Joomla Template Editing for Beginners
Video Showing How To Edit a Joomla Template
Steve’s Blog
Using WordPress as a CMS
We teach three kinds of website software: Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. At each class people bring different preconceived notions: Drupal: “This stuff is really hard, right?” Joomla: “This stuff is a quirky, right?” WordPress: “This stuff isn’t very powerful, right?” Our job is to convince them they’re wrong. One of the reasons people think WordPress isn’t powerful is because they believe it can’t be used to build an ordinary website with static pages.
WordPress Contact Form Tutorial
Unlike Joomla or Drupal, WordPress doesn’t have a default contact form. However, there are many good options to choose from. We’re going to recommend a plugin called “Contact Form 7”.
4 Joomla Classes for the Price of 1 in London and San Francisco
One is warm, sunny and on the beautiful Pacific Ocean. The other is cold, rainy and on the grey Thames (I’m allowed to make fun of it … I was born in its suburbs) San Francisco and London and nearly 5500 miles apart and you might not think they have much in common. Normally you’d be right, but this is an exception. Next week we’ve got two Joomla classes, one in each city: London – March 10 (Beginner) San Francisco – March 12 (Beginner)
Adding Metadata to Your Drupal Nodes
This week’s tutorial explains how to add metadata to your Drupal site. By default, Drupal has no fields for metadata. Check the source code at and you’ll see what I mean. To fix that issue, we recommend a module called Nodewords.
Installing Joomla Locally on Your P.C.
Following on from other newsletters where we showed you how to set up Joomla on a Mac and also how to develop locally and moving your site to a live server, this week we’re going to walk you through installing Joomla locally, on a P.C.. We’re going to use WAMP for this tutorial. WAMP stands for “Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP” which are the different elements that allow you to run Joomla on your computer. Here’s how you do it:
Send Joomla Updates to Twitter, Facebook and More
Would you like to be able to update your Joomla site and automatically send that update to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, Ning and dozens of other sites? This tutorial will show you how. Our first part will be to create an RSS feed to export all our new posts. From there we’ll use Twitterfeed.com and Ping.fm to distribute the posts to all our social networks.
Improving Drupal URLs with the Pathauto Module
This tutorial was requested by a student who is learning the Drupal basics. They turned on “Clean URLs” in the Drupal admin area and were surprised to see that the URLs remained largely unchanged: Old: /?q=node/3 New: /node/3 The student’s comment was: “that’s still a silly address for my About Us page. I want the address to be /about-us/.” The solution is the “Pathauto” module and let’s show you how to set it up:
Importing RSS Feeds Into Joomla Articles
This tutorial will show you how to take an RSS feed and import it into your Joomla site. Each item on the RSS feed will become a separate Joomla article. We use this technique for a couple purposes: Distributing our content to other Joomla sites. For example, we use this technique to showing these tutorials on Alledia.com. Importing blogs and news on a particular topic from other sites. This way people can read them all in one place. We’re going to use a component called 4RSS from 4RSS.com.
Thoughts on Being Elected to Open Source Matters
Last week I was fortunate enough to be elected to the Open Source Matters board along with 5 others. After having a very U.S.-centric board, it’s great to see such a wide diversity of new members. Add a Aussie and a penguin and we’d have someone from all seven continents 🙂 Marko Milenovic – Serbia Javier Gomez – Spain Jacques Rentzke – South Africa Robert Deutz – Germany Akarawuth Tamrareang – Thailand