We eat, sleep and breathe Joomla!

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 html. There are tons of online tutorials available for this. One I would recommend is the one of w3schools. That's a great site, I still use this quit often. You will find not only tutorials, but also a complete reference, lots of examples and even a quiz.

Make a copy

A smart thing to do is to make a copy of the original template. This way you can easily compare your changes with the original template. Here's how you can do this:

1. Open the zip-file of the original template and open the file templateDetails.xml
2. In this file you will find something like template_name. Change this name to whatever you want to name your template
3. Open the file index.php from the zip-file
4. In this file, scan for the template name and replace it with the name of your template. You will probably find it as part of a path to the css file(s).
5. make a new zip-file
6. install this template

Now you should see your new template in the Template Manager.

Change the images

If you use a template, you will almost always want to change some of the used images and logo's with your own. It's easy to do this. If you open the zip-file of the template, you will see a folder called 'images'. This contains all images used in the template. So all you have to do is replace these images with your own, make a new zip-file and install that template. Of couse you can also overwrite the images directly on your server.

If you replace images, then the best thing to do is to replace them with images of the same size. It's less work to change your images to the right size, then it is to change the template to match your images.

As a sidenote I would say that in my opinion, replacing images should be made easier. It should be possible to replace the images directly in the Template Manager, so people without ftp access don't have to make a new zip-file and reinstall the template each time they replace an image

Changing the content

In Joomla templates, the content and the design has been completely seperated. The content is present in the file 'index.php', the design is in one or more css-files. The index.php contains (or should contain) not much more then a number of

Now you see the contents of the file index.php. You will find there lines like:

 This is nothing more then a element that will contain all modules on the left position. If you change name="left" to name="right", the modules on the right position will now be shown on the left position. Once you understand the html basics, you can change here anything you want.

 A nice experiment you can do is to look for the lines in the index.php file where you see css-files included. If you remove these lines and then check your site, you will see what I mean with content only. All you will see is plain text. If you don't understand the purpose of css-files, this experiment will make that crystal clear for you.

Changing the style

You can change the css files in the same way. Only this time you select 'Edit CSS' in stead of Edit HTML. Now you will see a list of CSS files. If you're lucky, there will be only one. A lot of templates however have more then one stylesheet. There are no real conventions on how to split the CSS code in different files and how to name them, so you will have to examine them to know what is part of a certain CSS-file. Just select one of the CSS-files and hit the 'Edit' button.

 Now you can change the style sheets any way you like. I won't go into more detail here, that's what the CSS tutorials I mentioned in the beginning of this article are about. Just one more tip: most browsers now have different tabs which makes it easy to switch between different sites. Use this when you're changing css-files. One tab where you change the CSS and one tab where you see the template. If you're not experienced with CSS, always do just one change and then verify the result.

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Creating Content Pages in Joomla<br>
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.<br><br>
Log in to the Administration Panel<br>
Click the Add New Article Button in the administration Panel<br>

This will take you to the Article :[New] screen<br>

First you need to fill out some dialog boxes. Enter the Title of the content page, in this example I have entered “About the Display Joomla Site”.  Make Sure that Yes is selected next to Published, this will ensure that your content will be active.  Select No next to Front Page, this is not for the front page of the site, but rather the About Page, so it will not appear on the front page.  I have left Section and Category set to Uncategorised.<br>
Insert your content into the text editor section and click the save button. This will take you to the Article Manager Screen<br>

Notice that your article is set to published and set to not show on the front page.  When you go to your front page, you will see that the article can not be seen from the front page, but also that there is no way to get to that article. We will now need to add a link to the menu in order to get to the article that we just published.<br>
Go to the Administration Menu and Select Menu and then Main Menu, this will take you to the Menu Item Manager : [mainmenu] Screen.  Click the New Icon on the top right of the screen. This takes us to the Menu Item: [New] Screen<br>

 
Because we are working with Articles, click Article in the list. This expands a list of options for how we would like to display the article. We would like just a single article to be displayed so click on Article Layout. You will then be taken to a screen where we can create a link to the Content Item that we created earlier.<br>
Insert a Title into the Title Box, Here I have inserted About Us. The title that you enter here will appear as a link on the menu and can be different to the title of your content item (or article)<br>

