As one of the most popular CMS’ in the world, with more than 20 million sites using the platform, Joomla has a lot to offer even the least techie type who wants to develop their own website.
Bearing this in mind, we’ve come up with a list of 5 things that can really help your Joomla installation to give it more functionality and even perhaps, earn you some spare cash!
So without further ado:
It would be rude not to give DPCalendar a mention wouldn’t it? DPCalendar is a sleekly designed, high quality and super-responsive Joomla calendar and event management system. It has all of the usual features that you would expect from a high-end Joomla calendar and can even be integrated with social networks.
Add SEO functionality and you have one of the most powerful calendars on the market today.
This extension is the most used alternative to the Joomla default editor. It brings endless features to your writing experience like additional background colours, extra fonts, enhanced multimedia controls and much more. Ideal for those who really want to make their posts stand out, JCE Editor is a great addition to your Joomla site.
This week has seen a huge botnet attacking Wordpress sites and with this in mind, it’s worth bringing to your attention that passwords really should be very strong. Joomla sites, just like any other, are attacked every day by automated scripts which try “dictionary attacks” on passwords. If this password is simple, you may as well just hand it over to the hacker and have done with it.
Choose a complex password and avoid creating or leaving the administrator login name as “admin” for the best results (event better delete the default admin user with the ID 62 and create a new one). If you’re not sure, choose a password manager that will create a complex password for you.
Want to add another revenue stream to your site? Then simply select the ads and affiliates that Joomla helpfully provide, select the code and past it into your site wherever you want it to appear!
Let’s face it, in the current economic climate, we all need as much help as we can get!
We live increasingly in the smartphone age and as such, it would be a mistake to not make a mobile version of your Joomla website. There are plenty of extensions that can help you with this or you can choose a responsive design that adapts to whatever device is displaying the site.
As we mentioned last week, there are a limited number of Joomla themes for this at the moment, but the Joomla dev community will soon catch up and offer a lot more choice.
Anyone who has anything to do with web design will no doubt already have heard of, or even used, responsive web design.
Responsive web design means that when a webpage is opened on a mobile device or tablet, the page is displayed perfectly, with everything appearing as it does in a PC browser. This does away with cramped mobile websites, with tiny writing and constant scrolling, which is very difficult to navigate.
As we’re living in the connected age, where there are more smartphones in the world than toothbrushes and PC sales are in a steep decline due to tablets, it’s easy to work out why being responsive is a vital part of a modern website.
To begin with, responsive designs auto-scale to fit the destination device perfectly, without altering the content of the site. This is done automatically and doesn’t require any user intervention to make it work properly.
The technology works by using @media queries in order to discover the size of the target device, then present a layout based on that. It’s a reasonably new technology but has been around since about 2011.
Not necessarily, one of the beauties of having a Joomla website is the use of templates or themes, which have been pre-coded and optimised so that you simply install and go. There are already a large number of responsive templates available in the Joomla templates library, so it should be relatively simple to find one that suits.
However, if you have a simple site, then by all means install a responsive design template, but beware as Joomla sites that have a lot of extensions are likely to cause a problem when it comes to installation.
For the most part, it’s likely to be images and video that gives a problem in some templates and so it’s worth looking at your site structure in order to decide how you can simplify it.
This isn’t a bad exercise to undertake anyway, as problems that you previously had been aware of will inevitably present themselves when undergoing a full site audit.
The lack of support so far for Joomla extensions and responsive web design is due simply to the newness of the technology, so it shouldn’t be too long before the Joomla community respond and begin to publish compatible extensions and plugins.
In the meantime however, if you come across this problem, then it’s wise to either abandon the project for now, or give your site a good overhaul in order to make it compatible.
Well, those who don’t have a responsive website are more likely to find themselves trailing the opposition, as so many people now access the net via a smartphone or tablet. This means that you have to offset the potential cost in terms of time and money in order to decide whether it’s worth it right now.
Researching rival sites will help you with that, if all of your competitors already have responsive sites, then it’s time to act. Likewise, if none of your competitors do, then it’s worth asking yourself if you will benefit significantly from getting a head start.
The fact is, at some point you are going to have to adapt to modern technologies so it’s worth getting ahead of the game, in order to stay that way.
The next DPCalendar version will offer some cool configuration options to optimize your calendar and events for all kind of devices. Of course every view will be repsonsive using the state of the art framework bootstrap.
