area

We make a component that will write text to a text file. The user will enter the text in the component administrator interface. We shall name the component mytext. We will use our localhost installation to develop the component.

Step 1

Make a folder called com_ [...]

Upgrading your template index file

rituy@sas.com — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Upgrading your index.php file Replace _VALID_MOS with _JEXECReplace $mosConfig_absolute_path with $this->baseUrlReplace $mosConfig_live_site with JURI::base()Replace fixed strings with translatable strings. For example, replace echo 'Hello' with echo JText::_( 'Hello' )Replace calls to mosGetParam with calls to JRequest::getVar. For example, replace $id = mosGetParam( $_REQUEST, 'id', 0 ); with $id = JRequest::getVar( 'id', 0 ) [...]

Joomla template CSS and images only displayed on home page

rituy@sas.com — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100
Sometimes your template will lose all its styles and images when navigating away from the Frontpage.
This is caused by an incorrect path to the stylesheet due to SEF errors. If you've enabled SEF, make sure your htaccess.txt file is renamed to .htaccess. You may need to temporarily disable SEF. For more information on the correct way to set up SEF in Joomla! 1.5, see the official doc item at joomla.org: SEF URLs in Joomla! 1.5

SEF quick checklist: Make sure htaccess.txt i [...]