Joomla Blog

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 comes with several components that are accessible from the Components menu in Administrator. If you add a lot of extensions to your site, this menu can become cluttered. Or if you are developing a site for a customer who is not using these components, they might get confused.

If you are making major changes to your site, you might not want people to see any pages until your changes are complete. You can activate the "Site Offline" feature in the Global Configuration page within your Joomla Administrator. 

When you installed Joomla, you were asked to specify a password to access the Joomla Administrator. However the username of 'admin' was automatically assigned. To reduce the chances of someone hacking in to your Administrator, it is a great idea to change your username from 'admin' to anything else. 

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.

A handy, but often overlooked feature of Joomla is Archive. If your site contains articles that become out-of-date, but you don't want to delete them, you can move them to a different area of your site as follows.

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.

If you build a standard feedback form using Joomla, it's only a matter of time until you start receiving spam submissions. The way around this for most developers is to use a different form builder that includes a method you're probably familiar with called CAPTCHA. That's a bit of a shame as the Contacts component provides an easy way to create simple forms. So here is a way around this using a free extension.

This post includes a video tutorial.

Google Images is a useful resource that allows searchers to find images on the web related to their search inquiry. Your images may also show up in the standard Google results.