Tips for beginners

Life is full of surprises. One of these days I got a job offering with a consistent budget, one of my former clients approached me to "make his site secure".  I said yes, but when turned out what he wanted in fact i had a surprise: he wanted nothing else, just to make the browser warning about "unsecure site" go away. He actually purchased a security certificate and hired someone to install it onto his server - with no success.

Have you been driven crazy by the junk code added to your articles when you, your mate, or your clients are added page content to a Joomla site by copy&pasting from Word? I'm sure the answer is YES. The huge amount of junk you can add this way to your page not only slows down considerably the site, but also can potentially destroy your design. Anyway, you can kiss goodbye the clean, uniform look you (may) wished for your page when started to build it.

Websites take maintenance, and making a habit of performing a little spring cleaning each year can keep a business website running smoothly. The tips below does not apply for Joomla sites alone, any site can benefit from most of these tricks and tips.

Why you should want to do that? Dunno, but it's an evergreen question asked time-to-time from the first day I started to work with Mambo..., so let's take it methodically, to see how one can solve this problem!

One of the problems many users are facing when start they Joomla based site is, that the user information Joomla collects during registration is scarce - username and password often is not quite enough for their purposes. And the first reaction usually is to install a community solution, like Community Builder, JoomSocial or other, fancy user management tool - a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

In a previous tip I enumerated couple of methods on how you can make visible the template positions in Joomla 1.7+.

But there seems to be at least two different problems for some users.