Joomla Tips And Tricks

The other day I’d been doing some testing on the search features for client’s site and I came up with some interesting results. This website, based around sports, was pulling up results headed “Mambo”, “PHP.net”, “MySQL.com”.

I checked on Alledia.com and the same thing was happening:

I’d forgotten something really simple … by default Joomla comes with the “Search Newsfeeds”, “Search Weblinks” and “Search Contacts” mambots published. If you never get around to deleting all the newsfeeds and weblinks, they’ll then turn up in the search results.

So, I unpublished those mambots, and also those the called “Search Sections” and “Search Categories”. I figure that people are looking for individual content items rather than general folders on a subject.

A small change, but hopefully it will speed up the search results and also make them more useful.

During the last couple of weeks a new client has been complaining to us that their site was always running slow and timing out. The problem got so bad that they asked us to move it from their hosting company to ours in the hope that things would improve.

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of moving the site. There was only one problem – it had had a Joomla statistics component running inside it for over a year. The database was, without exaggeration, about twenty-five times the normal size of a Joomla database. It took several minutes to download the tables from PHPMyAdmin and then the fun was just beginning. Actually trying to upload such a huge file left the server hanging every time. The only way to upload the database was to edit it into small sections and run the queries secion by section. 

I can’t guarantee that 100% of the website’s speed problems had been caused by the statistics component but the extra database tables were so large and cumbersome that they undoubtedly caused some drag on the site.

The statistics collected by the component were reasonably useful, particuarly when it came to tracking the actions of individual users, but that benefit was more than outweighed by the performance problems it caused.

Four Hints for Collecting Statistics on Your Joomla Site:

1. Turn off Joomla’s default statistics package except for "Log Search Strings" (its useful to know what people are searching for).
2. Don’t use JoomlaStats, BSQ Sitestats or anything else inside of Joomla. Let someone elses’ servers store your mountains of data.
3. Sign up for Google Analytics and put the code at the bottom of your template, above </body>
4. Use a hosting company that utilizes CPanel and AWStats. Old and somewhat ugly, AWStats is still a great source of data.
   

For larger companies there are commercial solutions such as Indextools, but small to medium size sites should be able to do a good job of tracking their visitors and conversions with Google Analytics and AWStats, without spending a cent and without turning their database into an 500 hundred pound elephant.

Yesterday, I read a tutorial by Copyblogger, explaining how to write attention-grabbing blog headlines. So excuse today’s exclamation mark and over enthusiasm in the headline – I’m still practising the secret of better blogging (#2)! Before your patience runs out, here’s a list of our favorite Joomla tutorials showing how you can get rid of frustration once and for all (#5) and how you can build a Joomla website you can be proud of (#9):

1. Joomlart.com’s Understanding Joomla / Mambo CSS in 5 minutes. This is good enough to be part of the official documentation. I often give this to designers wanting to learn more about Joomla or clients who want to learn how to modify there own site. Its graphical, its comprehensive, its great.
2. Barrie North’s Joomla Template Tutorial. The original and best guide to building a Joomla template from scratch. Its recently been updated for Joomla 1.5 (zip file). Start knowing nothing about Joomla and
   
3. JoomlaTutorials.com. This is a new and improved variation on the Flash tutorials format initially produced by Mambodemo.com. JoomlaTutorials is easier to navigate and less cluttered with ads than its predecessor. They have a large series of clearly explained and useful video tutorials.
4. Joe Orr’s How to Install Open-SEF. Not the most comprehensive or most flashy, but perhaps the most important tutorial you can read for your Joomla site. Open-SEF is rapidly becoming such a powerful tool that you really need to look into its features and consider using it on your site.
5. Cory Webb’s HowtoJoomla.net. Not really organized, but this is a great site for browsing through and picking up tips and tricks.
   

Have we missed any? Contact us via the comments form below and we’ll add them to the list.

Two posts today, because I wanted some good news to counteract the problems with Virtuemart mentioned in the post below.

Early this week we found a great little hack, built by benneh over at the Joomla.org forum. It allows people to get a new password without having to remember their username. People nearly always forget their username and so this makes it much more likely that people will return to your site if they no longer have their details.

• You can see it in action by clicking here:  

• You can download it by clicking here.
  

 We’ll begin with 5 ways to make your Joomla site as professional as possible:

1. Create a new favicon.ico. Yes, the default black Joomla logo is cute, but people bookmarking your site they need to see something that identifies your site rather than Joomla. If you don’t want to design on a 16×16 pixels scale, there are sites that will generate a favicon for you. Then upload it to your images folder.
2. Make sure you backup your database everyday. We recommend the JomBackup Daily MySQL backup plugin. 
   