 
Next click on the Select Button, to the right of the Select Article Box, which is under the Parameters (Basic) section on the right side of the page, this will bring up a list of articles that are in your database. Select the Article that you created in the earlier steps.<br>

This will take you back to the previous screen. Click on Save. This takes you back to the Menu Item Manager : [mainmenu] Screen.  To see what the link you have created click Preview in the top right of the menu (the one that is just below the green bar at the top of the administration panel). This will open up your Joomla site to the front page, you will now see a new link in your menu named what you named it in the previous step. Click on the menu link you created and you will be taken to the new content page that you created.<br>
 

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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 =)

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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 do not like to use free software unless it is also open source. The reluctance could be due to a hidden fear of malicious coding, viruses or adware. All these factors do not affect Joomla since it’s source code is freely available on its own web site. Anyone with enough knowledge of PHP and MySQL can download the source code and look for themselves. You can even modify the source code to suit your needs if you are ambitious.

2.The Menus are created in real time

In most other CMS packages, menus are hard coded when you develop the web site. It is fine for the first time, but it becomes very difficult to make changes to those menus afterwards. It becomes a nightmare to update hundreds of web pages just to make a slight change in menu system. With Joomla, the scene is different. Its menus are created in real time. This means, you can add the menu items using any standard text editor like notepad or myedit, and paste the changes once into the Joomla editor. Joomla takes care of reflecting those changes in all affected web pages. Same thing is applicable for images and other objects.

3.Templates, Templates and more Templates

No CMS software is complete without support for additional modules. All commercial and most of the free CMS products offer support for external modules. Nothing comes even closer to Joomla in this case. With a dedicated team of several thousand developers worldwide, there are practically thousands and thousands of templates, plug-ins and extensions ready for downloading. Most of them are free of cost. Even those which are commercial cost much less than other commercial packages.

Availability of free extensions is probably second biggest reason for the popularity of Joomla. (The first reason is obvious – it’s free)

4.Control Panel – The best one around

However powerful a CMS product might be, there are times when you need to add, remove or modify its contents. Joomla excels in this area too, since its interface is user friendly, help is always available, and the user forum (With hundreds of users willing to offer you their advice) is great!

5.Joomla has one of the largest user base

Don’t underestimate this. This means there are plenty of user forums, free advice, feedbacks, free code, bug fixes, templates, suggestions available to you at any time. It is almost one of the liveliest communities on the web with something new to offer every time you visit their sites.

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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 downloaded. Next, click on the Upload and install button, and then click Continue. This brings you to the Templates Manager. Select the radio button of your new template.

Step 5 - Next click Default, which will make this template the default design for your Joomla website. And you’re  .

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Upgrading your index.php file

1. Replace _VALID_MOS with _JEXEC
2. Replace $mosConfig_absolute_path with $this->baseUrl
3. Replace $mosConfig_live_site with JURI::base()
4. Replace fixed strings with translatable strings. For example, replace echo 'Hello' with echo JText::_( 'Hello' )
5. Replace calls to mosGetParam with calls to JRequest::getVar. For example, replace $id = mosGetParam( $_REQUEST, 'id', 0 ); with $id = JRequest::getVar( 'id', 0 );
6. Replace mosShowHead(); with <jdoc:include type="head" />
7. Replace mosMainBody() with <jdoc:include type="component" />
8. Replace mosLoadModules( $position_name, $style ); with <jdoc:include type="modules" name=$position_name style=$style />. (Note: the 1.0 template's PHP syntax may use single or double quotes. Jdoc expressions require double quotes, and won't work with single quotes.)

Module Chrome/Style Conversion Chart

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1) Change the robots.txt to permit search engines to read the images folder

When you install Joomla, by default it will setup a robots.txt file. The Robots.txt file sits in the root directory of the server and instructs search engine robots which files and folders they have permission to access. The standard robots.txt file that Joomla comes with correctly instructs robots that they cannot access or index folders like the administrator or temporary folders, however it also instructs them they cannot index any content in the images folder.

Because the images folder is the default location for all images in Joomla, the result of the inclusion is that the majority of sites built in Joomla don’t have any of their images indexed!

To solve this issue, simply edit the robots.txt file and remove the following line:

Disallow: /images/

2) Change the default location for images

If you have added images to the articles you write within Joomla, you probably have noticed that the default location for images is www.website.com/images/stories/. Personally I don’t like this, and it is not best practice in terms of image optimisation.