For the novice especially, choosing the right shopping cart extension to use on a Joomla ecommerce site can be a daunting and confusing affair. Like other extensions, there’s a bewildering array to choose from and this can result in a lot of time wasted on trial and error.
Bearing this in mind, we’ve put together some of the better Joomla 2.5 shopping cart extensions to help you to make a choice. These are free solutions and have a number of common features, including:
So this is what you want as basics in your shopping cart and those that don’t contain these options should be discarded immediately.
J2Store is ideal for beginners, thanks to its simplicity, and your ecommerce shop can be up and running very quickly. There is an easy-to-use interface which allows for configuration, but doesn’t complicate things too much.
However, payment plugins have to be downloaded separately and this could put some users off.
Similar to J2Store is JoomShopping, an open-source solution which is feature-rich. This includes product ratings and testimonials, which is great for additional product details and can even be used for sale items and so on.
Menus and configuration are fairly straightforward and it can be found as a free extension, or you can purchase a Pro version. However, there is only support for three payment methods, so this may not suit everyone.
This extension comes in a choice of three different editions: HikaShop Starter, HikaShop Essential and HikaShop Business.
The starter edition gives plenty of features that are likely to keep you happy, such as coupon and discount options and customisable options for global sales, taxes and currencies.
HikaShop also supports social and RSS for products, so that it’s a simple matter for your items to be shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. This has numerous configuration options and is a powerful ecommerce solution for anyone.
Has long been billed as the best online shop solution for Joomla, but has fallen down slightly with more recent builds and come in for a fair amount of criticism. The sheer amount of options it has makes it an inadvisable choice for the novice and this is recommended for more advanced users.
Of course this is far from an exhaustive list, so it’s always worth doing your research and having a good look around at what else is available. Experimentation is also a good idea so that you can familiarise yourself with Joomla shopping extensions in order to help you choose the best one to suit you and your business.
There are a plethora of shared hosting plans to be found online, some great, others mediocre and some downright bad. This makes choosing a host for your Joomla website something of a headache, if you’ve never done it before, as there are just so many options.
However, we’ve had a look around for some of the well-known and respected hosts that specialise in Joomla to help take the hard work out of finding one.
Before you go ahead, plan your site out – is it going to be a hobby or blogging site or are you looking for something commercial? If you’re looking to use the site for a business, it’s not recommended that you go with shared hosting as it’s likely you’ll need a premium plan.
For hobbies and bloggers, who just want a basic platform on which to share their passions with the world, it’s possible to get free or shared hosting that costs a negligible amount.
Decent free hosting for a Joomla website is rare, and if you’re going to go down that route then the only real advantage you will have is the opportunity to use your own domain name.
Shared hosting, on the hand, is ideal for many people who don’t want to pay the earth as they share a server and its resources with others. Shared hosting tends to cost in the region of $4-20 and should include the following:
Hopefully, this should give you a good starting point when it comes to choosing a host. There are plenty more hosting companies out there which are just as good as those mentioned, but this will give you some kind of benchmark to work from.
Happy hunting!
You may have heard the phrase ‘content is king’ which has become so well used recently it’s more or less become a cliché. However, it’s true now more than ever before following the Google algorithm updates last year, so if you create regular content for your Joomla site, it’s more important than ever to get it right.
The first thing to consider when planning written content is whether you can actually write well. Google’s algorithms now look for a combination of things to check whether written content is legible.
These include:
Well, if you can’t write and your spelling is atrocious, hire a professional to do it for you. Bloggers and article writers vary wildly in price but there are a lot of them out there so set up a job on Problogger Job Boards and outline the project and what you’re looking for in a writer in full.
Of course, content mills still exist, where you can pick up a writer for pennies, but the quality is generally very low. This is one reason that Google brought out the updates, to address poor quality sites, stuffed with keywords which read atrociously.
Another route is to find an employee that kind write well within the company. You may be surprised who comes forward, there are plenty of budding writers out there that just don’t have the confidence to do it for a living.
When planning your content, think about how you can mix it up with images and video. Web video and infographics are very popular these days as they are an easy way for people to take in information.
People surfing the internet become bored and distracted very quickly and prefer content that they can disseminate rapidly. This means that videos should be short and preferably, amusing.
Images can be from many sources, but do check out distribution rights before taking from Google images or any other source. It’s not in your interest to be sued for copyright infringement. Again, people love infographics as they provide a strong visual with little in the way of text that isn’t completely informational.
Also ensure that written content is presented in short paragraphs, using relatively simple language, depending on the audience and with white space in between each paragraph so that it’s easy to scan.
