Archive for September 2011
Joomla Extension Review – Filtered News Module
September 27, 2011 | 
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Filtered News is a Joomla Module that allows you to show article leads in a module position, and it has all of the configuration that is missing from the standard Joomla Module Newsflash and What’s New: multiple display layouts, configurable content elements, text character number limit, include image, and more.
More than once I have struggled with the limitations of the Joomla Newsflash and What’s New modules. Both of these extensions provide only a basic display of news items and are severely lacking in configuration settings. Necessity is the mother of invention, and lucky for you, it pushed the developers at JoomlaVargas to develop this great module that includes all the features of Newsflash and What’s New and a LOT more.
Below is an example of the Filtered News module in action. The box on the left using the news scroller layout. The news items change every x number of seconds. The box on the right uses the plain list layout.
This Joomla module is a great way to display fresh content and do it with style. The following is a list of its main features:
Free Installed and ran “out of the box” with no issues. Easy to configure Multiple display layouts. The slider and scroller layouts are especially nice Count: control the number of articles that display Order: order, random, most recent, most hits Only articles from last X days. Display articles from within the number of days you specify Image Resize. If the article has an image, you can choose to include it and re-size it too. No longer do you have to make sure that thumbnails are included in the intro text. Filtered News will resize and use the first image it finds in the article. What a GREAT time saver! Filter by section, category, author, recent days, keywords, front page Specify height, width, background color, border, padding Specify which article elements to include: image, title, text, author, date, category, section, readmore Limit the number of characters to show from text And more! There are too many configurations to describe
I highly recommend this module. It gets the job done and does everything you’d expect from a free Joomla News Module.
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Inserting PDF Files Into Joomla Content
It is also difficult but sometimes is simple if we have understood the way to do it. The forum communities of web builder are forums you can share your problems and get the solution from other members. Also, you can get the update applications news, and many more. For you, who have problem in inserting Portable Document Format files into Joomla contents, here are some tips that may help you.PDF files are mostly used by people.
A PDF is not an ‘image’, but separate file type. However, it ‘contains’ images. Then, how to insert PDF files into Joomla contents? Some people make it simple and easier by exporting PDF files to other format, like html because it has smaller size. After that, you can insert them to Joomla. Also, you can upload PDF files to the directory in images using Media Manager which is commonly used, and then add a normal URL link and link them.
You must create the correct URL because this part sometimes makes us frustrating in Joomla. The correct URL creates correct link. However, you can check whether the link is right or not by opening up the homepage and entering image/foldername/pdf and see if Portable Document Format appears. Once the PDF appears, this is the right link. Moreover, since PDF contains pictures and documents, you can display it within wrapper. Create a wrapper and link to the PDF and use these extensions: “Jumi”, “Component Includer”, or “Sourcere”, that may help you. By following those tips your PDF files can be inserted in your Joomla.
You can try those steps. Make sure that your URL is correct and see the detail. It’s better to check it every step that you have done those steps correctly, so you don’t need to look for the part that make those steps do not work. Now, you can insert your PDF files in your Joomla with this Joomla PDF trick.
How to SEO Your Joomla Site
So you have a great design, great content and even a few links to your Joomla site but it still seems that you aren’t going nowhere in the search engines. Well, there is a reason: although Joomla is a great CMS it isn’t that good with SEO. Let’s see what we can do so Joomla will become the Search Engines’ best friend:
1. Enable SEF urls: this is almost critical for good rankings. Even though search engines are very good at indexing dynamic urls many webmasters have seen better results when using search engine friendly urls.
Here is how to enable it: log in the administrator backend and look for the “Global Configuration” icon. Now click it and in the upper right part you must enable “Search Engine Friendly URLs”. Also, if your site runs on an Apache server than you must rename the “htaccess.txt” file to “.htaccess”.
Although Joomla’s built-in SEF component is rather limited the output is still seen very well by the Search Engines. But it gets even better with the next module.
2. OpenSEF ( tinyurl.com/2oeogw ): this the best SEF component for Joomla. It works great, doesn’t slow down your site and is very configurable. Some of OpenSEF’s features:
- automatic rewrite of all urls
- ability to define how SEF urls will look based on section, category and article title
- define 404 Error url
- unlimited number of alias URL mappings
- possibility to create and update XML sitemaps, usable by Google, Yahoo and MSN
- many more…
And it does all this without modifying Joomla’s core files!
3. Put up a sitemap ( tinyurl.com/3y9bz6 ): in case you don’t want or can’t use the OpenSEF component you should create a XML sitemap to help the search engines index your site easier. It is integrated with other built-in components so contacts, newsfeeds and weblinks are supported.
4. Use metatags: this is very important if you want good rankings and many clicks from the search engines. The keywords metatag isn’t used by the search engines anymore, but using the description is a very good idea.
The best use for the description metatag actually is to influence visitors to click more – leaving the text excerpt that is shown up to the search engines is not the best idea in the world.
5. Ping module ( tinyurl.com/y8m5aa ): pinging is usually done only by blogs, but it can be used to great success with normal sites too! Install this component and after each time you write a new piece of content click “Syndicate” in the “Components” menu to ping Technorati.
6. Technorati tags ( tinyurl.com/2nkcqt ): this plugin adds tags at the end of your content, tags that are linked to Technorati. This way, when you ping Technorati with the ping module I’ve told you about before it will help you categorize the search engines.
7. Trackback module ( tinyurl.com/2wvj7l ): this is another thing we can pick up from blogs to help us get higher in the search engines. If you write about blogs this can help you get a few links. Think of it as a new form of link exchange – you place a link from a page on your site to another page on another site and you get a link back.