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.
I have been building websites in 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
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.
- Details
- Category: Joomla
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
- Details
- Category: Joomla
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.
- Details
- Category: Joomla
Writing a plugin for Joomla 5 involves several steps, from setting up the necessary files to implementing the plugin logic. Joomla plugins are event-driven and allow you to extend Joomla's functionality by listening for events triggered by the system or other extensions.
TL:DR – Here’s a detailed step-by-step guide on how to write a really simple Joomla 5 plugin. Out of acorns oak trees grow.
- Details
- Category: Joomla
Integrating Stripe with Joomla can be done efficiently using third-party extensions or by manually integrating the Stripe API.
TL:DR – Below is a step-by-step guide for the easiest way to integrate Stripe with Joomla using a Stripe payment extension.
- Details
- Category: Joomla
Enhance your Joomla site by creating a layout override for precise design control.
Joomla is an adaptable content management system (CMS) for web agencies, large and small companies, online shops, bloggers, communities, and all kinds of organisations (for example, NGOs, schools, charities and governments) all use Joomla as their preferred CMS.
Joomla is written by committed volunteers. Many of those volunteers use it in their everyday web design, building and hosting. So, unlike many other systems, Joomla is built by those using it on a daily basis. That is reflected in its secure, robust nature.
Joomla stands apart in its advanced functionality which allows developers to manipulate and modify the appearance of websites using a feature known as overrides. A layout override in Joomla enables customisation of the output from templates and extensions without altering the core files. This approach ensures that updates to Joomla or its extensions do not overwrite these changes, offering a seamless, maintainable way to extend a website’s functionality.
TL:DR – In this article, we will explore the step-by-step process of creating a layout override and how it empowers developers to take full control of their Joomla site’s design. Note that this is not about template overrides, it is about layout overrides - they are different things!
- Details
- Category: Joomla
Read more: Creating a layout override (alternative layout) in Joomla
I had a little plugin to generate my table of contents out of the headers but it never really worked properly, so I today got around to finging a better solution. It works, but its not exactly straightforward, reminding me of an old friend at Sun who triumphantly brought a sheet of paper over and said 'its taken me a week to print this but I've learned a lot about Unix'. Anyway I think my new table of contents in Joomla looks pretty nice. See for yourself, Its below the read more.
TL:DR – Thank you to Clifford E Ford who wrote the example on the Joomla site in 2019.
- Details
- Category: Joomla
Joomla 5.x, on Ubuntu 24.04, with PHP 8.3
Two years after installing Ubuntu 22.04 a third party software update completely broke my Joomla site development computer. Yeah I should have known better! So, nows the time to rebuild. I've chosen to use Ubuntu 24.04 desktop, which is about to be released, and is in the very final stages of work, and pretty much finished, so that I can find our whats new, and if anything I care about is broken and hopefully then remain as updated as I dare for the forseeable future.
What will be installed
- Apache 2, MySQL, and PHP
- Joomla 5.x in multiple virtual sites
- ddclient for auto updating DNS host IP addresses, because this is a laptop
- certbot for Let's Encrypt SSL certificates
TL:DR — This is always an interesting exercise because it makes you think about all the first principles for running a content management system like Joomla. Where and how your databases will be set up, how exactly are you going to set up the web server, will your network support Let's Encrypt certificate renewal. It can be challenging to hold it all in your head, so I tend to write everything down these days and take screenshots. It becomes self documenting. I hope it is helpful to someone.
- Details
- Category: Joomla
WYSIWYG editing in Joomla 5
Joomla 5 introduces Fontawesome 6.4, and already has Bootstrap 5, but it can be a pain to preview what your article might look like with Bootstrap styling and Font Awesome Icons. JCE Pro fixes that, with one simple profile configuration change which enables What you see is what you get, (WYSIWYG) editing in Joomla.
- Details
- Category: Joomla
Joomla can be annoying sometimes. You try to add a fancy icon to your article like this, , but when you save your article the icon isn't there. On inspection you can see the tags have been removed!
This is irritating, but before you spend all day trying to understand it, there is an easy solution.
TL:DR: Learn just enough about editor settings to configure Joomla so editing is how you want it to be.
- Details
- Category: Joomla
First, do you need a sitemap?
A sitemap is a file where you provide structured information intended for web crawlers such as search engines. You might need a sitemap if your site is complex and/or multilingual. You might not need a sitemap if you have a small site, (Google say less than 500 pages), or if your site content is comprehensively linked from menus, or if you don't have videos, images or news pages that you'd like to appear in search results.
But if you do need or want a sitemap for Joomla, it is a simple task to add a sitemap to Joomla..
TL:DR: If you do, just Download OSMap from Joomlashack, it is free, although there is a Pro version should you need it.
- Details
- Category: Joomla
Icons in Joomla Menus
This is a relatively new feature in Joomla 4.1 and later, and it really helps make menus look more professional.
Icon from bootstrap icons, font awesome, or any icon font supported by your template can be used.
TL:DR: Make your Joomla menus look better with icons, easily.
- Details
- Category: Joomla
Customising the Menu class in Joomla Cassiopeia template
I needed to style the border for my menu in the Cassiopeia template when an item is selected or hovered, as its not a very good contrasting colour by default.
and its actually really easy to do with one CSS statement and a Link Class in the Link Type screen for the menu..
TL:DR: Make your Joomla menus look better with a hover border, easily.
- Details
- Category: Joomla
- Scalable Vector Graphics in Joomla 4
- Making Joomla sites search engine friendly and better for search engine optimisation
- Find and replace across all your Joomla articles
- Enhancing Joomla CMS Site Security with SSH Keys
- Updating Joomla 4 to latest
- Joomla 4 Cassiopeia template resources
- Roboto in Joomla 4
- Using the Joomla Command-Line Interface (CLI)
- Joomla 4.1.x on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Php 8.1 (whew)
- Adding external News Feeds to your Joomla 4 site
- socialcards - a twitter meta data plugin for Joomla 4
- Bootstrap 5.x buttons in Joomla!