3. Don’t cut and paste from Microsoft Word. It may be easy but Word produces some of the worst HTML ever seen by the eyes of man. Cut and paste into a text editor such as Notepad before adding that content to your site.
4. Make sure you put the Search button in an obvious place. A search of the latest 20 sites on the Joomla forums showcase reveals that more than half don’t have a clearly visible search button.  Low on the left or right hand column are not great places. Try and put it close to the menu so that people’s eyes are naturally drawn to it.
   
5. Utilize "Read More". Lots of visitors will never get past your frontpage. Make sure that your homepage is not a long text area and start creating some "tease" text. Articles should not be longer than 3 or 4 sentences, followed by a "Read More…" link.
   

5 ways to improve your site via your Global Configuration file:

1. Content >> Unpublish the PDF and Print options. These create duplicate content problems in Google and may hinder your SEO succcess.
2. Server >> Use Server Defaults. Setting this to 777 or 775 leaves big security holes in your site.
3. Metadata. Don’t overload here. Keep it to a maximum of 5 description words and 5 keywords. These will appear on every page and you want to allow each page to have its own keywords.
4. Cache. Turn it on! Your site will run faster. The cache function saves copies of the web page so that users don’t have to load your whole page every time they visit.
   
5. Statistics. Turn them off! They’ll slow your site down. Go and get Google Analytics instead.

A quick little tutorial to show how to add a little RSS button to the browser bar when people visit your site.

1. Go to Run-Digital.com to get their RSS Feed Manager for Joomla! (Click here to get it). Install it as a component.
2. Take the url of your RSS feed from the component and go to FeedBurner.com. Sign up and register your feed. They should give you an easy to remember and customize URL. Ours is simply: http://feeds.feedburner.com/alledia
3. Add the following code to the head of your template:

If you want different RSS Feeds available on each page you will need to copy your template and assign the copies to the right pages unless someone can come up with a clever work-around….

Thanks to Sam over at SiteCoffee.com for tips with this.

On 1.5, you’ll need to turn off the default RSS feeds by going to Menus >> Main Menu >> Parameters (Advanced) >> Show a Feed Link >> No

Since IE7 has come out, a lot of people have noticed that Suckerfish dropdown menus are allergic to it. The principal problem is that once they've dropped down, they refuse to scroll back up again. This affects a lot of Joomla sites using Suckerfish variations and also the Extended Menu module.

The solution is thankfully, simple. If your list menu ID is called "topmenu", you only have to add the following lines of code to your css:

#topmenu li:hover, #topmenu li.hover {
    position:static;
    }

Thanks to Built from Source for the original tip and to Sam from Site Coffee for Joomla implementation. 

Are you fed up with little square grey boxes saying "login" and then "logout" on your Joomla site. Here's how to liven up your login box.

1) Make 2 little graphics – one saying "login" and one saying "logout". 70 pixels wide and 20 pixels high is a nice size. Upload them to the /images folder as login.gif and logout.gif

2) Go to /language/english.php and replace DEFINE('_BUTTON_LOGIN','Login'); with DEFINE('_BUTTON_LOGIN',''); and also replace DEFINE('_BUTTON_LOGOUT','Logout'); with DEFINE('_BUTTON_LOGOUT','Logout');  This means no text will sit on top of your images.

3) Upload the new mod_login.php to your /modules folder. Click here to download it . If your files are png or jpg instead of login.gif, search the code and update with the new extension.

And you're done! 3 simple steps to a livelier site.

If you do lose your SuperAdmin password for Joomla, don’t worry because theres an easy way to get it back. Just login to your MySQL database and run this query for

Versions up to Joomla 1.0.12.

UPDATE `jos_users` SET `name` = ‘admin’, `password` = ‘21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3’ WHERE `id` =62 LIMIT 1 ;

Versions from Joomla 1.0.13 to 1.0.15

UPDATE `jos_users` SET `name` = ‘admin’, `password` = ‘af9083d4b82dbc0745b124db3b3cf15d:M0WuLowO4rtRTddG’ WHERE `id` =62 LIMIT 1 ;

Your username will now be admin and your password will be admin also.

If you’re running an older version of Joomla or Mambo, you might need to change jos_users to mos_users.

If you’d like to change your password to something other than admin, go to http://www.allhype.co.uk and you can encrypt your password using MD5 – the same system Joomla uses.

Some quick tips and tricks to get you started with the PunLA forum:

1. PunLa installs like any other component. Simply click and upload.
2. Login as Super-Administrator and the admin options will appear at the top of the forum.
3. Make sure you have the correct version – PunLA (for Joomla) or PunBO (for Mambo).
4. Only seems to work with localhost database currently.
5. Make sure that everyone registering with your site uses the PunLA sign-up module. Unpublish the standard login module.
6. The forum has a very clever skinning option here, although PunLA doesn’t yet guarantee that styles other than Vershire will work.
7. Futher support for the component is provided at: http://www.punla.profbh.net.