Steve’s Blog

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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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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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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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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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.

Continue reading “Adding a Shopping Cart to Joomla”

Installing Sobi2

1. Click here to download the Sobi2 component.
2. Go to Administrator >> Extensions >> Install / Uninstall and upload the Sobi2 files.
3. Click “Install Sobi2 data”
4. Go to Menus >> Main Menu and click “New”
5. Choose Sobi2 >> Frontpage or Selected Category for your menu link. Give the link a title such as “Directory” and click save.
6. Visit the front of your site and click on the new “Directory” link. It should look like the screenshot on the right:

Continue reading “Setting up a Joomla Business Directory or Yellow Pages”

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.

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”