Joomla Blog

There are dozens of Joomla extensions that play MP3 files but I love Simple MP3 Bar as it is indeed simple and in many cases more than adequate. Of course MP3's are great for music but why not consider adding an audio introduction or audio instructions on your site? Your audience might appreciate hearing you rather than reading a lengthy explanation. The following instructions assume you already have an MP3 file, but if you don't, check out Audacity which is a free audio editor.

Joomla includes a site search feature, but the results are not always as relevant as you might expect. Here's a way to display better search results by replacing the standard search module with Google powered search.

The Joomla Administrator includes an HTML editor that allows you to format your article text, insert images, create links and more. This editor, called TinyMCE, is lightweight and easy to use but it does lack some useful features. Consider replacing this with the Joomla Content Editor (JCE) and enjoy a better experience with these features:

One Joomla article feature I'm using a lot at the moment is the Finish Publishing date. You'll find this in Administrator on each article editing page under Parameters (Article). However this feature is not available for modules. Get around this by using a fantastic free extension called MetaMod.

I hope you've been busy this week setting your website goals for 2010. It all starts with measuring your site's performance and I have previously mentioned Google Analytics which is fantastic. But some people prefer to have all the information right within their Joomla site, so let's take a look at how to achieve this using a free extension.

Here's something a little different for the holidays. Give your site visitors something of value by including a game of Sudoku on your Joomla site.

There's a Joomla extension for just about everything and this week I'll show you how to quickly and easily give your site a Christmas feel.

Allowing people to comment on the articles you publish can seem scary at first. However it adds value to your content and search engines arguably favour sites with comments. Let's have a look at how to add a popular third party comments service called Disqus to your Joomla site.

A sitemap displays links to all of your articles on one page. It can also be used to help search engines index your pages. There are various extensions available to create sitemaps but the one I like to use is Xmap. Once installed, it will create an HTML sitemap to be read by your visitors and a XML sitemap for use by search engines. New articles are automatically added to the sitemap.

Using Joomla to create content is easy but if you have a lot of articles, it can be time consuming. If you have a large site, have a look at a free extension called Mass Content. You can create multiple sections, categories and articles with ease. There is also a mass delete option which is a handy method to delete all the sample data created during the Joomla installation.