The Joomla Chick

WARNING!!  PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU CHECK YOUR JOOMLA GLOBAL CONFIGURATION SETTINGS AFTER UPGRADING!

I have been using Joomla 1.5 for a while now and absolutely love it.  It wasn’t until I was adding a site to a Facebook group and saw the Joomla description that I realised something wasn’t quite right.  I knew that I had put my proper description and keywords into my global configuration when setting up the site and yet they weren’t there.

What had happened is that I was in Fantastico in my site and upgraded my Joomla installation to the latest version.  Even although I know I should check the settings, I didn’t.  What a mistake!  What happens when you upgrade is that it puts the global configurations back to default and you need to put everything back in as it was.  Therefore I would advise you before upgrading your Joomla website to copy all your keywords and description from global configuration so that you can paste them back in after you’ve completed the upgrade.  The upgrade itself is very simple to do, one click and you are done!

Another thing is that if you have search engine friendly (sef) urls on, through the Joomla core extensions, then they will default back into not working.  It’s extremely important to change these back asap as the search engines will start sending your visitors to 404 error pages as the search engine friendly (sef) settings have been turned off.

The good news is that you can carry out the upgrade and resetting of the global configuration in less than 5 minutes so don’t let my warnings put you off upgrading!  Upgrading is a necessary part of using Joomla as the majority of the upgrades are security upgrades, making your site more secure, and we love that!

Many Joomla users create their websites and don’t upgrade their sites as they are using their sites just to promote their business and don’t update their information.  This is such a waste of such a wonderful content management system and they are losing out on web traffic visitors and increased profits.  If this is you, and you are not alone, then please consider upgrading and using Joomla as it can be used.

I’ve been asked recently to do site reviews for a few websites and was amazed (although I am not sure why) that they were all Joomla 1.5 sites.  Does this mean that more and more business owners and website developers are using Joomla as their website platform preference?  As you know it’s mine!

I love Joomla!  Joomla offers both website developers and business owners a great content management system (cms) which allows a great deal of freedom on what you have on your site as well as great Joomla 1.5 templates that make your website look very professional, instantly.

The one thing I have found with Joomla 1.5, although it is much easier to use (in my opinion) than it’s Joomla 1.0 counterpart, you still have to retrain your brain into geek mode to be able to figure out the logic.  I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, it’s just something to be aware of.

I’ve given countless hours of Joomla training and once people understand the basics, away they go happy in the knowledge that they know how to build their own website using Joomla and that they now have control over their website.  If they need a paragraph added or a new article added, they can do it themselves, without having to pay a website developer or designer to change it, not to mention having wait to get it done instead of being able to add it there and then.

There are other content management systems out there, infact there are quite a few sites build using Wordpress which is a great platform for blogging and basic sites but doesn’t give you the functionality that Joomla gives.  There is also Drupal and PhpNuke as well as a few others.  I haven’t tried to build sites on other platforms other than in html coding and Joomla is sooooo much easier that doing that, even with the learning curve you need to go through to learn how to use it.

Although Joomla is a self contained content management system you still need access to either cpanel or plesk or which ever control panel that is on your hosting account.  Why do you need access to your control panel?  Most, if not all, of the templates when you edit any of the css (cascading style sheet) files they lock the file so you can’t edit it again.  A problem therefore if you need to change it again and you don’t have access to your control panel or file manager.

I am presently creating a series of training videos which should be ready within the week to demystify the world that is Joomla!  I also offer Joomla training, at the moment I have individual training packages available and group training is planned for March.  Let me know if you are interested.