A module is a lightweight and flexible extension that is used for page rendering. They are used for small bits of the page that are generally less complex and are able to be seen across different components.

You can see many examples of modules in the standard Joomla! install: - menus - Latest News - Login form - and many more.

This tutorial will explain how to go about creating a simple Hello World module. Through this tutorial you will learn the basic file structure of a module. This basic structure can then be expanded to produce more elaborate modules.

File Structure

There are four basic files that are used in the standard pattern of module development:
- mod_helloworld.php - This file is the main entry point for the module. It will perform any necessary initialization routines, call helper routines to collect any necessary data, and include the template which will display the module output.
- mod_helloworld.xml - This file contains information about the module. It defines the files that need to be installed by the Joomla! installer and specifies configuration parameters for the module.
- helper.php - This file contains the helper class which is used to do the actual work in retrieving the information to be displayed in the module (usually from the database or some other source).
- tmpl/default.php - This is the module template. This file will take the data collected by mod_helloworld.php and generate the HTML to be displayed on the page.

Creating mod_helloworld.php

The mod_helloworld.php file will perform three tasks:
- include the helper.php file which contains the class to be used to collect the necessary data
- invoke the appropriate helper class method to retrieve the data
- include the template to display the output.

The helper class is defined in our helper.php file. This file is included with a require_once statement:

require_once( dirname(__FILE__).DS.'helper.php' );

require_once is used because our helper functions are defined within a class, and we only want the class defined once.

Our helper class has not been defined yet, but when it is, it will contain one method: getHello(). For our basic example, it is not really necessary to do this - the “Hello, World” message that this method returns could simply be included in the template. We use a helper class here to demonstrate this basic technique.

Our module currently does not use any parameters, but we will pass them to the helper method anyway so that it can be used later if we decide to expand the functionality of our module.

The helper class method is invoked in the following way:

$hello = modHelloWorldHelper::getHello( $params );

Completed mod_helloworld.php file

The complete mod_helloworld.php file is as follows:

<?php
/**
 * Hello World! Module Entry Point
 *
 * @package    Joomla.Tutorials
 * @subpackage Modules
 * @link http://dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wiki/Itemid,31/id,tutorials:modules/
 * @license        GNU/GPL, see LICENSE.php
 * mod_helloworld is free software. This version may have been modified pursuant
 * to the GNU General Public License, and as distributed it includes or
 * is derivative of works licensed under the GNU General Public License or
 * other free or open source software licenses.
 */

// no direct access
defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );

// Include the syndicate functions only once
require_once( dirname(__FILE__).DS.'helper.php' );

$hello = modHelloWorldHelper::getHello( $params );
require( JModuleHelper::getLayoutPath( 'mod_helloworld' ) );
?>

The one line that we haven’t explained so far is the first line. This line checks to make sure that this file is being included from the Joomla! application. This is necessary to prevent variable injection and other potential security concerns.

Creating helper.php

The helper.php file contains that helper class that is used to retrieve the data to be displayed in the module output. As stated earlier, our helper class will have one method: getHello(). This method will return the ‘Hello, World’ message.

Here is the code for the helper.php file:
<?php
/**
 * Helper class for Hello World! Module
 *
 * @package    Joomla.Tutorials
 * @subpackage Modules
 * @link http://dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wiki/Itemid,31/id,tutorials:modules/
 * @license        GNU/GPL, see LICENSE.php
 * mod_helloworld is free software. This version may have been modified pursuant
 * to the GNU General Public License, and as distributed it includes or
 * is derivative of works licensed under the GNU General Public License or
 * other free or open source software licenses.
 */
class modHelloWorldHelper
{
    /**
     * Retrieves the hello message
     *
     * @param array $params An object containing the module parameters
     * @access public
     */   
    function getHello( $params )
    {
        return 'Hello, World!';
    }
}
?>

There is no rule stating that we must name our helper class as we have, but it is helpful to do this so that it is easily identifiable and locateable.

More advanced modules might include database requests or other functionality in the helper class method.

Creating tmpl/default.php

The default.php file is the template which displays the module output.

