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…

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

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

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: Go to the…

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. This image is an example using the Bolt template. Red header, white background. Orange header, orange background. Yellow header, white background. Green header, green background. You can see the full list of color options by clicking here. Here’s how you do it Go to the administrator area of your site and Extensions >> Module Manager. In the parameters of your module, on…