A new Joomla Blog Template that stands out

Joomlart.com released a new template called JA Uvite and it is really one of the greatest templates I have seen that you can use on a Joomla based Weblog.

The templates features some module’s in its footer that you could use for Related items, Recent posts and even for recent comments if you have a Joomla comment component and modules installed.

A great homepage setup like in their example makes this template one of a kind. I really like te colors and the way the modules are placed though out the page.

Joomla Blog Template

You can download the template if you are a member of the Joomlart template club, membership includes not only this template, but at the moment you have access to 60 others and more to come!

Which I think is a great deal for the great looking templates the put out every month.

How to use sh404SEF to Improve MojoBlog SEF and SEO

As I mentioned in an earlier post about MojoBlog, that the only thing missing with this Blog tool for Joomla where the SEF options to create nice SEF URLs, and missing the Title tag for each post.

Reading some posts from www.goodwebpractices.com and www.alledia.com I wanted to see if the options in the advanced settings of the SEF Component sh404SEF would help to overcome these MojoBlog problems.

It did!! and it wasn’t even that difficult, so I thought I would share this with you, so you can do the same…

Getting sh404SEF Component and Module ready

First of is getting the sh404SEF component to show you its real strength!
If you installed and use the sh404SEF component (please use the latest release), you will see this basic configuration screen:

 

And you see nothing there that can help you… now just click on the item next to this screen that says “select advance parameters:

 

After this, you will see a screen with some more items to use in this great SEF and SEO Component:

As you can see now, there are to items on this screen that you can use to get some great stuff for you MojoBlog posts.

But before you can get to work on those items, you have to make sure of one other very important item to be published! 
The sh404SEF Custom module needs to be published!
You can find this module in the normal module overview of Joomla, and you only need to publish it.
The module is part of the sh404SEF Component installation, so you don’t need to install it yourself.

 

There are a lot of parameters below this screen, but you only have to set it to published, that’s it.

Creating the SEF URL

Once you have done the above things to get everything into place, lets start by creating a SEF URL for a MojoBlog post.

First go to the front-end, while making sure the site, or just the MojoBlog component is NOT showing SEF URLs. You need this to get the “old non SEF URL” to put into the settings.
If you have a post, it should say something in the last part of the URL like
“index.php?option=com_mojo&Itemid=63&p=5″
This will be different on your site ;-)

Copy this part of the URL and then go back to the sh404SEF Panel and click on:

And then choose “new” , this will bring up a field that will aks for that old URL and the new one.
Just copy the code from the previous step into the “Old URL” part and create a nice new one that should get into that place.
Please use “-” to connect the words
For the URL you can use the post title and you could leave out words like “and”, “for” and stuff like that for shorter URLs (Google ignores those anyway)
If you have set the option in sh404SEF that .html should be added to the URL, you can set it here as well.

Save the new URL and you are done with this part, you could check if it works already.
(Make sure the SEF Component is enabled an working again if you disabled it before)

Getting the Title and Metatags to  Work

You have seen another nice items in the sh404SEF Control panel… it says “Metatags”

Before you click on it, make sure you have the ”Old URL” you used earlier at hand, because you are going to need it here as well.

 After you clicked on the above icon , choose “new meta” from the upper right-hand menu.

You will get a screen like the one below:

As you can see, the first file is where your old URL should go.
Below that you have the fields:

• Title: where you can write your HTML Title that will be picked up by Google
  This title is different form you post title and shows only in the Title bar of your browser.
• Description Tag: make this into a nice commercial description for you post
• Keywords tag: Keep this few in numbers and make sure those terms are in the post text
• Robots tag: Come in handy you want to doe some Follow, NoFollow or Index, NoIndex stuff
  Otherwise you can leave it empty.
• Language tag: only useful for multilingual installations.

If you are satisfied with your lyrics, save it and go to the front-end, selecting the post you just worked on, in the source code of that screen you should see the Title, description and keywords you just entered…

One final thing remains, but that is out of you hands…. wait for Google or other search engines to re-index you page so you can check if what you did is indeed what the robots will pick-up…

If you want so see if things work on a live example, go to Hummerbie Mojo Blog and check some of the posts.

P.s. One more tip… the “Old URLs” from MojoBlog contain the last code &p=10 (or another number) and that last number correspond with the post ID from MojoBlog. So if you know that number, you can use the old URL you copied and just change the last number.

Giving your Joomla Blog section a different Template

Did you know you can assign different templates to different sections that are called on by your Joomla menu?

Let’s say you want your Joomla Blog categories to have a different Template then the rest of your website, how would you do  this?

First you have to create a menu item that holds your section, or the categories like you did in Creating your Blog Menu 

Now go to “Site” -> “Template manager” -> ” Site Templates” and there select the template you want to use.
Then click the “Assign” button in the upper right menu of the screen.

Now you can select the menu item(s) that should show the different layout.

After that, you should see something linke the screen below.

Go to the Frontpage of your website, and try the link yourself, look if it works…it does…!
If you want to reverse the process, simply push assign again and choose the top choice “None”.

So, where could you run into trouble and how to fix it…. for this to work, you should select two (or more) templates that have the same modules like ” left”, “right” end other positions you want to use, since you can only assign a module to one position.

If you have a template that works the wrong way, you could try to chance position calls in the index.php of the template (via the HTML editor in your template manager) .
For example, your want your menu to appear in “left”, but your new Blog template only has a ” right” column.
Go into the Blog template HTML and simply change “right” into “left” and see how that works out.

I know, it is so simple, you just don’t think about it this way… 

Putting your Joomla Blog set up on the Frontpage

I have set up an example Blog to let you see some of the nice components you can read about at the Joomla Blog Components page

Especially with the mojoBlog component as the frontpage of the website.

To get the mojoBlog, or any other component, to load on the frontpage instead of the Joomla frontpage you have to do two things.

First, create a menu item linking to the component.
Second place this menu link in the main menu above the Frontpage item!

The first menu item of the mainmenu is always the one that shows up on your website.

So, here is the example (in Dutch) with the Red Evolution Scrapbook template. De Joomla Blog

Building a Better RSS Feed for you Joomla Blog

If you have worked with Joomla, you know about its syndication function, right?

If not, go publish the module called “Syndication” but most likely you hae seen it on the Frontpage after a new installation of Joomla!

Click on the RSS 2.0 icon and look how it turns out…. o, and the articles you see there are ONLY from the frontpage!
Here are some screen shots of you standard Joomla Syndication option.

 

As you can see, there are no layout options, no images, just text..
Why, becouse the standard Joomla syndication components strips all html coding from your articles… so you beautifully crafted pages from you Joomla blog gets scrabeld to just text.
And it takes only articles that are on the frontpage.

Improving your Joomla Blog Feeds

But there is help, via a great component called DS-Syndication!

DS-Syndication is installed like a normal component and comes with some great features, like a button maker for your RSS Icons, but there is a lot more that this component does.

Like giving you the oppertunity to create feeds for each section or categorie, or bundeling more sections or categories end even create a feed for a section and than exclude a categorie… oké this might be a little overwhelming I guess.

So lets take a look at some screen shots of this component:

Like there is the Button maker, which is Fun, but not why you should use this component:

Are there is also a Ping manager and a Ping functionality build in, Ping is just ping…

Setting up the good stuff for your Joomla Blog