5MinuteJoomla

Adding Favicon.ico To Your Joomla Website

Admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:15:11 +0000

There are dozens and dozens of little things that make a Joomla website look professional. One of these many things isn’t part of Joomla installation is making sure a favicon.ico is included for your website. What is a favicon.ico?, you may ask. When someone visits your site with a web browser, a small icon appears at the top of the browser next to the URL web address. This icon is carried over to represent your website when a visitor bookmarks or favorites your site. It’s a very small visual representation to help your visitors know what your site is about, both now and in the future.

This video tutorial shows how to create a favicon.ico for your site, install it on your server and how to check that it is working.

Skill Level: Beginner

This video course comes with a PDF class sheet so that you can have it to refer to while watching the video class and later when you make the changes to your Joomla website.

PDF class sheet: Adding Favicon.ico class sheet

If you are having problems viewing this video tutorial by clicking on the image above, click here.

Password Protecting the Joomla Administration Directory

Admin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:25:05 +0000

There are a number of important steps to securing your Joomla website and administration area. One that is not mentioned on the Joomla.org Administrator’s security checklist but is nevertheless is often cited by Joomla experts is password protecting your Joomla administration page and folder. By putting another step in front of would be hackers who might directly address your admin page to try to gain access, you can frustrate them to the point where they move on to another Joomla website.

This video tutorial shows how to setup password protection on your Joomla administration folder at webhosts running cPanel, the most common hosting interface for shared servers.

Skill Level: Beginner

This video course comes with a PDF class sheet so that you can have it to refer to while watching the video class and later when you make the changes to your Joomla website.

PDF class sheet: Protecting Administration Directory class sheet

If you are having problems viewing this video tutorial by clicking on the image above, click here.

How To Back Up Your Files And Database In Joomla

Restricting Authors To Their Own Articles In Joomla

Admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:37:02 +0000

A good way to build content for your Joomla website is to have multiple authors posting to the site. Many publication-type sites have dozens or even hundreds of authors contributing. So it is key that each author can only post and change their own work. It would be a major security issue if each author could access other author’s work. It’s also important that if an author leaves that you can easily close the door to their accessing your site. This video show you the steps to setting these parameters and helps you understand how this allows access to your site.

This video tutorial also shows how you can raise each user to the level of editor, which allows users to have access to author’s work for editing approval, correction and updating.

Skill Level: Beginner

This video course comes with a PDF class sheet so that you can have it to refer to while watching the video class and later when you make the changes to your Joomla website.

PDF class sheet: Restricting Authors class sheet

If you are having problems viewing this video tutorial by clicking on the image above, click here.

How To Back Up Your Files And Database In Joomla

Admin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:42:44 +0000

It’s easy to build a large and complicated website with Joomla, and it’s just as easy to back up all the the files and database to rebuild your Joomla site on another server or rebuild after a server failure or website attack. All it takes is a few steps, an understanding of how to go through those steps at your webhost’s cPanel administration and being organized enough to perform back ups on a regular basis.

These video tutorial instructions are for Joomla websites hosted at webhosts that offer a cPanel server administration. cPanel is the most popular webhosting administration interface. You will know where to look and the procedures are for producing complete copies of your Joomla website.

Skill Level: Beginner

This video course comes with a PDF class sheet so that you can have it to refer to while watching the video class and later when you make the changes to your Joomla website.

PDF class sheet: Backing Up Your Files and Database class sheet

If you are having problems viewing this video tutorial by clicking on the image above, click here.

Adding Google AdSense Ads To Joomla

Admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:18:42 +0000

An easy way to monetize your Joomla website is to add Google AdSense code to your webpages so that relevant ads appear on each page of your site and offer your visitors more options to find what they are looking for. You make a percentage of what the advertiser paid to Google for the click thru and all it requires is setting up an AdSense account and pasting in a small piece of code into a Custom HTML module.

For best results, it’s good to know and understand how modules are laid out in your template so that can know which AdSense ad layout will work with your sites and where your ads will appear relative to other content on the page.

Skill Level: Beginner

This video course comes with a PDF class sheet so that you can have it to refer to while watching the video class and later when you make the changes to your Joomla website.

PDF class sheet: Adding Google AdSense class sheet

If you are having problems viewing this video tutorial by clicking on the image above, click here.