The code for the default.php file is as follows:

<?php // no direct access
defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' ); ?>
<?php echo $hello; ?>

An important point to note is that the template file has the same scope as the mod_helloworld.php file. What this means is that the variable $hello can be defined in the mod_helloworld.php file and then used in the $hello file without any extra declarations or function calls.

Creating mod_helloworld.xml

The mod_helloworld.xml is used to specify which files the installer needs to copy and is used by the Module Manager to determine which parameters are used to configure the module. Other information about the module is also specified in this file.

The code for mod_helloworld.xml is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<install type="module" version="1.5.0">
    <name>Hello, World!</name>
    <author>Jervis</author>
    <version>1.5.0</version>
    <description>A simple Hello, World! module.</description>
    <files>
        <filename>mod_helloworld.xml</filename>
        <filename module="mod_helloworld">mod_helloworld.php</filename>
        <filename>index.html</filename>
        <filename>helper.php</filename>
        <filename>tmpl/default.php</filename>
        <filename>tmpl/index.html</filename>
    </files>
    <params>
    </params>
</install>

You will notice that there are two additional files that we have not yet mentioned: index.html and tmpl/index.html. These files are included so that these directories cannot be browsed. If a user attempts to point their browser to these folders, the index.html file will be displayed. These files can be left empty or can contain the simple line:

<html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"></body></html>

which will display an empty page.

Since our module does not use any parameters, this section is empty.

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.

This is a tutorial on how to set up Joomla in Ubuntu. The set up examples based on Linux Ubuntu desktop 8.04.

Set up LAMP server in Ubuntu desktop

Open command terminal by clicking 'Applications - Accessories - Terminal'. Change to root environments using 'sudo su' command. See step by step example below:

kucing@ubuntu-laptop:~$ sudo su
[sudo] password for kucing:
root@ubuntu-laptop:/home/kucing# tasksel

Choose LAMP server and OK to install. See screenshot example below:

 

When LAMP server installation is finished, we can start Apache web server using '/etc/init.d/apache2 start' command. Then, we can start configure Apache web server.

Change directory to /etc/apache2.

root@ubuntu-laptop:/home/kucing# cd /etc/apache2/
root@ubuntu-laptop:/etc/apache2# ls
apache2.conf  envvars     mods-available  ports.conf       sites-enabled
conf.d        httpd.conf  mods-enabled    sites-available

Copy 'sites-available/default' file configuration for Joomla virtual host.

root@ubuntu-laptop:/home/kucing# cp sites-available/default sites-available/joomla-basic

Run 'a2ensite' to enable site:

root@ubuntu-laptop:/etc/apache2/sites-available# a2ensite joomla-basic
Enabling site joomla-basic.
Run '/etc/init.d/apache2 reload' to activate new configuration!
root@ubuntu-laptop:/etc/apache2/sites-available# /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
 * Reloading web server config apache2                                         
apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain
name,
using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName
                                                                         [ OK ]
root@ubuntu-laptop:/etc/apache2/sites-available# cd ..
root@ubuntu-laptop:/etc/apache2# ls sites-enabled/
000-default  joomla-basic
root@ubuntu-laptop:/etc/apache2#

Set up MYSQL database for Joomla cms

Create a database for Joomla. See example steps below:

root@ubuntu-laptop:/home/kucing# mysql -u root –p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 66
Server version: 5.0.67-0ubuntu6 (Ubuntu)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql>

Create a new database:

mysql> create database joomladb;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.07 sec)

mysql>\q

Quit mysql and we can begin the Joomla installation.

