Last week I revealed that the number one thing I hate about Joomla is extensions. I have a love/hate relationship with Joomla at times, and so it's only fair that I counter this with a look at the thing I love most about Joomla. Discover what this is and I'll also introduce you to some Joomla goodies you've probably never heard of. 

There are a huge number of positives that Joomla has in its favor. It's open source. It has a huge community. And once our fabulous and free Joomla training course gives you the knowledge to use it properly, it does become easy to manage. But there is one thing that drives me and thousands of others crazy. Learn what this is and how to take steps to minimize its impact on your Joomla life.

We’re a couple of weeks into the new year and I’m ready to attack my website To Do list. I realised that a lot of points on my list would apply to your site too, so here are my 7 ways to make your Joomla site shine in 2012. Wish it were still 2009 – the title would have had a much nicer ring.

This week's newsletter will explain how you can get a custom K2 template working for your Joomla website. It's a bit more involved in terms of file manipulation, but we'll look at it from a very general point of view, give you some tips and explain why we think this is a really nice feature. You will need either good knowledge of and access to cPanel or a good command of FTP. You will also need to know a bit about CSS, and remember that you can always get professional help when you need it.

This week we’ll take a look at a new slider building extension from Offlajn. It's a pretty nice toy to play with, and while we haven't had it for long enough to become complete experts yet, the benefits are pretty clear if you're wanting to include dynamic content on your website.

This week we're back to K2 and discussing item tags and their benefits. If you're used to search engine optimization, then most of the concepts will be familiar, it's just nice to know you have this capability on a local level, within your website, as well.

This week is a bit of a combination topic. We are talking a bit about K2 still as we address the topic of titles for your articles, but we're also including some SEO ideas, as well as some basic standards for good writing. We are, after all, trying to drive traffic to our websites with almost everything we do. If you produce your own content for your website, you'll want to go through these points carefully.

Is it a forum? Is it a support ticket system? Is it the Joomla equivalent of Yahoo Answers? 

Today we take a look at EasyDiscuss, a flexible extension that can be used for all sorts of applications.

This week we'll be discussing the benefits of K2 once again. Specifically, we'll look at the Extra Fields available with K2 and what you can do with them to improve your site and make some of the work you do a bit easier.

This week we’re going to look again at K2, the content component used widely for Joomla category and article creation.

An introduction to K2.

Many of the pre-made Joomla templates available today include various formatting options to improve the look of elements within your article. For example, if you wish to highlight a paragraph, you can include a style that displays the text inside a colored box.

Whether you're looking to sell advertising space on your website or promote your own activities, you need to understand how the Joomla banner feature works. This can be daunting for beginners so here is an overview of the process.

In a previous article, you learnt how to use an extension to automatically resize images. Here is another approach that is worth exploring.

One of the greatest frustrations for developers using content management systems is spending hours getting a website looking perfect and then handing the reigns over to the client, only to have them do something ... I can think of a few words here but let's go with "unwise".

One of the nice things about web pages is that they can be as short or long as you like. However, long pages can be intimidating and your readers might find it difficult to find the information that is relevant to them. Consider displaying some of your content in "tabs" or "slides" using the following extension.

If you have a lot of extensions it can become difficult to find your most frequently accessed pages in Administrator. Art Admin Shortcuts is a free extension that allows you to create quick icons and keyboard shortcuts to your favourite pages. Here are the steps to get this working:

Joomla uses sessions to monitor whether or not a user (including you) is still on your website. If the session time expires, any data that has not been saved will disappear. This is frustrating if you are writing an article, and forget to save (or apply) it before the end of your session. All your input will be lost.

Are you tired of starting a new article or editing an existing one and waiting for all those icons to appear in your HTML editor? Dramatically speed up this process, along with other Administrator tasks, by installing Google Gears and a free extension. This week's tip only has two steps:

A well developed website should work well on all devices. However the mobile platform presents specific challenges such as bandwidth and browser size. One option is to build a dedicated mobile version of your website, but you would then need to update your content on two sites. Here are two alternative solutions for mobile-friendly Joomla sites.