Before we start, here's a reminder of the three key things you needs to know about Joomla 3:

- What is great about Joomla 3? Mobile. Joomla will be the first major, mobile CMS.
- Who is Joomla 3 for? Early adopters. You will be able to build sites with Joomla 3 as soon as it is launched. However, as with the first release of most software, there's no need to rush in and use the first version.

1. Sample Data Choices At Installation

Instead of a choice for sample data or no sample data, you can now choose different subsets of sample data. In addition to the actual data, there are some layout and module choices included in the samples.

The Blog sample data sets up the site automatically with a category called Blog and all the sample posts on the home page. If all you want to do is create a very simple blog, this is a great shortcut. It's easy to see how this could be expanded to allow template companies, extension developers and others to easily create great sample installs.

2. Common design features for the user interface

- The Save button is now highlighted and the whole set of action buttons has moved to the top-left rather than the top-right.
- Many settings have now been placed inside tabs.
- Yes / No buttons are color-coded with green and red.
- There's a left-hand side navigation on many screens.

3. Bulk Image Uploads

In Joomla 2.5 bulk uploads were possible via a Flash Uploader, but it didn't work for a lot of people. And besides, Flash is on it's way out.

Joomla 3 has a bulk image upload feature that works great and works by default:

4. The Disappearance of Pop-up Windows

OK, it's hard to take a screenshot of something that isn't there, but the Options button is a good example. There are many fewer pop-up windows in Joomla 3 than in previous versions. 

Many options have been moved to tabs or can now be accessed via the left-hand side menus.

The disappearance of pop-up windows undoubtedly helps with making Joomla more mobile-friendly.

5. Unified Component Options

We mentioned that pop-up window for options had disappeared. What happens instead?

You now get sent to one single, unified options area for all your components. This makes setting up your site, and particularly permissions, much easier.

6. Drag and Drop

Re-ordering lists in Joomla has always been cumbersome. Now you can re-order items with drag and drop.

- Click the Order icon at the top of pages such as the Article Manager.

- You'll now see icons at the beginning of each row.
- Mouse over the icons to get the drag symbol.
- You can drag the item to any position on the line that you want.

7. Article Editing

- Using tabs for additional options allows more room for the article editor.
- No more cramped edit window.
- Image options are easier to read and more convenient.

8. Context Menus

Context menus have been added to lists for quick editing and configuration. You can modify items in lists via options that are directly next to them. No more wandering off to other parts of the screen to find a button.

The Key Points

If you know nothing about Joomla 3 yet, here are the 3 key points:

What is great about Joomla 3? Mobile. Joomla will be the first major, mobile CMS.

Who is Joomla 3 for? Early adopters. You will be able to build sites with Joomla 3 as soon as it is launched. However, as with the first release of most software, there's no need to rush in and use the first version.

I am on Joomla 2.5. What do I do? You can stay right where you are for now. Joomla 2.5 is a wonderful version of Joomla and will be supported until 2014.

1) The First, Major Mobile CMS

This is the version that will bring Joomla up-to-speed with the mobile revolution that is taking over the web.

It's predicted that, as soon next year, more people will be online via their phone than a desktop. The mobile version of your site may soon be more important than the desktop version.

Joomla 3 is using Bootstrap to make sure that the visitor and administrator areas are mobile-friendly.

Joomla will become the first major content management system to be 100% mobile-friendly by default.

2) 10 Second Installations

The installation process for Joomla 3 is much quicker and better designed. There are now only three steps in the process. Some people report being able to finish the installation screens in less then 10 seconds.



Here are how the installation screens look:



3) Improved Administration Area

When you go to login to your new Joomla site, you'll notice the new dark-blue color scheme for the first time:



Login and you'll see that the main admin screen has been overhauled.

The dashboard is entirely made up of modules so you can customize it to your needs.



Here are the six main areas of the Joomla 3 dashboard:

1. Menu bar: This is largely unchanged from Joomla 2.5
2. Extra links: These have been radically simplified. Many were moved to area #6 in the footer.
3. Sub menu: These provide important sub-menu links for the current page that you're on.
4. Dashboard modules: These are modules and can easily be replaced, depending on your sites needs.
5. Quick icons: In Joomla 2.5 these took up the entire central area of the dashboard. They're now neatly organized on the right-hand side.
6. Footer links: Many of the links from area #2 are now down here.



