60 posts
If you are using Joomla’s alternative layouts for certain pages, you might want to target those pages with a css class. You could add a class directly into the layout file, but since the layout file is inserted into the main component area this only lets you target that specific area and not the page
It used to be easy to remove core JavaScript files from Joomla’s output by unsetting the script at the top of your template’s index file. unset( $this->_scripts[ JURI::root( true ) . ‘/media/jui/js/bootstrap.min.js’ ] ); For whatever reason, this doesn’t work anymore with Joomla 3.9.
In this article, we are going to add a new field to the article editor screen and use the content of the field to output a canonical link in the head of the page on the article view. At some point, Joomla’s automatically added canonical links were removed as they didn’t work correctly, so this
How to fix fatal errors related to JSON decoding when updating you Joomla core version.
Sometimes, for whatever reason, I need to find out the exact version of Joomla a site is running without being able to access the administration area. Here’s where to find the version number in the file system.
There was no big announcement, but you may have noticed that the Joomla 3.2.2 templates area now has a compile LESS button when viewing a less file. I had a look at how to bring this into a custom template without having to use a plugin, giving you the possibility to compile a templates less
Finding extensions for Joomla 1.5 is not so easy any more, and when you do find something you need there is a good chance it doesn’t work anymore (php versions, api changes etc). I was asked today to add a recaptcha field to the standard contct form on a 1.5 site. Please, no comments about
Unfortunately I was on the receiving end of this bug before finding out that it existed. Apologies to anyone trying to download my extensions – I have just enabled all new user accounts. Updating to Joomla 3.2 introduces a new option which allows you to disable email sending globally. You can find it in Global
I guess it’s been a long time coming but, as more and more sites need to be upgraded to the latest Joomla versions, I finally put together a starter template using the best practices I have built up over the past 6 years of helping people speed up their Joomla websites and helping them share
In the days of Joomla 1.5 there were a few limitations to using core content for anything other than simple pages. Yes, plugins were available but they couldn’t handle things like nested categories, item specific galleries and videos etc etc. Many components were created to combat those limitations but the outright winner in terms of
For reasons detailed in an earlier post about why Joomla canonical urls are not implemented correctly it may be that you want to remove them. That’s pretty easy by hacking the core, but safer to unset the tag in your template so the changes don’t get wiped out on an upgrade.
Joomla 3 introduced a new feature of canonical url links. There is no way to turn it off in settings, which wouldn’t be a problem if it worked correctly, but unfortunately it doesn’t. It has been plagued by problems since it was introduced and has led to some sites taking a massive hit on visitor
In Joomla 1.5 this was quite easy as there was generally only one homepage (multiple in Joomfish but the same check worked for all). With the introduction of multi-language in 1.6 (or was it 1.7?) it was made a bit more difficult as it is possible to have multiple homepages, and checking for them involves
I wrote about this a while ago in my Joomla microdata article. It has struck me since that it was complete overkill to add authorship in that way and can be done without any code changes at all, just using the standard contacts component. The reasoning is, that you don’t have to link each article
Google has been using microdata for quite a while now and adding it to your website can help with clickthrough rates from search engine results. The most obvious is Google’s own authorship markup (not strictly microdata per se) where linking to your Google+ profile adds your profile image to pages in search results, but there
There has been a few reports about not being able to install Joomla because it stalls at the installation and you can’t get past the first installer step. Whilst there are many reasons why this could happen, most times I have come accross it it has been down to the server setup and Joomla not
There are hundreds of plugins, modules and components which add Facebook opengraph tags to your articles, but is it really necessary to add an extension for the sake of a couple of meta tags. There was a time when Facebook ignored your standard meta tags and insisted that you add a specific opengraph tags for things like page title
Sometimes there is a need to get the current content/site language to use in other places. An example being when you want to set social share buttons to display in the same language as the site. Luckily Joomla makes this easy for us.
