Joomla Blog

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.

Adding a YouTube or any other third party video is easy with a static website. However when you add the required code to a Joomla article, the editor alters the code which prevents the video from working. I explained how to avoid this in a previous newsletter but here's an even easier way to add videos using a free extension.

Joomla 1.5.15 was released last week and as always, it is a good idea to keep your site current. I have previously explained how to do this manually, but let's have a look at how to update Joomla using a free extension.

Joomla does not provide a way to format the text that appears in an article heading (such as italicising a word as I did in this article's heading). If you try to insert HTML code, this is removed when you save the article.

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.

Having a goal for your website is vital but you need to measure results to see how you're performing. The goal for a website will vary from one organisation to another but many metrics can be tracked using Google Analytics. This free tool provides much more information than you get from the statistics package provided by your web host.

It is really easy to configure Joomla as a blog but there are a few extensions you should consider to get full blogging functionality. A blog is simply a collection of articles. I demonstrate how to do this in the free Joomla video tutorials.

Several people have asked me what is available to create job listings on a Joomla site. You can view these at the Joomla Extensions Directory. The latest Job Board release is JA Job Board by JoomlArt. With a starting price of $290, this is one of the more expensive Joomla extensions around. However if you're making money from your job listings, you will quickly recover this investment and end up with a full featured application.