Blogs

Written by Marco Conti Wednesday, 21 October 2009 11:56

In this issue of 10 Minute Joomla! Tips we are going to take a look at Joomla's Sections and Categories structure.

No other topic has confused so many people so needlessly in the Joomla world. Sections and Categories are simply a categorization system where Sections could more easily be thought about as Categories and the categories themselves as "sub-categories".

I am sure, many are now just as confused as before. So why not view this Screencast and take a look not only at what Sections and Categories are, but also at the new K2 component, which turns the concept on its head (and forecasts the way the upcoming new version of Joomla will work), as well as how to create the proper menu links to display sections and categories in Joomla.

Retrieve your Joomla Admin password

Written by Marco Conti Tuesday, 13 October 2009 13:01

Have you ever forgotten your Joomla Admin Password?

In this Video, Marco of ContiCreative.com will show you a few simple methods for retrieving your password in Joomla!

The first method is the simplest: Just click on the "Forgot Password?" Link in your login module.

But what if your login module is not published? Then use this link: http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?option=com_user&view=reset to bring up the password reset page.

(For the username the link is http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?option=com_user&view=remind

Did you use the wrong email when you created the site? Bummer!

The trick above won't work. It's time to go to PhpMyAdmin and perform some magic on the MD5 hash Joomla stores the password in.

In the Screencast, Marco will show you how to copy an MD5 hash from one website database to another or you can even generate your own MD5 and paste it in the proper field by Googling "MD5 Generator" or going to http://www.adamek.biz/md5-generator.php

Either way, you won't need to dispare if you forgot your password. One way or another you'll be able to get back in.

How easy to use is Joomla?

Written by Marco Conti Sunday, 04 October 2009 21:42

How easy to use is Joomla? Compare with sending an email. In this Episode of 10 Minute Joomla! tips, Marco, compares the process of writing and sending an email using Yahoo Mail to creating and publishing an article in Joomla. Amazingly, if you can send an email , you can publish articles in Joomla.

The work flow is almost identical. If you are a web developer, a Joomla developer or someone considering using Joomla for your website, you'll find this side-by-side comparison very compelling. If you are still on the fence on whether to use Joomla or not, this episode of 10MJT can help you make up your mind.

Add comment (3)

Making Dreamweaver recognize .INI and other non-native files

Written by Marco Conti Monday, 28 September 2009 16:14

As most of my readers already know, I use Adobe Dreamweaver as my main IDE (Integrated Development Enviroment). While I also use a number of other powerful code editors, like Coda, BBedit, TextMate (on the Mac) and Notepad++, PHP Eclipse and others for PC, Dreamweaver has been my choice for many years, regardless of the low opinion some developers have for this program.

In fact, I found that not only Dreamweaver is a powerful HTML, CSS and PHP editor, but when working with Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, Magento and pretty much90% of Open Source web scripts out there, Dreamweaver has many advantages , not least the infamous "Design" view, which in split mode can reduce the time it takes to edit dynamically driven templates by a factor of 5. (And incidentally, I am in the process of writing a book on how to apply these techniques to Joomla!).

Add comment (1)

Virtuemart Flypage fix - flypage not changing on product pages

Written by Marco Conti Wednesday, 16 September 2009 14:09

If you use Virtuemart with Joomla! and you have tried to assign a different "flypage" to each product category, you may have noticed that this feature doesn't always work. Fortunately, I have found a solution and made an easy to follow tutorial that anyone with server access or an FTP client should be able to execute fairly easily.

Add comment (8)

Handling Microsoft Word html text for Web Publishing

Written by Marco Conti Tuesday, 15 September 2009 13:54

In this edition of 10 Minute Joomla! Tips we discuss writing web content using Microsoft Word and how to make sure that the resulting HTML code will not corrupt the output of our Joomla Web site (or any web site for that matter).

Marco of conticreative.com will show some of the main procedures to handle MS Word text, one using the JCE editor "HTML" cleaner button, one with an intermediate step using Notepad or Text Edit to strip the text of its MS Word formatting and finally using a third party online service called "Textism" available at http://textism.com/wordcleaner/ .

Add comment (1)

Windows 64 bit OS still a battered child?

Web Technologies Blog

Written by Marco Conti Sunday, 13 September 2009 10:19

A Sunday Morning rant on windows stupidity.

A couple of yars ago I made the big jump to installing Vista 64 on my main workstation. The main reason at the time was because I felt the time for 64 bit computing on windows had come, drivers were easier to find and I wanted to utilize my motherboard 8GB maximum capacity.

Fix the beez modified date from 1999

Written by Marco Conti Saturday, 12 September 2009 13:02

In this article I uncover a bug in the Beez template that may affect those that use Beez "HTML" folder to override the default Joomla component chrome.

While writing an article on the Joomla date system I noticed that in my test site the "Last Updated" date in the article looked like this:

Last Updated on Saturday, September 12 1999

Create a clone or "staging" site for your Joomla website

Written by Marco Conti Thursday, 10 September 2009 13:01

Over the many years I have been working with Joomla! I have found that creating a "clone" (or more than one sometimes) of the main web site I am working on is a very useful tool in a Joomla developer bag of tricks. If you are using Cpanel as your main hosting control panel, this process is very fast and easy to implement.

Add comment (1)

How to install and Configure JCE - Part 2

Written by Marco Conti Wednesday, 09 September 2009 08:28

This is Part 2 of a 2 parts screencast about the Joomla Content Editor (or JCE). In this Part 2 of my JCE tutorial I go int more detail on how to use some of the JCE features. Remeber that this video was going to be part of my 10 Minute Joomla! Tips series but for a number of reasons I could not release it under that title. Consequently, I did not spend a lot of time editing and polishing the video and I apologize in advance if it's a bit rough. I hope you'll still find it useful and entertaining.

Mouse doesn't work in Microsoft word 2007

Quick Fixes

Written by Marco Conti Monday, 07 September 2009 14:23

You are working in MS Word 2007 (and apparently in other versions as well) and suddently you cannot use your mouse inside the document. It's like the page turned into an image.