Five tips for blog hackers starting to use Joomla
You’re probably experienced with PHP, Wordpress and similar things and now are going to give Joomla a go… here are my five tips:
1. Check out the documentation - you’re a don coder so you don’t have to read it, but if you use their search for items that you want to change / configure you might find the ‘correct’ route rather than hacking stuff (and breaking things like I did).
2. Try some different templates and how module positions work - install some templates that match what you want your Joomla install to look like and jack ‘?tp=1’ on the end to show the module positions. With Joomla you can build a module and sit it in any position to appear when the user has the required permissions level, nice and configurable.
3. Realise the power of disable - anything that you’re not liking in your base install, disable it. Plugins run loads of things from breadcrumbs to newsfeeds to ‘remember me’ boxes on login windows… all can be disabled and removed form the site as required. The same goes for modules, disable them at will to clean down the site as you require.
4. Create a bucket menu - menus are strangely tied to pages. However, you can create menus that are not shown on the site. The power of this is that you can then create menu items in those bucket menus and reference them in modules without them having to appear in your site navigation.
5. Revert to hacking - if all else fails, get out your PHP and dissect the thing. It’s easier than WP to get it working how you want anyway!
Good luck!
