Joomla tutorials

Sometimes, I would like to restrict the way the Joomla front end editing works. More specifically, I want to restrict access to some of the features in the front end editing.

On one site I work on, I've restricted access to the 'Publish' and 'Show on Front Page' buttons. For this particular site, I want local editors of an organization to be able to enter new articles, and to edit the published articles. I don't want the local editors to be able to publish to the front page. This is something the editor-in-chief should do. Thus, this function needs to be removed from the front end editor.

I did this by editing the form page used to edit articles.

If you know some HTML and can read PHP you can remove / comment out the parts of the file you don't want the users to see. This will happen for all users without administrator privileges, though. I've put together a modification which removes the radio buttons for 'Publish' and 'Show on Front Page' if the user belongs to a lower access level groups than 'Manager'.

This tutorial will show you how to send blog or web site updates to your email subscribers, using Aweber.com.

I will show you how to set up Aweber.com to work with Joomla. This will also work with content from K2 and other components that show an RSS feed.

Aweber.com is the online email list service that I use. The procedure I describe may also be applied to other mailing list services like MailChimp etc.

Most likely, you know that you can assign modules to specific menu items in Joomla. You can assign modules to all, none or specific menu items. This will make the module appear when clicking on the particular menu item.

That's fine, but what do you do when you don't have a menu item for the particular article?

In this tutorial, I will show you how to have modules appear even when you don't have a (visible) menu item pointing to it.

Even though Joomla is a great platform, there are times when you will have to alter the core files to fit certain needs. For instance, you can't stand how the elements in Joomla content are put together in Joomla. Or your client wants to alter the way the date is shown, where the author appears, how the list of contacts is displayed. We could go on for ever.

The point is: You don't want to be restricted by the platform, do you? You won't have to! I will show you the basics of how to customize the output from Joomla components, modules and plugins, by applying something called template overrides. Relax, they're your friends.

I know many of you out there struggle with this one. When using the SEF extension sh404SEF, it's quite easy to set up search engine friendly URLs. For the core joomla components and supported third-party extensions, that is.

If your extension does not have a plug-in for sh404SEF, you're basically stuck. Unless you apply some sort of work-around. In this case, I will show you how to create SEF URLs that show forms created by ChronoForms. It's easier than you would think.

There are times when I need to have the title of an article break somewhere in the title itself. This is not something which is easy to do in Joomla without modifications, as far as I know.

By applying a small modification of the Joomla template overrides however, we can achieve our goal quite easily. Some restrictions apply, though.

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to create the line breaks by replacing text in article titles on the fly.

When I recently wrote a post about the Joomla 1.6 ACL Use Case presentation written by Amy Stephen, I had a slight problem. When using JCE I couldn't insert the video using the JCE Media Manager.

I had to get the post out, so I did a work-around and published the post. A few days ago I got an email from Bryan Z., telling me he had the same problem. So I decided to find out how to solve it. An entry into the JCE forums - and a few hours later it was solved :)

Sometimes, you might like to use Google AdSense advertising on your Joomla site. The most obvious way of doing this is to take the HTML/Javascript code provided by AdSense and paste it into the Custom HTML module. However, this is not as flexible as I would like it. Also, if you want to change the appearance of the ad, you will have to create a new code in the AdSense account and do the pasting process all over again.

So, let's find an easier way to work with Joomla and Google Adsense.

Sometimes, you might want to create a Joomla page that is not available through a menu. You only want the page to appear when the URL is entered. This might be a 'thank you' page after form submission, a log in page or some other type of 'hidden' page you would need on your Joomla site.

Many users ask about this in the Joomla forums and on Twitter. I decided to write a short tutorial on how to set up a link to an element - article or other type of Joomla assett - with no menu item visible on the site.

In this tutorial I'll show you how to set up the blog editor in the ScribeFire blog editor for use with Joomla. This way, you have an even easier way of publishing articles to your Joomla! blog.