4) Mobile-Friendly Admin Area

The Joomla 3 administrator area is now fully mobile-friendly. Here's what the main dashboard area looks like on an iPhone



Here's the Artlcle Manager in the mobile view:



Here's the toolbar that you'll see when editing something:



5) Revamped Article Screen

One of the most common complaints were heard with Joomla 2.5 was that the article writing screen was far too small.

There were too many options on the page and the actual editor area was tiny. In Joomla 3, the article screen is given almost the full width of the page:



The article screen also allows us to see several other usability improvement in Joomla 3

First, tabs. In Joomla 2.5 the extra options were scatted all over the screen. Now almost all of the extra options are now organized into tabs across the top the screen:



Second, the right-hand column. No longer cluttered with 1001 options, only the most important are placed in the right-hand column:



6) Drag-and-Drop

You can enable drag-and-drop sorting in almost any screen. First, choose to sort by Ordering:



Then you'll be able to drag-and-drop all of the items on the page:



7) Unified Configuration

With Joomla 2.5, it was hard to update the site's configuration options. You needed to visit each part of the site individually to configure it.

This should make it much faster to complete tasks such as setting up permissions. You can click through the permissions screens far more quickly on Joomla 3 than you ever could with Joomla 2.5:



8) Quicker Choices

Work is still going on with this improvement, but the plan is to allow people to search and select much more quickly. The example below is assigning a module to certain pages. If you type in the name of the menu link, Joomla will automatically show you the choices that match.



Here's an example of searching for a position to place a module in:



9) Mobile-Friendly Front-end Template

There is a new front-end template for Joomla called Protostar. The design is fully reponsive:



One nice extra touch is that all the module positions are logically labeled. In Joomla 2.5, the naming conventions were a mess and users struggled to work out the differences between position-10, position-11 and more. Now you'll see labels like these:

- Navigation [position-1]
- Top center [position-3]
- Right [position-7]

10) Your Choice of Updates

Joomla 3 will be a available as a one-click update option from Joomla 2.5, but it won't be offered by default yet. As with the first release of most software, there's no need to rush in and update immediately.

Joomla 3 will not be offered as an update option until next year when Joomla 3.5 is released. Even then, people will have the choice of whether to update or not. Here's the Joomla 2.5 update options screen:



Want to test drive Joomla? Get an affordable Joomla hosting with ASPHostPortal.com

ASPHostPortal is a premiere web hosting company that specialized in Windows and ASP.NET-based hosting, proudly announces new Microsoft product, Windows Server 2012 hosting to all new and existing customers. The newly released server operating system offers a number of features that can be utilized to benefit developers, resellers and businesses.

Windows Server 2012 offers new and improved features which enable multi-user infrastructure where storage resources, networking and compute are completely remote from other users. There are a number of key features that customers will find useful, including support for asp.net 4.5, Internet Information Services 8.0 (IIS), compatibility with Visual Studio 2012, Visual Studio Express 2012, support for ASP.NET MVC 4, and Entity Framework 5. Other key new features include dynamic IP restriction to help prevent DoS attacks, support WebSockets and node.js, and also CPU Throttling to ensure isolated each client's server usage and Application Initialization to improve user experience of first requests.

“We have always had a great appreciation for the products that Microsoft Offers. With the launched of Windows Server 2012 hosting services, entrepreneurs and organization will be able to build their impressive website to be on the top of the competition.” Said Dean Thomas, Manager at ASPHostPortal. “Within Windows Server 2012 hosting packages, users will have the ability to use Hyper-V in assorted configurations, improved isolation and security, fortified access controls to files and processes and the capability of managing servers as a group.”

ASPHostPortal is one of the Microsoft recommended hosting partner that provide most stable and reliable web hosting platform. With the new launch of Windows Server 2012 into its feature, it will continue to keep ASPHostPortal as one of the front runners in the web hosting market. For more information about new Windows Server 2012 hosting, please visit http://www.asphostportal.com.

