Steve’s Blog

Installing Joomla Locally on Your P.C.

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:

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Send Joomla Updates to Twitter, Facebook and More

socialiconsWould 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.

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Improving Drupal URLs with the Pathauto Module

This tutorial was requested by a student who is learning the Drupal basics. They turned on “Clean URLs” in the Drupal admin area and were surprised to see that the URLs remained largely unchanged:

  • Old: /?q=node/3
  • New: /node/3

The student’s comment was:

“that’s still a silly address for my About Us page. I want the address to be /about-us/.”

The solution is the “Pathauto” module and let’s show you how to set it up:

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Importing RSS Feeds Into Joomla Articles

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:

  • Distributing our content to other Joomla sites. For example, we use this technique to showing these tutorials on Alledia.com.
  • Importing blogs and news on a particular topic from other sites. This way people can read them all in one place.

We’re going to use a component called 4RSS from 4RSS.com.

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Thoughts on Being Elected to Open Source Matters

Last week I was fortunate enough to be elected to the Open Source Matters board along with 5 others. After having a very U.S.-centric board, it’s great to see such a wide diversity of new members. Add a Aussie and a penguin and we’d have someone from all seven continents 🙂

  • Marko Milenovic – Serbia
  • Javier Gomez – Spain
  • Jacques Rentzke – South Africa
  • Robert Deutz – Germany
  • Akarawuth Tamrareang – Thailand

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Importing RSS Feeds Into WordPress Posts

This tutorial will show you how to take an RSS feed and import it into your WordPress site. Each item on the RSS feed will become a separate WordPress post. We use this technique for a couple purposes:

  • Distributing our content to other WordPress sites.
  • Importing blogs and news on a particular topic from other sites. This way people can read them all in one place.

We’re going to use a plugin called FeedWordPress.

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Review of RSSEO Suite by RSJoomla.com

joomla seo sef boxI must admit I knew nothing about RSSeo before starting this review despite having used other RSJoomla products before.

After few minutes of using it, I realised it was very familiar: RSSeo is similar in many ways to iJoomla SEO which we reviewed last last year. Both are essentially quick and easy ways to manage your site’s metadata, plus some additional SEO tools.

Whereas there were very few metadata options available last year, RSSeo joins iJoomla SEO as a worthy option.

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Printer-friendly Versions of Drupal Articles

In this tutorial we’ll show you how to add a “Print This Page” button to Drupal. The main reason you’d want to do this is as a courtesy for your readers. Many still print things they read online and you don’t want them to waste that expensive printer ink just to print your logo and theme as well as the article.

This is a themed tutorial because our sister newsletter with WordPress tutorials is covering the same topic this week: Creating Printer-friendly Versions of WordPress Posts.

Without this solution you’d likely need to create a separate CSS file with styles specifically for the printed page.  Fortunately the Print Module makes this much easier. It will automatically create a printer-friendly version of each page. As an added bonus and it can also do “Email to a Friend” and “Download as a PDF” link (if your server has the correct features).
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Creating Printer-friendly Versions of WordPress Posts

In this tutorial we’ll show you how to place add “Print This Post” button to WordPress. The main reason you’d want do this is as a courtesy for your readers. Many still print things they read online and you don’t want them to waste that expensive printer ink just to print your logo and theme as well as the post.

This is a themed tutorial because our sister newsletter with Drupal tutorials is covering the same topic this week: Creating Printer-friendly Versions of Drupal Articles.

Without this solution you’d likely need to create a separate CSS file with styles specifically for the printed page.  Fortunately the WP-Print plugin makes this much easier. It will automatically create a printer-friendly version of each post.

Continue reading “Creating Printer-friendly Versions of WordPress Posts”

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5 Useful JCE Features That People Miss

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:

1) Cut and Paste Images Into Different Folders

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:

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