Community Magazine

Joomla! is a Content Management System (CMS) first and foremost, and a very sophisticated one at that. Joomla! offers so much flexibility and so many extensions, it can be easy to overlook basic core features that exist to help us manage and display our content.

There are the obvious reasons why web sites need a membership component - to collect money and to create a community. Ah, but it goes much deeper than that.

Many people consider using Joomla! to create a classified ads website or to expand functionalities of an already existing portal. There is such a possibility of course, and the Joomla Extension Directory (JED) offers at least a dozen components to use. However, there are only a few dynamically developing solutions worth recommending.

This article describes how I migrated a big website, with over 10000 articles written in Cyrillic and using special characters, from Joomla 1.x to Joomla 3.x.

If you're planning to migrate your WordPress website to Joomla for the wide range of features Joomla allows, here's what to keep in mind as you map out the process.

One of the hidden gems which appeared with the 1.6 version of Joomla is the Redirect Manager - a simple system which allows you to identify and fix broken links. Before the Redirect Manager was introduced, the only way to find and fix broken URLs was to use a third party extension, an SEO scraper such as Screaming Frog, or looking in your server logs. Now it's possible to identify and manage broken links within the administrator panel of your Joomla website.

There's a few objectives that pretty much all websites have in common and one way or another they all depend on SEO. Joomla! can be your friend, with out of the box SEO and functionality enabling you to attract your target market, convert visitors and rank higher. We've set ourselves a 10 minute time limit... so let's get cracking.

Joomla is very flexible and has many possibilities. A disadvantage is that working with Joomla can seem complex because of all of the setting and navigation choices. For a Joomla specialist this is usually not an issue, but for many end users it can be a stumbling block. Adding new articles via the Joomla frontend is often one of the first things end users face. This should be a simple operation, but many experience this as very complex.

“If you value a Joomla extension, you will also value and appreciate the work that goes into making that extension.” A few weeks ago in a Joomla user group, a user shared a link to a website encouraging the purchase of various Joomla extension licences, sharing them with those who had paid for this pirated 'membership'.

With the latest updates in Joomla 3, many improvements have been introduced regarding Microdata (sometimes also called Rich Snippets or Structured Data). Some recent articles in the Community Magazine already explained the technical backgrounds of the implementation and the workflow for developers. However, many still struggle to understand where they can see this and how they can benefit from the SEO advantages that microdata give on a practical level.