About ASPHostPortal.com:

ASPHostPortal.com is a hosting company that best support in Windows and ASP.NET-based hosting. Services include shared hosting, reseller hosting, and sharepoint hosting, with specialty in ASP.NET, SQL Server, and architecting highly scalable solutions. As a leading small to mid-sized business web hosting provider, ASPHostPortal strive to offer the most technologically advanced hosting solutions available to all customers across the world. Security, reliability, and performance are at the core of hosting operations to ensure each site and/or application hosted is highly secured and performs at optimum level.

Modules you create are assigned to module positions and these module positions are displayed on your website as defined by the template you use. Sometimes it is useful to display modules within articles, and in this instance there is no module position defined for that purpose.

Overview of what you need to do:

1. Enable the “Content – Load Modules” plugin in the Plugin Manager
2. Create a module with custom module position in the Module Manager
3. Edit the article and insert custom module position code in Article Manager

Assign the module a position not used in your template. You can type it in and not select it from the drop down box. Afterwards edit your article and enter in the {loadposition moduleposition} command where you want the module to be displayed.

For example:

1. I want to display a the random banner module inside my ‘Beginners’ article.
2. I will create a module position = moduleinsidearticle1

Below are steps:

Enable the “Content – Load Modules” plugin in the Plugin Manager

1. Login to your Joomla 1.7 Administrator backend

2. Click on ‘Extensions’, ‘Plug-in Manager’

3. Search for “Content – Load Modules”

4. Make sure that the plugin is enabled

5. If not enabled, click on the checkbox and click on ‘Enable’



Create a module with custom module position in the Module Manager

6. Click on ‘Extensions’, ‘Module Manager’, New, Module Type = Banners

7. In the Module Manager Banner Details, set the following values:

- Title = Module In Article Title
- Position = moduleinsidearticle1
- Status = Published
- Access = Public
- Client = Joomla!
- Module Assignment = On all pages

8. Click on ‘Save & Close’



Edit the article and insert custom module position code in Article Manager

9. Click on ‘Content’,'Article Manager’, edit article you want module to go in. My example I edit ‘Beginners’

10. In the article content, place your mouse where you want your module to show up and enter in the code

{loadposition moduleinsidearticle1}

11. Click on ‘Save & Close’



You can refresh your Joomla website now. Open up the article that contains the article to test it out. See mine below. It worked perfectly.



Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

To migrating the joomla 1.5 website to 1.7, first we need to migrate the joomla 1.5 website to joomla 1.6 and then we can update the joomla 1.6 website to joomla 1.7.

With Joomla 1.7 the user community placed a large emphasis on making the CMS installation process as simple as possible and new versions more frequent.

This will allow users to more easily and frequently migrate to the latest version of Joomla, and take advantage of all the security benefits associated with running the newest code. We think Joomla users around the world will really embrace this new process.

Please check before upgrading

1.  Is your Joomla 1.5 version up to date? The most up-to-date version of Joomla 1.5 is 1.5.23. If your version is not up-to-date, upgrade to 1.5.23 before migrating, especially if you are running Joomla 1.5.11 or lower.

2.  Do all your extensions have Joomla 1.6 native versions? At the time of the writing of this tutorial there are 108 available on the JED. Please note that jUpgrade is not currently able to upgrade Joomla 3rd party extensions, so those will have to be done via their respective upgrade procedures. This is however a work in progress.

3.  Have you modified any core files? Any changes that you have made to core files in Joomla will be lost so please be forewarned.

4.  Is there a Joomla 1.6 compatible template available from your template provider? If not, do you feel comfortable making the changes yourself?

5.  Is your language pack available in Joomla 1.6? Find your Joomla1 1.6 Translation.

6.  Do you have folder or file permissions issues in your Joomla 1.5 installation?

7.  Do you NEED to migrate to Joomla 1.6? Joomla 1.5 is powerful and very mature. For many people there is not a need to rush into Joomla 1.6. Joomla will continue to support Joomla 1.5 for at least another year and three months, releasing security updates and bug squashing updates when needed.

