Steve’s Blog

People often ask “what’s the best blog extension for Joomla?”. Our answer: “how about Joomla itself?”.

We use Joomla for our blog on alledia.com and get 10s of 1000s of visitors every month. Here’s how to set up a blog using Joomla:

• Step 1: Go to Content >> Section Manager and make a section called “Blog”.
• Step 2: Go to Content >> Category Manager and make categories for your blog. Make sure to assign them to the “Blog” category.
• Step 3: Go to Content >> Article Manager and write the first few articles for your blog. When you’re writing each article, be sure to click the “Read More” button at the bottom of the page to insert the red line. This will create an intro text for the article. Everything before the red line will be the intro. To get to the rest of the article, people will need to click “Read More”.

• Step 4: Go to Menus >> Main Menu >> New >> Articles >> Section Blog Layout and choose the “Blog” section that you created in Step 1.
• Step 5: Go to the front of your site and click on the new link. If you don’t like what you see, you can go back to the menu link from Step 4 and change the “Parameters” on the right-hand side. Common things to change are the number of articles on each page and the number of columns.

Adding Comments

If you’d like to allow people to leave comments to your blog, click here and follow the instructions.

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Often you have pages on your website that you want to keep private – either for your staff or for you registered members.

This week we’ll walk you through how to keep search engine bots from indexing certain articles.

Method #1

1. In your Joomla Admin panel, go to Content >> Article Manager and open the article you wish to keep private.
2. On the right-hand side under “Parameters (Article)” you will see a field labled “Access Level”.
3. If you set this to “Registered” then only people at the “Registered” user level and above will be able to see the article.
4. If you set this to “Special” then only people at the “Author” user level and above will be able to see the article.

Click here to see a list of the different Joomla user levels and what they can do.

Method #2

1. In your Joomla Admin panel, go to Content >> Article Manager and open the article you wish to keep private.
2. On the right-hand side under “Metadata Information” you will see a field labled “Robots”.
3. You can write “noindex” into this box and search engines should recognize that this page should not be indexed

To verify that this has worked, visit the secret page on the front of your site and click “View Source” in your browser. If everything has worked correctly you should be able to see a line in the code looking like this:

< meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” / >

(we’ve added spaces around the < and > signs so you can see the code)

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As the season of giving and good will toward others is upon us what better time to collect donations for your favorite charity, organization or cause. This week we’ll show you how to do just that by adding a PayPal Dontation button to your website to help you collect donations.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Download the Easy Paypal Donation Module
2. In the administration area of your Joomla site, go to Extensions >> Install / Uninstall and upload the file to install.
3. In the administration area of your Joomla site, go to Extensions >> Module Manager and locate the Easy Paypal Donation Module and open the module.

Essential Options

The one essential option that you have to fill in is “Paypal Account”. Be sure to enter your Paypal email in that field. You can fix the donation level in “Donation Amount” or leave it blank for people to choose their own amount:

Advanced Options

You also have more advanced features available. For example, you create a “Thank You” page and redirect people there after payment. Also, although the developer has done a great job with this module, you might not want a link back to his site. If you don’t, set “Show Footer” to Yes.

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One of the most famous blogging experts is Brain Clark on Copyblogger. He recently wrote a post about the “Click Here problem”.

He quotes research that shows how often people click on different kinds of link:

• “Click to continue”: 8.53%
• “Continue to article”: 3.3%
• “Read more”: 1.8%

The main problem is that “Read More” doesn’t tell people what to do or what they’ll be reading about. Well, you can probably guess which of these options Joomla uses by default.

Fortunately, it is possible to make Joomla’s Read More more descriptive and useful.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Go to the administrator area of your site and Content >> Article Manager.
2. In the parameters of your article, under ‘Parameters(Advanced)’, enter the text you would like the article to use for the Read More link. If you leave this field blank, Joomla will use the default “Read More”.
3. This is how it will look on the front end of your site:

If you don’t want to do this yourself for every article, both sh404SEF and SEF Advance are components that will optimize your URLs and also insert the article title into the read more link. Finally, if you’re not using either of those, click here to find a code hack available to insert the title automatically (notice what we did? ).

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Joomla templates allow you to redesign your site easily. They also allow you style your modules. Your login box can have one color, your “Latest News” can have another color and your “Most Popular News” can have third.

Here’s how you do it

1. Go to the administrator area of your site and Extensions >> Module Manager.
2. In the parameters of your module, on the right-hand side, you’ll see a box saying “Module Class Suffix”.
3. You’ll have to read the documentation for your template to know what to enter – each template is different. If you’re using Bolt you could enter any of these:

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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 is good for you because they may stay on your site longer

In order to create our list, we’re going to need three extensions: a component, a module and a plugin. Let’s get them up and running on our Joomla site:

• Step 1: Click here to download the latest version of the “FJ Related” component.
• Step 2: Click here to download the latest version of the “FJ Related Articles Plus” module.
• Step 3: Click here to download the latest version of the “Add Keywords” plugin.
• Step 4: Go to the administrator area of your site, Extensions >> Install / Uninstall and upload all three.
• Step 5: Go to Extensions >> Plugin Manager and enable the “System – Add Keywords” plugin.
• Step 6: Go to Extensions >> Module Manager and enable the “Related Articles” module.

Once you’ve followed those six steps, your related articles list should start working.

A note of caution: the “Add Keywords” plugin will automatically generate keywords for all your articles. You don’t have to do anything. However, to reduce the amount of work your site has to do, it may not create the keywords automatically. Have patience and the links will show reasonably quickly.

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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”.

Continue reading “Track Search Queries on 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.
• Step 5: On the right-hand side, under “Module Parameters” enter all the details you’d like to use on the contact form. Click “Apply” and check the contact form on the front of your site.

A note of caution: contact forms are susceptible to spam. If you find yourself receiveing spam emails from this form, go to “Module Parameters” and right at the bottom you will be select and enable a spam-blocking question.