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Building a Joomla website

Building Websites with Joomla! Hagen Graf

Filed Under: Building a Joomla website, Seo Basics

I have had the pleasure of reading Hagen Graf's book, Building Websites with Joomla 1.5, no the first version of the book, which was for the RC1, but the latest one based on the Final 1.5 Joomla! release.

Note, Joomla is now on 3.6 and you can get that book from Amazon here. Joomla! 3.0 in 10 Easy Steps

As you might have guessed, I am not new to Joomla, and I have also worked with Joomla 1.5 as well.
But if you want a manual to go with Joomla 1.5 you should really get this book.

If you look at the chapters in the book, you will see a clear path to where you want to go, getting your Joomla 1,5 site installed and ready.

A Short Chapter overview

The book starts with a Chapter called Terms, Concepts, and Deliberations, and here you will read some things about the History and Changes if the different versions of Joomla!.
For me a chapter that you might want to skip though as it will bring you some knowledge on Joomla development, but does it really bring you something in terms of building knowledge? No, don't think so.
The examples on the last pages are nice to look at, just to see how different Joomla sites can evolve.

In Chapter Two you get the basic installation with XAMPP on your local pc if you want to, and some tips on how to install it on a hosting platform of your choice.

(You might want to consider using basic hosting on (l)Unix servers instead of Windows servers)
Joomla installation is not that hard, and what is described with screenshots as well pretty much covers what you need to know to get your Joomla site running.

I think it is also a good idea to put more information in this chapter on how to check and solve Read and Write access if you are on a hosting platform.


TIP. if you are done with your site, Check your System menu and you will find a Tab there that will show you what you still have to change.

In Chapters 3 till 12 that is where the real meat is!
Ranging from A tour, through Customizing Joomla, Configuration and Administration you go to the chapters that can help you best.

Chapters

  • 6 – Site Menu
  • 7 – Menus Menu
  • 8 – Content Menu (including article writing and categories)
  • 9 – Components Menu.
  • 10 – Extensions Menu
  • 11 – Tools
  • 12 – More on Extensions (with some great components and how to install and use them)
  •  

In all these chapters you get clear information on how to get more out of Joomla! site in a well written and easy to understand way.

As for his advice on SEO setting in the Global Configuration for Meta descriptions and keywords, I suggest you might want to read more on this site because here I don't agree with Hagen…

In Chapter 8 he writes about the robots field in your article, here he does not understand the field, as he mentioned you should enter the words for robots, but those go into the keywords field.

In the robots field, there should be values like, follow, index or nofollow, noindex or any other option you would like the Search Engine Robot to do with your article.

In Chapters 13 and 14, there is a lot of information on how to create your own Joomla template and how to make your site better for more visually challenged visitors.

For these and chapter 15, on Your own Components, Modules, and Plugins you really need to have some experience with HTML and PHP to go through the process described.
They are nice introductions to the subject and might interest you in reading more on these subjects.

A Website with Joomla!

In Chapter 16, Hagen takes you on a trip from Idea to realization of the website for the Winery for the Bertrand family.

Here you can read more about the whole process of building the site from a non- to a semi-technical way of getting started with a Joomla website.

This is fun reading! You see how the site grows and what decisions are to be made in the process.

Chapter 17 is just a short introduction on other templates and the appendixes are also more technical.
Appendix E, Forgot the Admin Password shows you how to fix that on a MySQL Database level.
Appendix F gives you some information on how to migrate from 1.0.x to Joomla! 1.5.x

Conclusion

This book Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 is great for getting to know Joomla 1.5 from the ground up.
It is more than a Beginners guide, some webmasters that are used to Joomla 1.0.x will find more detailed information on the differences between Joomla 1.5 and 1.0.

Is it worth the money? I think so, you can read it as it is, or you use it as a base reference.
For me? It is definitely a book I keep close at hand for reference and on my desktop as I develop more Joomla! 1.5 websites.

Title: Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5
Author: Hagen Graf
ISBN: 978-1-847195-30-2
Publisher: Packt Publishing

Change Joomla Weblinks text

Filed Under: Building a Joomla website, Seo Basics

Change the standard Joomla text of the Weblinks component

 

Most people have the standard text of Joomla weblinks component in the Links page.