Global layouts were introduced in Joomla 3 so that they are no longer limited to a particular view or extension. In this example I am going to create a new view for the tags component which will output a plain comma separated list so that I can use it in a facebook opengraph tag.
The future is here, the future is now. Boomla 3 has been sent back from the future to fitful our mobile bogging needs. I’ve been away for the weekend so what better time to sample a piece of the future. And what better time to test android s predicted words features.
The reference field is not something that is new in Joomla 1.6 and up. Joomla 1.5 had a ‘Key Reference’ field in the articles advanced parameters tab. What is different is where the field is now found and the way the data entered is utilised. In Joomla 1.5 the content of the key reference field
Template overrides are great, but sometimes you have no choice but to take a component apart to get it to do what you want it to do. It’s great that all the code is open and you are able to do that too. What’s not great is when you hand over that site to someone
So Joomla 3 has been around for a while now and seems stable enough that you can use it for production sites without having to check up on it everyday to see if anything new has broken. And with a new site comes a new template. As always, I wanted it to be fast loading,
Today I was looking into moving our company blog to a new joomla 1.6 test site so I could experiment with a bit of HTML5 Due to the structual differences between 1.5 and 1.6, there is no option to import data from the backup of an old site like it was when upgrading from 1.0
I have been working recently with the K2 component/plugin K2store. As a simple shopping cart it works great, but I had a nightmare trying to get hold of any translation files. The forum is full of people asking questions about how to translate different parts of the store into lots of different languages, but no
Google, Bing, Yahoo and all search engines are instructed not to index photos from a default installation of Joomla.With the advent of blended search results, why would you not want your images to be indexed and shown alongside your site in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS)?
I was asked earlier today to create a Google+ widget for a website to replace a twitter widget. I was suprised but also interested to get it working. Currently there is no widget maker from Google but there is an api which allows you to do the same thing.
Inspired by Robert Vining over at www.joomstew.com and the fact that I am building most of my new sites using Joomla 1.7, I decided it was time to finally migrate this site to the latest Joomla version. I think the actual decision maker was when I was adding about 50 flickr gallery modules to a
I only realised a few days ago as I looked into someone elses site that the standard url on an xmap sitemap for the homepage is /home Both this and the standard / urls exist and it can lead to problems when getting indexed. Here’s how to sort it out…
I was looking for a simple latest news slider module for joomla 1.5. You would think that there are hundreds of them around but nothing really fitted what I needed and anything that did was using jquery which conflicted with the ajax search and twitter modules. Plus I don’t really want to be loading 2
Joomla Estate Agency Canonical URL Problem, solved Before reading this please note tht some php code has been stripped out of this article. I’ve included a zip of a text file at the bottom containing all the code update #2 – I found a way to do this automatically in the end, the info is
Joomla estate agency component has had the ability to use the title alias in the url since the last major update. The currently available plugin for xmap still uses the old url structure which just uses the property id. I noticed this when checking on a site made a couple of years ago which has
The xmap plugin for Joomla Estate Agency (JEA) has now been updated to stop duplicated properties with buying and selling menu items. It can now be found on the JED {removed as it is 1.5 only}. Please give it a vote {try, I dare you} so it rises above the older module which produces the
I’ve just uploaded a joomla 1.5 module to display a share to diaspora button. The module automatically takes the url of the page, the page title and the introtext and sends it to the users diaspora stream and shares it with their frineds. I added a parameter to limit the number of chars sent, as
I just made a quick module based on the K2 Quickicons admin module to add the quickicons from the K2store component to the Joomla dashboard. After just building a site for a client with K2store, I thought the only reason they would want to go to the back-end of the site regularly (It is an
I’ve just uploaded a weather module I created using the api from yr.no. It produces a 10 day, detailed weather forecast. Check out the details here And the demo here
Today I made a quick module for Joomla 1.5 to display a newsletter sign up box on your site. It connects with your AWeber account and signs up subscribers. I looked around and found that a module was made for mambo but never updated. There was a plugin for $30 that also used the registration
I have just created the custom html plus module to be able to add text to a component view and override the page title, meta description and meta keywords. I also added the functionality to add extra css and general code to the head section. Normally there is no option in a menu item to
The launch of a new site left me really confused a couple of weeks ago. The launch went better than expected, but a few days later people were registering on the site, which would have been great, except that there was no registration form on any of our pages. At first I jumped to the
Last night I had my first play with the new Adobe Edge prieview (available free to download and works for just over 100 days). It creates flash style objects using only html, css and javascript. Having never really used flash before I was unfamilliar with the layout of the program (it’s a kind of cut
Just put out a new google map module that plots tweets with info bubbles. Check it out here
This is more apparent when using an AJAX refreshless search method, but affects all joomla sites using the default search settings. Here’s how to speed it up…
If you have a K2store and your site is in multiple languages, you might have found that there was no way to translate your product attributes and their options. Now there is……..