Install Joomla in Ubuntu

1. Download latest joomla 1.5.x from official Joomla website:

http://www.joomla.org/download.html

2. Extract joomla 1.5.x and move it to web server home directory. Here is an example on how to transfer Joomla to web server root directory in Ubuntu desktop:

root@ubuntu-laptop:/home/kucing# cd /var/www/
root@ubuntu-laptop:/var/www# mkdir joomla-basic
root@ubuntu-laptop:/var/www# cd joomla-basic/
root@ubuntu-laptop:/var/www/joomla-basic# cp -R /home/kucing/Documents/kursus-joomla/Joomla_1.5.14-Stable-Full_Package/* .
root@ubuntu-laptop:/var/www/joomla-basic# cd ..
root@ubuntu-laptop:/var/www# chown -R www-data.www-data joomla-basic/

3. Open web browser and key in “localhost/joomla-basic” in the url.

4. Follow joomla installation steps.












5. Remove “installation” directory.

root@ubuntu-laptop:/var/www# rm -r /var/www/joomla-basic/installation

Test Your Joomla Site

Open your new website's administration page by entering the address such as 'localhost/joomla15/administrator' in the web browser url. Replace the 'joomla15' with the name of your joomla's directory name. Enter your username and password.

Done!!

If you have any problem with Joomla, you can trust us to host your Joomla site. We are always ready to help you. You can start from only $5.00/month to get Joomla hosting.

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.

This change will display the number of times each article has been read (hits) in the Joomla 1.5 Article layout.

You can see how it looks on the article pages.

Open file joomla_root/components/com_content/views/article/tmpl/default.php in any text editor and go to line 130.
The table row were interested in looks like this -

<?php if ( intval($this->item->modified)\n != 0 && $this->item->params->get('show_modify_date')) : ?>
<tr>
  <td colspan="2"  class="modifydate">
    <?php echo JText::sprintf('LAST_UPDATED2', JHTML::_('date', $this->item->modified, JText::_('DATE_FORMAT_LC2'))); ?>
 
  </td>
</tr>
<?php endif; ?>v

You need to add the conditional clause to display the number of hits for each item.
The <?php endif; ?> have been moved as well –

<?php if ( intval($this->item->modified) != 0 && $this->item->params->get('show_modify_date')) : ?>
<tr>
  <td colspan="2"  class="modifydate">
    <?php echo JText::sprintf('LAST_UPDATED2', JHTML::_('date', $this->item->modified, JText::_('DATE_FORMAT_LC2'))); ?>
        <?php endif; ?>
        <?php if ($this->params->get('show_hits')) : ?>
   <span style="float:right;">
                  Read : <?php echo $this->item->hits; ?> times
   </span>
  </td>
</tr>

Now the number of times the article has been accessed (hits) is displayed.

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.

A module is a lightweight and flexible extension that is used for page rendering. They are used for small bits of the page that are generally less complex and are able to be seen across different components.

You can see many examples of modules in the standard Joomla! install: - menus - Latest News - Login form - and many more.

This tutorial will explain how to go about creating a simple Hello World module. Through this tutorial you will learn the basic file structure of a module. This basic structure can then be expanded to produce more elaborate modules.

File Structure

There are four basic files that are used in the standard pattern of module development:
- mod_helloworld.php - This file is the main entry point for the module. It will perform any necessary initialization routines, call helper routines to collect any necessary data, and include the template which will display the module output.
- mod_helloworld.xml - This file contains information about the module. It defines the files that need to be installed by the Joomla! installer and specifies configuration parameters for the module.
- helper.php - This file contains the helper class which is used to do the actual work in retrieving the information to be displayed in the module (usually from the database or some other source).
- tmpl/default.php - This is the module template. This file will take the data collected by mod_helloworld.php and generate the HTML to be displayed on the page.

Creating mod_helloworld.php

The mod_helloworld.php file will perform three tasks:
- include the helper.php file which contains the class to be used to collect the necessary data
- invoke the appropriate helper class method to retrieve the data
- include the template to display the output.

The helper class is defined in our helper.php file. This file is included with a require_once statement:

require_once( dirname(__FILE__).DS.'helper.php' );

require_once is used because our helper functions are defined within a class, and we only want the class defined once.

Our helper class has not been defined yet, but when it is, it will contain one method: getHello(). For our basic example, it is not really necessary to do this - the “Hello, World” message that this method returns could simply be included in the template. We use a helper class here to demonstrate this basic technique.

Our module currently does not use any parameters, but we will pass them to the helper method anyway so that it can be used later if we decide to expand the functionality of our module.

