Joomla install & config

How to install and configure Joomla with minimum effort, tuned for speed, SEO, security - and top performance.

How an author can submit a story?

We all know that Joomla is all about collaboration. And anyone who had set up at least one instance of Joomla knows, that there are multiple levels of access in Joomla, among them one called Author who is supposedly able to submit an article to a Joomla site from the frontend.

How to upload pictures to the site?

The use of pictures in Joomla is a bit different from the methods you are used before, so you need to learn new habits here. But the first problem is usually not that, but how to upload those pictures to the site.

First of all we strongly recommend some additional components to your Joomla site, if you don't have done allready.

On the top of these recommended add-ons are the file/FTP managers joomlaXplorer/Ninja eXplorer/OSE Filemanager and the WYSIWYG editor JCE. We will use both recipes here.

Accessing the administration panel

Okay, you've installed your Joomla site, and want to began to master it. You click on the administrator link in the frontend and instantly hit the wall: a blank page is showing up. What's the deal? The cause is generally simple: This is happening almost always because your 'live-site' setting in your configuration.php file doesn't correspond with your Administration URL. You either have a www in your live-site setting in your configuration.php file and you are accessing your administration backend without the www or vice versa. It's highly recommended to correct this, the problem can impact even your site's Google rating.

Ajax - preferred by some, hated by others

Ajax is not a genuine Joomla technology, it is just one of programming techniques to made a web page more attractive.

Options

YOnce the basic setup is done, yo need to tweak your Joomla installation to behave as you need. you will need individual configuration settings for your website elements (components, plugins, modules, content pages, templates): in the Joomla lingo we call them options. These options are applied to the whole website, for users, categories, modules, components. Since Joomla 1.6 this has became standard: you will always find an icon named Options in the backend pages, which are providing you the interface to set your preferences for the given component.

For example in the Joomla 1.6+ in the template manager you have in the Options a way to switch on or off the support for the well known trick to append "?tp=1", which reveals you the available module positions for your templates.

Now you can block attempts to visualize by others these module positions by visiting the address:

http ://yourdomain.com/index.php?tp=1

BTW: The "tp" stands for template position and the trick is one of core Joomla tricks.

Navigation

To find your way around the website, you will need navigation with corresponding links. In Joomla! we call this a menu. You may create as many menus as desired and nest them into as many different ways as you wish. Each menu is a module which can be positioned on a provided area in the template.

Important note: Joomla! is a genuinely menu driven system, the most important behaviors: as what module when to be shown, what template to be used on a certain page, etc all can be controlled using by associating behaviors to menu items. So, plan carefully your menu - it is the core of your site's end user experience!

Subcategories

How did you find this site? Did you asked yourself the question how a site can be found on the net? Watch your own habits, and you'll see: you are looking to the sites found on first page of the Google results for a given search term. Must be something very important, to go down to the second, and even to the third page. What else you use to find new web content? Social media? Recommendations from friends? Links on pages you like and visit? Do you know, that less, than 1% of existing web-pages are reaching the first page of the Google results for some search term? do you know, than less, than 17% of existing web-pages are even spidered regularly by the major search-engines? If you don't get spidered and/or you don't reach the magic first 3 pages for at least some search terms you are interested in - you aren't exist. And I can't believe, that anyone building a web-page plans to remain hidden... So, how you can get there? Enter the art of SEO. You will find some interesting, Joomla-specific ideas here which may help you learning it! And never forget: SEO is about what you do every day. SEO is a long term strategy - not a quick fix.

Joomla is safe!! - you can heard in every forums. Is indeed safe enough? Yes, the core Joomla, if properly configured and deployed is a reasonably secure environment. The difference can be made by several factors. and first of these factors is YOU, the webmaster. But there are others, like the hosting environment, the addons used, and couple of others. Watch your back! And keep your site safe!

... and not only. Sometimes you don't know, why your Joomla site isn't working as you want it. Here you can find some tips wich might help you finding your way!

And, remember: everyone was a beginner!

Yesterday your Joomla site worked just fine. Today is misbehaving. And you're clueless... Right? Hey, you're not the first one having this experience. You're on the good site where you might find the cure for your problem!

All kind of software tools you should have to be productive. From local development environments to programming tools, resources, tips and tricks wich can help you build your Joomla siter faster, easier.


 

Basic tricks to make Joomla work for you. Things you can solve using various configuration areas of your Joomla, your hosting environment or your components.