 

"We are regularly out on the web. When we find a great site we list it here for you to enjoy.
From the list below choose one of our weblink topics, then select a URL to visit. "

 

But what if you want to change this text, where do you go to change this text?

Location of the Text


This text comes from your language file that is located in the languages directory of your Joomla site.

 

The easiest way to change this text is bij going to you administrators panel > site > language manager > and then choose cthe language file you want to edit.

Af course it needs to be set to writeable…

 

How to change it

 

Find the section in this english.php file that says:

 

/** components/com_weblinks */
DEFINE(‘_WEBLINKS_TITLE','Web Links');
DEFINE(‘_WEBLINKS_DESC','We are regularly out on the web. When we find a great site we list'
.' it here for you to enjoy.  <br />From the list below choose one of our weblink topics, then select a URL to visit.');
DEFINE(‘_HEADER_TITLE_WEBLINKS','Web Link');
DEFINE(‘_SECTION','Section:');
DEFINE(‘_SUBMIT_LINK','Submit A Web Link');
DEFINE(‘_URL','URL:');
DEFINE(‘_URL_DESC','Description:');
DEFINE(‘_NAME','Name:');
DEFINE(‘_WEBLINK_EXIST','There is a Web Link already with that name, please try again.');
DEFINE(‘_WEBLINK_TITLE','Your Weblink must contain a title.');

 

(Psst.. its near the bottom of the file….)

 

Here you can change the first two lines to whatever suits your own needs.

 

The Best Joomla Editor

Filed Under: Building a Joomla website

Finding The Best Joomla Editor for you

People have their own taste, no doubt about that.
So what I will try to convey to you is way I think the Editor I use is the best one YOU can work with as well.

The editor I use is not the standard TinyMCE and it is not even the Joomla Editors Choice JCE…
Because with both of them you can get into some strange behavior with it.
Especially if it comes to core HTML Coding.

Must of the editors I have used have strange effects when editing HTML code and then saving the page.

So my favorite is definitely JoomlaCK

I will tell you why I love it!

It is a fast and lightweight WYSIWYG editor, based on FCKeditor.

It is compatible with most Internet browsers like IE 5.5+ (Windows), Firefox 1.0+, Mozilla 1.3+ and Netscape 7+. and Opera.

I use all of these to check the rendering of my websites.

But the best is yet to come:

– CSS support for better integration with your web site
– Font formatting: type, size, color, style, bold, italic, etc
– Text formatting: alignment, indentation, bullets list, etc
– Cut, Paste and Paste as Plain Text, Undo and Redo
– Paste from Word cleanup with auto-detection
– Link and anchors support
Image insertion, with upload and server browsing support
– Table creation and editing (add, delete rows, etc) – one of the best.
– Table cells editing (size, colors, etc)
– Form fields
– Right-click context menus support
– Plugins support
– Spell checker (external freeware ieSpell)

And my favorites

– Multi-language support with automatic user language detection. Including Right to Left scripting.

Yes, it automatically works in your language!

– Complete page editing (also HTML) or just contents.
– Automatic browser detection and customization

And these options makes you forget the rest!

Image and file links upload and server repository browser!

No more going back and forth to upload your images with the media manager!

Just browse your image directory's right from whit-in you Editor.

Upload images the same way, just at the moment you need that file from your hard drive….

Put your images where you want it, how you want it, and of course, give your “alt” tags directly to the images.

This JoomlaFck Editor is the best for Joomla giving you the tools You need

For Joomla and other web users, it's simple and easy to use!

So how do you install this JoomlaFCK editor into Joomla?

First, run to the Joomla extension website and Pick Up your JoomlaFCK Mambot
Download the extension and install it like a regular Plugin (Mambot).

After this successful installation, you can set some configuration settings at the site Mambots directory.
Just click on the JoomlaFCK Mambot and set the things you want, I never changed a thing…

To set it as the standard Editor for your Joomla site, go to the configuration screen and set it as the default editor, save the changes and you are ready to go!

P.s. If You Download and Install ieSpell, You can also do an Editor Spel check inside Joomla!