The yr.no joomla weather module has now been updated to work with all UTF8 characters.
Just a quick note to say that the yr.no module has just been updated to add joomla 1.6 configuration parameters. I’m still testing it but there doesn’t seem to be any problems so far. Let me know if there are!
I’ve just finished the basics of the next version of the popular yrno joomla module. YRNO2 is Joomla 2.5 specific and has a load of new features including:
Open up your module zip file or download the module folder from your server. In the main directory there will be a php and xml file, usually with the same name as the module.
Where are the Joomla Administration Header Images? To customise the Joomla admin header locate the images directory administrator/templates/khepri/images/ For the purpose of this tutorial we’re going to edit the default template style which is green. The files are contained in the folder
Joomla Estate Agency is an excellent real estate component for joomla. After using it for several sites and spending some time in the support forum I noticed there seemed to be some confusion on how to edit the property contact forms. So here is how to do it….
URL to preview joomla articles If you want to preview an atricle without adding a menu item you can use this url and add the item ID of the article on the end. index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id= If you would like it to display the modules assigned to a menu item then you can add: &Itemid= using the
I recently had an email asking how I removed the ?task=search from the url of the joomla estate agency component. I originally removed the ?task=search query string as it prevents people from emailing the url of a property to a friend. When the url is visited by another user it will show a session has
Certain functions within joomla rely on a high/normal php memory limit. Certain web hosting companys have a very low php memory limit, around 8mb.
Xmap is a great automatic sitemap generator for the joomla content management system. It produces HTML (For your users) XML (for search engines) and news (Please fill me in!) The URL’s to these sitemaps however are not so search engine friendly.
Joomla .htaccess and SEO for Dummies The Joomla content management system provides a powerful, yet simple way for anyone to design a website. However, out of the box, a standard site is not set up with search engine optomisation (SEO) in mind. There are several simple rules that should be implimented into every Joomla
Joomla slows down page loading times by loading the full uncompressed Mootools 1.1 Javascript library. Here’s an easy way to speed it up…
Rather than hacking the core files, which can be replaced with an update, place this line in your template index.php file above the </head> tag. <?php $this->setGenerator(‘Changethisline’); ?> Replace Changethisline with whatever you want to show or just leave it empty.
To change or remove the “Joomla! is Free Software released under the GNU/GPL License.” links from the joomla administration area we need to edit 3 files: administrator/templates/khepri/cpanel.php administrator/templates/khepri/index.php administrator/templates/khepri/login.php
By default joomla shows a number by each article when listing all the titles in a category view layout. Here’s how to remove the numbers…
How to remove the xmap ‘Powered by Xmap!‘ link from your HTML site map.
Joomla loads Mootools.js and caption.js by default. If you have ever wondered why your simple pages load slowly, this could be the reason. If you have nothing that uses Mootools.js (dropdown menus and such) and want to speed up your site then it would be a good idea to stop it from loading. In