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Set up a blog in Joomla (1.0)

Written by Marco Conti Friday, 15 December 2006 11:53

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A common complaint of the Joomla! Blog section is that it seems to have a life of its own. Joomla! is based on the concept of "Sections" and "Categories", where a Section is composed of one or more categories and each category is composed of the actual content. This is a source of some confusion and a lot of frustration on the part of users and I will try to explain how the Joomla! system works and how to set up a working personal bog in Joomla!

If I want to setup a Blog on Joomla, I need to be able to publish only a given section within the blog page. For example, if I have two categories, "Blog" and "Services", I don't want to have the content from the services category spill over in my Blog.

The way Joomla! is set up by default, all non-static content gets inserted in the blog page regardless of what section or category it belongs to and it's not immediately apparent how to set up one or more independent blogs within the Joomla! CMS structure .

To make matters worse, in the stock Joomla! installation this title appears on top of the Blog page: "A Blog of all sections without images". At first, it appears that changing the title or making only one category the content of the blog is impossible.

The solution to both problems is easy if not very evident, almost embarrassingly so. To fix the title issue go to the menu manager > MainMenu (where the "Blog" menu entry is by default) > "Blog" menu item.

As you can see in the screenshot, at the left the name of the menu item there is a list of sections that the blog refers to. The default is "All sections", and consequently the blog will pull in all the contents of every section. Choosing a section instead will only display that section's content.

It couldn't be easier.

The issue of the blog page title is even simpler. On the same page, in the "Parameters' Screen the title is displayed in all its glory for you to change. No database hacks (all though that will work too if you have masochistic tendencies), no fuzz. You can even choose not to display the title at all.

Create a Joomla blog step by step - Section

• Go to Admin > Section Manager > New Section
• Name the section and click "Apply"
• In the right pane enter a menu link and choose "Section Blog" as the type (*)
• Save and create a new category.

Create a Joomla blog step by step - Category

• Create a Category to contain your blog articles
• Create a new category inside the "Blog" section
• Click Apply and create a menu link of type "Section Blog" (*)
• Fill in the Meta tags and write a description if you like and save

Section menu item

Now you have a workable blog that will publish content exclusively from the section or category you will define. However, there are a few more steps to take care of: You may have noticed that you can create both a Section menu item and a Category menu item. The two are similar but there are some differences. Let's work the Section menu item first:

As you can see, the section is pre-selected and can be changed here if needed. A section blog page will display articles from more than one category in a format you can control from the "Parameter" pane on the right. There you can choose how to display your blog page:

• Page title: The name of your Blog
• Leading: How many article will display full width
• Intro: How many articles will display with the intro text (as opposed to the entire text or just the title)
• Columns: How many columns (1,2,3) for the articles not at full width
• Links: How many links to articles with just the title displayed
• Category Order and Primary Order: define how the articles will be ordered
• Description: Whether the Section Description is shown or not. Useful if you'd like to have some intro text for the entire section.

The other parameters, while important are not critical to what we are trying to do here. A section based blog can be useful if you have several different blogs and you want to have a page where you can display all your articles in one place but just the blog articles, not pages such as "about us" or "Services" getting in the way.

Category menu item

The category menu works similarly, but it allows you to drill down to the specific category or categories you want to show in a page. In the picture at right (click to enlarge) you can see that the page layout choices are similar to the Section link interface.

Promote your blog

Some of the nice features of many dedicated blog software installations are so called "Pingers". They in essence "ping" the various blog repositories and tell them when you have created new content to index. Thanks to Joomla! large Open Source community, Joomla! too can be setup to ping these repositories. I use "Weblog Pinger" a very nice component that comes with a Cron job script and can can ping Blo.gs , Weblogs.com , Technorati and Pingomatic. The component reads the RSS 2.0 feed of the site and only sends pings if it discovered a change since the last run.

I have not had a chance to really test how well it works compared to tools like Wordpress, but I will post future impressions on this space when I do.

Other useful tools

There are other add-ons that can make your blog more effective and add things like a Blog calendar, a Blog roll, etc. and with a bit of ingenuity you can even come up with solutions on your own to really customize the Joomla! blog to your liking.

If a site needs to give a blog or let several authors contribute, there are more advanced set-ups that can be put in place. I may write an article on this subject in the future.

I hope you found this article useful and feel free to tell me what you think. I'll be happy to expand on it or revise it if needed.

Thank you for reading and good luck with your blogs.

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