Joomla® — The Flexible Platform Empowering Website Creators
Joomla! is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build web sites and powerful online applications.
Multizone have been building websites and content management solutions with Joomla since its inception in 2005 and love it. it may not have the market share of some of the competition, but it is award-winning, free and open-source.
Joomla! has a global community of developers and volunteers, who make sure the platform is user friendly, extendable, multilingual, accessible, responsive, search engine optimized and more.
How to get started with Joomla!
Joomla! is free, open, and available to anyone under the GPL. If you are unfamiliar with this license, you might want to read the GNU General Public License FAQ. Read Getting Started with Joomla! to find out the basics.
If you're ready to install Joomla! by yourself ou can download the latest version of Joomla! and you'll be up and running in no time.
Joomla tech notes and demos
Joomla is a powerful content management system but much of that power comes from the ability to add extensions without breaking the system. Extensions are opaque though and there is a lot to get to grips with to create them. There are many dependencies and knowledge points that you need to have to succeed. You might wisely choose to use a component creator to do this heavy lifting for you but I wondered what help there might be from AI. The answer is quite a bit and that I now have two working extensions - a plugin and a a component - but it wasn't exactly a straight out of the box experience. This article explores how to build a Joomla component using AI that dynamically generates meta descriptions from article content, thus enhancing SEO without manual input. You can learn more about Joomla development at the Joomla developer website.
Anyway, to the topic. I decided my meta descriptions were poor. I'm not sure how much they are relevant anymore in SEO so I didn't want to spend a lot of time curating them, but I want them to be useful. So I need to generate them automatically when an article is created and optionally need to regenerate them all if I change the logic for generation. We'll cover key aspects, including model creation, controller handling, and the UI for a "Regenerate All" button. By the end, you'll have a functional extension that automatically fills the metadesc field in Joomla articles.
TL:DR – The following guide walks through building Joomla extensions, a (component and a plugin) that automatically generate SEO-friendly meta descriptions. You'll create the necessary MVC files, ensure proper database updates, and add a button for bulk regeneration. The process automates a manual task in Joomla's content creation and should improve article visibility in search engines.
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Read more: Creating a Joomla plugin and component with AI help
The meta description tag can be used by search engines tag content to generate snippets, if the search engine decides it to be better than page content. Social media sites also might use it for link preview if the page has no open graph description tag. A meta tag might be better if you want to control the summary of the page. In Joomla you can set a global meta description but this is not a good practice as search engines do not like duplicate title or meta description tags. The Global setting is in the Joomla Administrator at Administrator → System → Global Configuration → Site tab → Meta Data Settings → Site Meta Description but it would be better not to use it.
Meta descriptions play a pivotal role in search engine optimisation (SEO) by summarising a page's content for potential visitors. A plugin that generates an automatic Meta Decription on Save could help to refine your workflow and give you less page errors from your page analysis tools. This article looks into the practicalities of such a plugin, its benefits, and other considerations and shorcomings surrounding automated meta descriptions in Joomla with an objective of helping to ensure that you can enhance your site's presence in search results while maintaining content relevance.
TL:DR – The global meta description is an old global setting in Joomla. Search engines have moved on and so should you! An automatic Meta Decription on article Save plugin effectively automates the generation of meta descriptions based on the article title, saving time for content creators and optimising search engine visibility. To set it up, simply build it, install it on your Joomla site, adjust your preferences, and enjoy enhanced SEO without the tedium of manual entry.
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A new module in Joomla 5.2 provides a flexible approach to article positioning.
Use one module to display latest, most read, specific or archived articles, from select categories - with filters, tags and more...
From Content -> Site Modules, create a new module of type 'Articles'.
Lets take it for a spin on this site. After all, thats one of the reasons this site exists, to try out Joomla features.
TL:DR – The arrival of a new site module in Joomla is cause for celebration. Nice work Joomla team! It was dead easy to replace my 'Most Read Posts' module with a 'Most read articles' module and took only a few minutes.
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Read more: The new all-in-one Articles module for Joomla 5.2
A client had me set up Google Analytics on WordPress. I'm a Joomla guy. What could possibly go wrong?
TL:DR – Step by step setup of Google Analytics - GA4 - for a WordPress based website using Google SiteKit for WordPress
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So I find myself needing to write a module for Joomla! and thought I would document it as I go so that I have something to refer to in the future. Perhaps you'll find it useful too.
TL:DR – There are lots of resources for Joomla on the Internet going back decades and in many cases not that useful. The most useful I've found is the Official Joomla Module Development Tutorial. These are my specific notes based on that tutorial about writing a module for Joomla 5.x for myself which I've documented for my own needs in late 2024.
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