The helper class method is invoked in the following way:

$hello = modHelloWorldHelper::getHello( $params );

Completed mod_helloworld.php file

The complete mod_helloworld.php file is as follows:

<?php
/**
 * Hello World! Module Entry Point
 *
 * @package    Joomla.Tutorials
 * @subpackage Modules
 * @link http://dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wiki/Itemid,31/id,tutorials:modules/
 * @license        GNU/GPL, see LICENSE.php
 * mod_helloworld is free software. This version may have been modified pursuant
 * to the GNU General Public License, and as distributed it includes or
 * is derivative of works licensed under the GNU General Public License or
 * other free or open source software licenses.
 */

// no direct access
defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' );

// Include the syndicate functions only once
require_once( dirname(__FILE__).DS.'helper.php' );

$hello = modHelloWorldHelper::getHello( $params );
require( JModuleHelper::getLayoutPath( 'mod_helloworld' ) );
?>

The one line that we haven’t explained so far is the first line. This line checks to make sure that this file is being included from the Joomla! application. This is necessary to prevent variable injection and other potential security concerns.

Creating helper.php

The helper.php file contains that helper class that is used to retrieve the data to be displayed in the module output. As stated earlier, our helper class will have one method: getHello(). This method will return the ‘Hello, World’ message.

Here is the code for the helper.php file:
<?php
/**
 * Helper class for Hello World! Module
 *
 * @package    Joomla.Tutorials
 * @subpackage Modules
 * @link http://dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wiki/Itemid,31/id,tutorials:modules/
 * @license        GNU/GPL, see LICENSE.php
 * mod_helloworld is free software. This version may have been modified pursuant
 * to the GNU General Public License, and as distributed it includes or
 * is derivative of works licensed under the GNU General Public License or
 * other free or open source software licenses.
 */
class modHelloWorldHelper
{
    /**
     * Retrieves the hello message
     *
     * @param array $params An object containing the module parameters
     * @access public
     */   
    function getHello( $params )
    {
        return 'Hello, World!';
    }
}
?>

There is no rule stating that we must name our helper class as we have, but it is helpful to do this so that it is easily identifiable and locateable.

More advanced modules might include database requests or other functionality in the helper class method.

Creating tmpl/default.php

The default.php file is the template which displays the module output.

The code for the default.php file is as follows:

<?php // no direct access
defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Restricted access' ); ?>
<?php echo $hello; ?>

An important point to note is that the template file has the same scope as the mod_helloworld.php file. What this means is that the variable $hello can be defined in the mod_helloworld.php file and then used in the $hello file without any extra declarations or function calls.

Creating mod_helloworld.xml

The mod_helloworld.xml is used to specify which files the installer needs to copy and is used by the Module Manager to determine which parameters are used to configure the module. Other information about the module is also specified in this file.

The code for mod_helloworld.xml is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<install type="module" version="1.5.0">
    <name>Hello, World!</name>
    <author>Jervis</author>
    <version>1.5.0</version>
    <description>A simple Hello, World! module.</description>
    <files>
        <filename>mod_helloworld.xml</filename>
        <filename module="mod_helloworld">mod_helloworld.php</filename>
        <filename>index.html</filename>
        <filename>helper.php</filename>
        <filename>tmpl/default.php</filename>
        <filename>tmpl/index.html</filename>
    </files>
    <params>
    </params>
</install>

You will notice that there are two additional files that we have not yet mentioned: index.html and tmpl/index.html. These files are included so that these directories cannot be browsed. If a user attempts to point their browser to these folders, the index.html file will be displayed. These files can be left empty or can contain the simple line:

<html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"></body></html>

which will display an empty page.

Since our module does not use any parameters, this section is empty.

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.

Here are the steps:

1. You need to install the Extended Menu module in your Joomla application.

2. Go to Extensions -> Module Manager and click on the newly installed Extended Menu module.

3. Step 3. Now you have to configure the Extended Menu module. It provides you with the ability to set many different variables that change the way your menus will work. You can, however, leave most of the settings in their default values. You can only change the Menu Style option to Tree List ,Active Menu Class to Both, Enable Menu Template to No and Element Id to Yes. In addition you have to select which menu should be loaded from the Menu Name drop-down box.