Download jUpgrade

Download the latest version of jUpgrade. It is highly advisable, especially when development still is progressing, to always use the latest available version!

Install jUpgrade

Go to your Joomla backend. e.g. www.yoursite.com/administrator
Enable Mootools Upgrade Plugin

1. Go to Extensions | Plugin Manager
2. Search for “System – Mootools Upgrade”
3. Enable the plugin

It is important that this plugin is installed and that it has been set to enabled, as the proper functioning of jUpgrade depends on it.

Configure Options

As of jUpgrade version 1.1.1, support is present to migrate to Joomla! 1.6, Joomla! 1.7, and an old Molajo build. As well, for jUpgrade to be successful, you must configure your current table prefix prior to beginning the migration. The following are the options that can be configured with jUpgrade:

Global:

·    Distribution – Select whether to migrate to Joomla! 1.6, 1.7, or Molajo

·    Prefix for old database – Your current table prefix

·    Prefix for new database – Your selected table prefix for your migrated site

Skips:

·    Skip checks – Skip pre-migration checks

·    Skip download – Skip downloading the package (Note: Must have a package already downloaded to your temp folder or set this and Skip Decompress if set to yes)

·    Skip decompress – Skip decompressing the downloaded package (Note: Must have a package already downloaded and decompressed to site_root/jupgrade if set to Yes)

Templates:

·    Keep original positions – Keep the currently defined positions for modules

Debug:

·    Enable Debug – Enable this to have messages displayed below the migration process concerning the progress, helpful if having issues

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

ASPHostPortal is a premiere web hosting company that specialized in Windows and ASP.NET-based hosting. Now ASPHostPortal.com supports the latest Joomla 1.7 Hosting. For more information about this new product, please visit ASPHostPortal official website at http://www.asphostportal.com.

“Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone. Joomla is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you're not an advanced user. Many Web hosting services offer a single-click install, getting your new site up and running in just a few minutes.” Said Dean Thomas, General Manager of ASPHostPortal.com.

There are several benefits that you can get from Joomla. Joomla's powerful application framework makes it easy for developers to create sophisticated add-ons that extend the power of Joomla into virtually unlimited directions.

- Inventory control systems
- Data reporting tools
- Application bridges
- Custom product catalogs
- Integrated e-commerce systems
- Complex business directories
- Reservation systems
- Communication tools

For more details of our new Joomla 1.7 hosting, please visit our site at http://asphostportal.com/Cheap-Joomla-Hosting.aspx.

Another features that you can get if you host your site with us:

1. ASPHostPortal supports the latest ASP.NET 4
2. ASPHostPortal supports the latest ASP.NET MVC 3
3. ASPHostPortal supports the latest SQL 2008 R2
4. And the other Microsoft technology

About ASPHostPortal.com:

ASPHostPortal.com is a hosting company that best support in Windows and ASP.NET-based hosting. ASPHostPortal.com have many great plans that can meet your business requirement. For more details about ASPHostPortal.com, please visit the official site at http://www.asphostportal.com.

Small business owners – regardless of whether you are going to set up a website yourself or outsource to third party web developers, you need to be sure about the CMS (content management system) to use. This article will explain a bit on why Joomla CMS is the one you should consider to build a small business website.

When you or your team build a small business website that is more than just company profile, you need to think about the possible integration with other software or plugins to extend the capability of your site.

For instance, when you develop a small business website that can help you capture and manage leads for your business, you need a CMS that can easily integrate powerful software into your website.

How Joomla rocks

When you are going to set up an online store, you need an extension or plugin that can “extend” the capability of your basic installation of CMS. With Joomla, all you need to install is VirtueMart – and start setting up a professional online shop with full order management capability.

Let’s take another example. Suppose you want to build a small business website that will capture leads and manage them – in other words, doing CRM or customer relationship management – you will need an extension to help you with CRM, such as the powerful vTiger CRM. All you need is a plugin that can seamlessly connect your website with the CRM software; with Joomla, this is easily done by using CRMVJ Joomla extension.

