Joomla Blog

How to speed up your Joomla website is a topic that's been discussed quite a bit in our forum lately. In this article we will look at just one technique, how to combine and minify your JavaScript and CSS files. The tool we'll use is a freely available Joomla Extension called JCH Optimize, and it can help speed up your Joomla site dramatically.

Every webmaster wants the sites that they manage to load faster. Highly optimized, quick loading pages are important for many reasons. A speedy site, according to Google, is good for SEO. Mobile devices, where bandwidth is limited, definitely need quick loading websites. This is also very important from a usability perspective as we all know how quickly we navigate away from a page that just hangs as everything loads. It seems that nothing is more frustrating these days than a slow loading web page. In a matter of seconds, people will decide to go elsewhere. Let's look at one way to prevent that from happening.

The biggest feature to hit Joomla 1.6 was the vast improvement with access control. However this greatness comes with responsibility and it can be a pain to test a development site or troubleshoot issues with a live site. Joomla Administrators would love to be able to login as a particular user, without knowing that user's password. Well ... it turns out that this is indeed possible.

CAPTCHA is one of the most used and hated pieces of technology on the web. It almost defines the term "necessary evil" while driving website visitors completely insane. Webmasters love the fact that it can cut spam on their sites to almost nothing, and website visitors sometimes completely abandon their form submissions over frustratingly garbled words and numbers.

People have lamented over and over, "There must be another way!" Well, there are other ways, and we'll look at one in this article. This alternative, however, could be just as controversial as CAPTCHA itself.

Video is clearly becoming the king of media formats on the internet. Adding video to a website is one of the most common needs today, but relatively few people do it because it's not always the easiest thing to accomplish. Most people with a decent understanding of online technology can upload a video to YouTube, and embedding a player has become easier over time, but getting a great looking playlist on your site is normally a different matter...until now.

As Facebook has become the definitive standard for social networking online, more and more web developers are looking for better and easier ways of working it into their websites. This is just as true for the Joomla world. What's great about using a CMS like Joomla is that you have so many options for including services like Facebook into your web pages. We've come across another easy way to do it.

We're often asked how to create an effective and good-looking business directory. Here are a few places to start looking.

When writing web content, you often want to preview how an article will appear before it's published. This provides an opportunity to check that everything looks sensible, especially the positioning of images. However Joomla does not provide a preview feature and although there is a workaround, it's a bit clumsy. In this post I demonstrate how to preview Joomla articles using a free extension.

The Joomla ACL is incredibly flexible but there are a couple of areas where in some circumstances, it might not provide the features you need. For example the frontend registration option assigns users to a group that you specify. But what if you need to give your user the choice as to which group they can join? This post answers introduces you to an extensions that solves this dilemma.

As we teach in The Basics, modules can have different styles. The style of a module can be updated quickly and easily through the Module Class Suffix field as long as your template provider has included some extra styling options. If you’re the one designing the template, or if you just want to add your own styles to an existing template, here’s how it’s done.