How To Create A Back Button In Joomla

Admin — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:14:44 +0000

Joomla has many great tools built in to its core installation that can quickly and easily give a new website installation a professional look and feel. But one option that is very common high-end websites that does not come “out of the box” in Joomla is a back button to take your visitors to their previous page easily. Since you can add javascript to the Custom HTML module, it’s easy to add this functionality to your Joomla website.

Once you have the back button in place and understand how the Custom HTML can fit into your site, you then can add a number of other javascript functions to your web pages easily using the same method that you used to add your back button.

Skill Level: Beginner

This video course comes with a PDF class sheet so that you can have it to refer to while watching the video class and later when you make the changes to your Joomla website.

PDF class sheet: How To Create A Back Button class sheet

If you are having problems viewing this video tutorial by clicking on the image above, click here.

Creating A Blog With Joomla

Admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:53:53 +0000

One of the most common ways to create and display content is through a blog format. Although Joomla was not built from the ground up as a blog platform, it is fairly easy to set up Joomla to present it’s content as a blog, which allows you to add Joomla’s many powerful functions as your site grows. Some good options in adding Joomla features to complement your blog includes such items as a forum if you want to open up your site to more conversation, review components, a directory related to your subject or a customer service center if your blog is to promote a business.

You can also set aside one type of content as “blog” content and still have Joomla’s powerful content management functions on other types of articles and information that you want to present. Joomla offers a lot to those wishing to build a robust blog website.

Skill Level: Beginner

This video course comes with a PDF class sheet so that you can have it to refer to while watching the video class and later when you make the changes to your Joomla website.

PDF class sheet: Creating A Blog class sheet

If you are having problems viewing this video tutorial by clicking on the image above, click here.

Changing User Settings In Joomla

Admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:32:06 +0000

Joomla excels in allowing different users to have access to, add to and edit the site’s content. These is a great opportunity to elevate user engagement and interest but on the other hand, opens the site to being changed in ways you would NOT like! You, as the administrator should understand how to give users different levels of access so that you control how people can interact with your site. Luckily, Joomla has a great user interface that is is easy to set up and configure.

The default choices of site access for your website users are easy to find and understand. In this video, we walk you through where these are located and what choices you need to make to have a simple, sensible system of user access.

Skill Level: Beginner

This video course comes with a PDF class sheet so that you can have it to refer to while watching the video class and later when you make the changes to your Joomla website.

PDF class sheet: How To Change User Settings class sheet

If you are having problems viewing this video tutorial by clicking on the image above, click here.

Finding Available Module Positions In Joomla

Admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:38:43 +0000

Each Joomla template has its own positioning and configuration for modules. For the beginner, this can be a daunting task, determining which modules are open to add more modules. This video shows a simple way to understand the module positions on any template. Even if you cannot read or understand php, you can easily take a new, unsupported Joomla template and create a “cheat sheet” for module positioning reference.

This video tutorial assumes that you have a new installation and not a lot of module content in place when you start. If you do, you can always use this technique to find the currently open positions in your template.

Skill Level: Beginner

This video course comes with a PDF class sheet so that you can have it to refer to while watching the video class and later when you make the changes to your Joomla website.

PDF class sheet: Finding Available Module Positions class sheet

If you are having problems viewing this video tutorial by clicking on the image above, click here.

Creating Search Engine Friendly URLs in Joomla

Admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:47:18 +0000

The default urls generated by Joomla tend to be long and cryptic and not helpful to allowing the search engines an easy way to understand what each page on your site is all about. Luckily, the Joomla developers understood that this was a problem for their users and created a built-in search engine friendly (SEF) URls function. The bad news is that it takes a step or two to configure. That’s what this Joomla video tutorial is all about!

We do want to explain that this video tutorial has instructions specifically for those whose Joomla installations are hosted on Linux/Unix running Apache. This is the most common server setup. If you are not sure what your server software is, please confirm with your webhosting provider what server software your site is using. If you are running Windows, check with your provider for resources on configuring your Joomla installation to allow .htaccess files.

Skill Level: Intermediate

This video course comes with a PDF class sheet so that you can have it to refer to while watching the video class and later when you make the changes to your Joomla website.

PDF class sheet: Creating Search Engine Friendly URLs class sheet

If you are having problems viewing this video tutorial by clicking on the image above, click here.