Joomla and web hosting

To support those powerful features of Joomla, you need a Joomla Hosting. Joomla Hosting is actually similar to a “general” web hosting, except the fact that the web servers are configured and optimized for Joomla (yes, choosing the wrong web hosting provider CAN make your website setup a nightmare.) So, you need to be careful to choose your hosting provider. And for me it is more important to pay more to get best service than pay less but you get very inconvenience service.

Conclusion

Joomla offer unlimited possibilities for small business owners; whether you are going to establish an online business, a lead capturing business, or an extension of your corporate website from which you do CRM, the CMS can help you start your small business website on the right foot.

To add, Joomla has a great global community you can always turn for help and advice, as well as accessing new capabilities for your Joomla-powered websites – mostly available for free – developed by Joomla user, for Joomla user. How’s that for a CMS that is open source and free to use?

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

For those who spend most of their time on the Internet creating, designing, and maintaining website, Joomla is already a common and popular system to them. But for those amateur web developers, Joomla just seems to be an acquaintance. The good thing now is, I am bringing you closer to Joomla through this Joomla 1.6 tutorial article guide.

To start off, let me tell you what Joomla is. Joomla is one of the leading open-source content management systems. With this software, all web developers using this can maintain a hassle-free webpage because the system does all the managing for them. Joomla is like a library that stores personalized contents of developers, be it word files, music, or photos. Joomla can be used in array of functions such as personal websites or blogs, corporate sites, government applications, corporate intra and extranets, E-commerce, advertising, marketing, and community-based portals. Joomla can be downloaded and installed for free. And, has user-friendly panel and one-click installation processes.

Joomla is proud to present its newest version available for Internet users—the Joomla 1.6. Joomla 1.6 offers fully-functional system with new and more additional features to make your site more entertaining and interesting. There are four reasons why Joomla 1.6 is currently the best among all Joomla versions.

1. It has configurable user groups and viewing levels that give users total control and access to various site resources.
2. Multi-level categories at its best, which is a more improves site structure. Joomla experience has been less complex than the previous versions.
3. Improved maintenance system, which automatically updates the software.
4. Improved search engine optimization system, for more convenient indexing of search engine keywords.

To install the Joomla 1.6, create a MySQL database (cPanel->MySQL Databases) and then add a user first. Then, in the official website of Joomla, download the latest version of Joomla 1.6. Download the full archive file and then extract. Using an FTP client, upload all the contents from this folder to the directory on the server. Open the URL of the Joomla script. Use http://yourdomainname.com if the content you have uploaded is in the main web directory. However, if uploaded in a subdirectory, use http://yourdomainname.com/example. Only then you can replace the domain and the directory names of your own preference for your site. When done successfully, you’ll see that the Joomla 1.6 installation page will be loaded. Follow the step accordingly to start using the Joomla 1.6.

Wait for the confirmation towards the end of the installation page that you have successfully installed Joomla 1.6 on your webpage. Goodluck!

If you have any problem with Joomla installation, please let me know. Or you can always host your Joomla site with us. Very simple and easy.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

Now that the dust has settled from the recent launch of Joomla! 1.6 and developers are releasing new 1.6 compatible components daily, you may be getting anxious to move your site from 1.5 to 1.6.

You might be asking yourself (or others), “Am I able to use my existing 1.5 template for my new 1.6 site?“  The answer is, in short, no.

Ok – while that’s not entirely true, there are a lot of changes that you’re going to have to make before even attempting to install your 1.5 template on Joomla! 1.6.  Although there are lots of changes that may be required, depending upon your template, we’re going to review 3 of the most common changes: the XML file, the index.php file, and your template overrides.

Changes with the XML file (templateDetails.xml)

As the old saying goes, “The one thing that’s constant is change.” Well this is true for the Joomla! XML file as well.  The XML file is essentially the database of information about an extension (yes, templates are extensions). When it comes to Joomla templates, the XML file must be named templateDetails.xml.

