This tutorial is the answer to two questions we’ve been asked repeatedly:
Essentially they’re looking to change a link from http://www.cnn.com to http://www.ostraining.com/link/cnn/. The link still goes to the CNN website, but it first goes to a url on the webmaster’s own site.
Continue reading “How to Automatically Add Joomla Links to Keywords”
Lots of websites use a discussion forum to help their users.
Our choice of discussion forum for Joomla is Agora from JVitals.com. We use Agora to support our Joomla training students and in this tutorial we’re going to show you how to set it up on your site.
The hottest new extension in Joomla is K2.
Why? Normal Joomla articles provide you with a Title and Body. K2 gives you the flexibility to add much more information. Last week in Part 1 we covered the main administrator parts of K2:
If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend that you go back and read Part 1 first. This week we’re going to focus on the frontend of K2.
The hottest new extension in Joomla is K2.
Why? Normal Joomla articles provide you with a Title and Body. K2 gives you the flexibility to add much more information. For example, this is part of a K2 article about a camera called the Canon EOS Rebel:
Beyond just an article, you can add information about:
You can also add tags, videos, photo galleries, comments and more. You can see the full Canon EOS Rebel example article here.
That is the essential benefit of K2 … you can create articles with far more information and features.
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:
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.
Continue reading “Send Joomla Updates to Twitter, Facebook and More”
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:
We’re going to use a component called 4RSS from 4RSS.com.
It’s no secret that Joomla’s default editor lacks quite a few features. We often recommend that people upgrade to Joomla Content Editor (JCE). You can click here to find full instructions on how to install JCE, including a video.
What we’re going to cover in this tutorial are 5 really great features of JCE that people often don’t realise are there:
One common complaint about Joomla’s default Media Manager is that you can’t move images around. Once you’ve uploaded an image to one location, you’ll need to delete it and re-upload it if you want it in a different folder. JCE allows you to do that:
This tutorial is similar to last week’s in two ways: becaue it’s the answer to a question asked by a user in our support forum and also because it deals with managing people signing up on your Joomla site.
It has one important difference however … it’s much shorter! This week’s tutorial explains how to approve Joomla users when they register. You might have a school website and only want to approve parents or students. You might have a club website and only want to have members join your site. This tutorial will show you how. We’re
Continue reading “Approving Joomla Users When They Register”
This tutorial is the answer to a question asked by a user in our support forum … “how do I collect more information from my members when they register?”.
The user’s problem is that the normal Joomla registration form gives you precisely 5 fields:
That’s it. If you want to collect people’s location, birthday, opinion or any more information about them you’re stuck. What we’re going to show you in this tutorial is how to collect more information from your users when they register.
Continue reading “Collecting More Information From Joomla Users When They Register”
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 products (except color and size). Really it’s ideal for a website selling up to 20 or 30 products.