When evaluating the relevance of content on a website, search engine algorithms examine the directory and file names of the content on a site and ascribe priority to pages that are closer to the site root. In other words, when possible, try and keep content closer to the site root.

I recommend changing the default location of images from images/stories to just images/. You can do this in the Joomla Administrator backend by selecting: Site > Global Configuration > System > Media Settings and then changing the directory in the “Path to Image Folder” box.

Once you have made the change, when you add images to articles, the images will be automatically uploaded into the root images/ folder.

3) Use images on relevant page and use keyword rich file names, alt tags and title tags

Once you have changed robots.txt and the default location for images, you can now start optimising the individual images on your site to ensure they are included in the search engine index.

To optimise the image for a certain keyword or key phrase, you should ensure:

• The image is included on a page which is relevant to the image (e.g. a photo of someone playing Golf in Mauritius on a page about Golf in Mauritius)
  
• The filename of the image is the keyword or key phrase you are targeting and words are separated with a hyphen, for example: golf-in-mauritius.jpg
  
• The alt and title tag of the image should also contain the keyword or key phrase, for example, “Golf in Mauritius”
  
• The location of the image file names should be keyword rich to improve the overall keyword relevancy. This can be accomplished by inserting keywords in the URL when Appropriate e.g. travelbison.com/images/mauritius/golf-in-mauritius.jpg

This is what an optimised image tag would look like:

<img src="http://travelbison.com/images/mauritius/golf-in-mauritius.jpg"
height="200" width="500" alt="Golf in Mauritius" 
title="Playing Golf in Mauritius" />

It does not matter if the Alt and Title tags are not exactly the same but closely related keywords should be used. It is best practice to use hyphens in the filename to separate words.

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It is clear by now that the most critical thing about the success of a website is the amount of traffic that major search engines send to your website. Hence, it is very important to take all the necessary steps to make sure that your Joomla website has been optimized fully for search engines.

There are a lot of things you can do in order to optimize your Joomla website. There are options such as using a sitemap in order to make sure that all your content has been successfully crawled by search engines.

Here are some of the tips on Joomla SEO to help you optimize your Joomla website for attracting more visitors.

• You can reduce the number of articles that appear on your front page.
• Enable caching feature for your Joomla.
• It is important to disable or remove all the components, plug ins or modules you are not using at present.
• Work towards installing an additional database optimization component.
• Minimize the number of internal and external links on your pages. Just leave the ones that are most important.
• Enable debugging from the admin area of Joomla, go to global configuration and analyze the number of queries executed. The higher the number, the slower your applications will run. Remember that if the number of queries is more than 50, you must disable the extension that makes the most of the queries.

You can easily optimize your Joomla site via following all the points mentioned above.

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So you’re creating your Joomla site. You're working hard to make it look good, adding in your keywords and all the right content. Now what about your visitors? To drive the most traffic possible to your site there is some advice you just cannot ignore. Read on below to find 6 quick Joomla SEO tips that will help maximize your traffic potential.

Step 1: Turn on Search Friendly URLs

This is one of the most effective Joomla search engine optimization tips. To enable Search Friendly URLs you first must run Apache server. Then, mod_rewrite must be enabled. Your server will also need to allow .htaccess override.

Step 2: Install sh404SEF Component

To install, you will need to download the sh404SEF plug-in from siliana.com. After downloading, you can go through the straightforward configuration to finish installing.

Step 3: Easy & Clean Joomla Titles and URLs

Joomla automatically enters the entire title of your page in your URL, which can make it unnecessarily long and messy for Google results. One way to fix this is to take out stop words. You can do this using the “Title Alias” option when creating your webpage.

Step 4: Insert H1 Tags

First you will need to install the sh404SEF component, which should be no problem if you followed the earlier step. After installation, go to components > sh404SEF > sh404SEF configuration > Meta/SEO > Insert H1 Tags and select Yes. Your H1 tag should be different from your Joomla page title. It should accurately represent what is on the page.

Step 5: Create a Unique Home Page Title

Your Home page tag is quite frankly the most important element of your Joomla site's titles, and as such it should include your most important keywords.

Step 6: Prevent Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can prove problematic down the road in Google and other search engines. So the best advice is to prevent it!

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