Let’s take a look at the differences in a Joomla 1.5 templateDetails.xml file and a Joomla 1.6 templateDetails.xml file:

Joomla 1.5 Template XML Introduction

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<install version="1.5" type="template">
<name>Your Template Name</name>
<version>1.0</version>
<creationDate>04/01/2011</creationDate>
<author>JoomDaddy</author>
<authorEmail>[email protected]</authorEmail>
<authorUrl>http://www.joomdaddy.com</authorUrl>
<copyright>(c) 2011 JoomDaddy.com</copyright>
<license>GNU GPL</license>
<description>This is my template description.</description>

This example contains detailed information about the template – the version of Joomla! for which it’s developed, the author, author contact info, and the license information. Now let’s look at the same section of a Joomla! 1.6 template XML file.

Joomla 1.6 Template XML Introduction

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE install PUBLIC "-//Joomla! 1.6//DTD template 1.0//EN" "http://www.joomla.org/xml/dtd/1.6/template-install.dtd">
<extension version="1.6" type="template" client="site">
<name>Your Template Name</name>
<creationDate>04/01/2011</creationDate>
<author>JoomDaddy</author>
<authorEmail>[email protected]</authorEmail>
<authorUrl>http://www.joomdaddy.com</authorUrl>
<copyright>(c) 2011 JoomDaddy.com</copyright>
<license>GNU General GPL</license>
<version>1.0</version>
<description>This is my template description.</description>

So far, the only major differences in this file are the use of a DocTypeDefinition (DTD) and the use of <extension> instead of <install>. The DTD is used to check the XML file’s content to make sure that it matches the structure needed by the application. Prior to 1.6, Joomla has not used DTDs in the XML file. The other difference is the extension element and version parameter – which must be set to 1.6 instead of 1.5. This let’s the system know that you’re installing a template developed for 1.6, instead of a 1.5 or 1.0 template.

The next section of the XML file is the used to index the files and folder.  This section has gone unchanged:

<files>
<folder>css</folder>
<folder>images</folder>
<folder>html</folder>
<filename>index.php</filename>
<filename>index.html</filename>
<filename>favicon.ico</filename>
<filename>templateDetails.xml</filename>
<filename>template_thumbnail.png</filename>
</files>

This list needs to be accurate or you’ll receive an error during installation. Note, however, that files and folders found within the folders of the <folders> element do not need to be listed separately. This feature saves developers a lot of time when creating XML files!

The next part of the XML file is defining your module positions. You can add as many as you need.  The position names cannot have spaces, but other than that can be named anything you want:

<positions>
<position>left</position>
<position>right</position>
<position>top</position>
</positions>

At the end of your XML file, you’ll need to include the </extension> tag to let the system know it has reached the end of the file.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

First, in order to build your web site you will have to log into the administrator area. This can be achieved by opening the corresponding URL in your web browser:

http://yourdomainname.com/administrator

Replace yourdomainname.com with your actual Joomla URL.

Next, you have to enter the admin login details which have been set during the installation:

After entering the Joomla administrator area, you can check the featured articles (the ones that are included in the sample data or created by you) published on the front page through Content->Featured Articles.



You can edit them, create new ones, remove existing from the front page, delete, publish and unpublish articles.

If you have installed the Sample Data, before adding new articles you can delete the sample ones. Select them and click on the Trash button. Then remove the menu links to the sample articles from Menus->Main Menu.

After this you can add a new category from Content->Category Manager->Add New Category.



For example, you can put “Test” as the new category Title. The other options can be left blank or you can set their values as per your personal preferences. Click on the Save button to add your new category.

Next, navigate to Content->Article Manager->Add New Article.



Only the Title field is mandatory. Enter the article title. You can also select your category from the corresponding drop-down menu. Change the article State to Published. If you want to show it on the front page, set the Featured value to Yes.

Once you are ready with the settings you can proceed with the actual article content. Use the included text editor to type the article text, to include images or to directly edit the HTML code.



Under the text editor area you can set the permissions for the different user groups regarding your article.

You can also adjust the settings in the Publishing Options, Article Options, Metadata Options menus.



You can hover your mouse pointer over the options’ labels and get a brief description of each one of them.

Once you are ready, Save the article and check it on the front end. You can always edit the existing articles from the Joomla admin area->Content->Article Manager.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.