Steve’s Blog

Add a List of Related Articles to Your Joomla Site

This tutorial will show you how to create a list of related articles for your Joomla website. You can see an example on the right-hand side of this site in the “Related Articles” module. Joomla is analysing the keywords in the current article and automatically listing other articles that have the most matching keywords. Related articles lists are: … good for Search Engine Optimization because the search engines can find accurate and descriptive links to other pages on your site. … good for your users because they can find other articles similar to the one they’re already reading … which…

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Track Search Queries on Your Joomla Site

This tutorial will show you how to track search queries on your Joomla site. Often these queries can be a great source of information about what your visitors want: They show you what visitors can’t find: If one search term is really popular, it might be because people can’t find it using your current menus … it might be time to add a new menu link. They show you what visitors really want: You may think people want “pink widgets” but search terms might show that people really want “blue widgets”.

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Add a Contact Form Module to Your Joomla Site

This tutorial will show you how to add a contact form to the front of your Joomla site. This will allow people to contact you easily and quickly without having to navigate through to a dedicated “Contact Us” page. Step 1: Click here to download the Rapid Contact module. Login to the Administrator area of your Joomla site. Step 2: Go to the Administrator area of your Joomla site and click on Extensions >> Install / Uninstall Step 3: Upload the Rapid Contact module. Step 4: Go to Extensions >> Module Manager then find and open the Rapid Contact module.…

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Setting up a Joomla Business Directory or Yellow Pages

This tutorial which will show you how to create a business directory or Yellow Pages on your Joomla site. We’re going to use a component called Sobi2, which is available from www.sigsiu.net. Installing Sobi2 Click here to download the Sobi2 component. Go to Administrator >> Extensions >> Install / Uninstall and upload the Sobi2 files. Click “Install Sobi2 data” Go to Menus >> Main Menu and click “New” Choose Sobi2 >> Frontpage or Selected Category for your menu link. Give the link a title such as “Directory” and click save. Visit the front of your site and click on the…

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Adding a Shopping Cart to Joomla

One of the most common questions we get from Joomla learners is … How do I set up a shopping cart with Joomla? For several years the only option was Virtuemart. However, Virtuemart is a very large and complex product that it simply overkill for many sites. Fortunately, some simpler and easier shopping carts have recently been released and perhaps the best of the bunch is RokQuickCart from Rockettheme.com. It does have basic tax and shipping options, plus support for either PayPal or Google Checkout. It doesn’t have the ability to put products into categories or have custom fields for…

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Integrating Magento and Joomla Using MageBridge

We had a great presentation at the Atlanta Joomla Users Group last night. Paul from went over the integration possibilities with Joomla and Magento, a very powerful open source shopping cart. Suffice it to say that Magento is miles ahead of Virtuemart in at least three areas: Features Complexity Expense If you’re looking for a very simple shopping cart with Joomla, Magento isn’t it but RokQuickCart is a good option. Paul’s presentation is embedded below.

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The Biggest Ever Week of Joomla and Drupal Training

Did you guys make a resolution in 2010? Lose a little weight … stop wasting so much time Twitter … (OK, those are mine) As a business, we made just one: spread the Joomla and Drupal gospel as widely as possible. At Christmas last year, we hit 100 Joomla classes. Those were held from Alaska to London and from Vancouver to Miami. This year we’re starting so quickly that we could run 100 classes in a month at this rate. During the last 10 days of January, we’re running 18 classes all across North America. They stretch 3500 kilometers from…

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What Joomla People Need to Know About WordPress 3.0

I had the chance to attend Wordcamp Atlanta on Saturday. It was a well-run event in a great location: the Savannah College of Art and Design. The best presentation was the keynote delivered by Jane Wells who is the User Experience lead from Automattic. Here’s her rundown of where WordPress is going in 2010, head-lined by the release of WordPress 3.0. A lot of WordPress’ successes and problems have lessons for us in the Joomla world.

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Optimising Joomla and Virtuemart for Google Base

This is a guest blog post by David Dawson from Promo-Gifts (UK) Ltd I have been working with google base on my website now for sometime. I’ve found a few different things that can greatly change the way that your products are viewed within Google Base. This is where you can upload products that are then show in Google’s search results. Because Google shows them so frequently, this can be beneficial even if you only have a few products that you want to upload.

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Against-the-Grain Thinking for 2010

Last month I made some predictions for the Joomla world in 2010. Here a couple more ideas that I’ve been thinking about but haven’t yet had the courage to act on: 1) What if CMSs as We Know Them Have Peaked? What if the CMS industry has reached its high-point and may start to receed? Louis Landry mentioned, “I am personally looking beyond CMS because I think the traditional CMS is probably not going to be the focus of the web in the near future.” Certainly the big 3 all seem to have plateaued during 2009:

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