Joomla! Community Magazine™

As a young IT manager, sometime at the end of the last century, I came across a term that interested me a lot. It was “set it, and forget it”. Sounds a bit haphazard, doesn’t it? Apparently it was less to do with software than rotisserie chicken cooking. You'll find it on Google. Why would I want to forget something important? Well, semantics aside, the principle meant that I could go off and do other things rather than waiting to make sure my backups had run. 

Not every feature works the first time we use it on a website, but sometimes there really is an issue that cannot be fixed by changing settings. This is the story of how my "glitch" became a code change in the Joomla Core.

I became aware of the changes in extension development in Joomla when I started looking at migrating websites from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4. A sticking point for me was that some extensions hadn't been made Joomla 4 compatible. Some took a long time to be updated and some didn’t ever work in Joomla 4. It was a big jump and reading this book I can now see much more of what that was about. 

My goal, Using Joomla 5, was to create one website with 4 distinct branded areas while utilising the same core styles and settings.

Search is such an important part of a website especially when there is a large amount of content. It helps improve engagement, or dwell-time as it’s sometimes known. Most of all it makes the site user-friendly as it helps visitors find what they’re looking for.

Joomla provides us with two Tags modules by default. These are Tags - Similar and Tags - Popular. Let’s take a look and see what these modules can do for us.

It’s often said that Content Management Systems other than Joomla are best for SEO. What’s not said so often is that it’s only true if that CMS has plugins installed to manage its SEO. Joomla comes with SEO tools out-of-the-box, so you’re already one step ahead.

“The Article Newsflash Module will display a fixed number of Articles from a specific Category or a set of Categories.”

Newsflash? Sounds dramatic doesn’t it? It suggests breaking news that is so important that it interrupts everything else. And maybe you have news that your website visitors really have to see over any other content. Lucky then that this is a module, and we can place modules almost anywhere in Joomla.

If you’re still using Joomla 3 you’ll no doubt have seen the message that: “Support for Joomla 3.10 ends on 17th August 2023” I was last in this situation with Joomla 2.5.28 and at the time I carefully documented my experience as it took a number of goes to update and included several quirks, such as turning off the “Remember Me” plugin and then copying library files once the update had been done. For me this was a painful process.

You probably know how to organise your content with categories. But what if you want to be able to show content from multiple categories, based on something they have in common? That’s where tags can be useful. And the good part is: you can use this right out of the box, because it comes with the Joomla core.