4. Now you have to organize your menus properly in order to make them display as a drop-down menus. For the purpose of this tutorial we will create a sub-enu of the Features menu and display it as a drop-down. To do this go to the Menus -> Top Menu(or if you changed the name of this menu - the one you have set) page and click on the New button. Once you set your menu to display the desired content, make sure you set its "parent" menu. In our case that will be the Features menu.



5. Finally you should add to your CSS file some lines that specify the behavior of the drop-down menu. You can simply add those lines at the end of the stylesheet file of your template (usually template.css):

ul#menulist_root li ul {
display:none;
}
ul#menulist_root li:hover ul{
display:block;
background:none;
}
ul#menulist_root li ul li{
background:#000000;
opacity:.85;
filter: alpha(opacity=85);
-moz-opacity: 0.85;
clear:both;
}
ul#menulist_root li ul li a{
background:none;
width:66px;
}
ul#menulist_root li ul li a:hover{
color:#AA0000;
background:none;
}

This style sheet will display a stylish, transparant drop-down menu once you point your mouse to the Features menu (i.e. on hover). You can use different CSS to achieve the looks you want for your menus.

Well done! you have successfully added a stylish horizontal drop-down menu to your Joomla website! At this point your page should look like this:



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.

Here are the steps:

1. open the index.php with the HTML editor and go to the line where you want to add the new module
2. insert the following code: <?php if ($this->countModules('newmodule)) : ?><div id="newmodule" ><jdoc:include type="modules" name="newmodule" style="xhtml" /></div><?php endif; ?>
3. save the file, go to the module manager and place the module on the "newmodule" position.
4. this new position will not be available in the position selector, but you just need to type in and save the module

Style the new module with CSS (style="xhtml")

1. #newmodule .moduletable {}
2. #newmodule .moduletable h3 {}
3. #newmodule .moduletable_menu {}

Add these codes to the template css file, and customize them as you want.

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.

Managing a static website can be a challenging task. To change a simple text in a static website you may have to make the changes locally and then upload the new files to your hosting account. On the other hand, a Joomla based website has all the flexibility a CMS application provides. This is why many people consider converting their static websites to Joomla.

The conversion process can be divided into two parts - adding your actual data and recreating the design of your website.

You should begin with adding your data first because later it will be much easier to make your design with the real information on your pages.

Adding your data consists of two main steps - creating your pages and creating your menus.

Let's start with the creation of your Main Menu and a Home item that will show the content of your front page.

- Step 1. Log in to your Joomla administrative area and click on the "Menu Manager" button to start the creation of your first menu.

- Step 2. Click on the "New" button to create a new menu.

- Step 3. On the next page set the title and description of your menu. You have to specify a unique name for the menu. You will later use this name to assign modules to it.

- Step 4. Now you have to add items to your menu. Click on the "New" button at the top-right part of the page.

- Step 5. In the next screen you will be asked to select the menu item's type. Since this item will show your front page, expand the "Articles" category and click on the "Front Page Blog Layout" item type.

- Step 6. Type "Home" in the title field. This text will appear on the menu link that will be shown on your website. You can always come back to the Menu Manager and rename the menu item.

- Step 7. Click on the "Save" button at the top-right part of the page.

- Step 8. The next step is to set this menu item as default. This means that when someone opens your website this will be the first page that will load. If you do not have a default item, Joomla will return a "404 Component not found" error.

You have to click on the checkbox next to your menu item and then press the "Default" button.

- Step 9. The creation of your menu is complete. You should now add a module to your website that will display your menu. To do this ,go to Extensions -> Module Manager and press the "New" button at the top of the page.

- Step 10. Choose "Menu" for module type and click "Next".

- Step 11. On the next page select a name for the module and set it to "Enabled".

- Step 12. Select the position where the module should be displayed.

- Step 13. Click on the "Save" button at the top-right part of the page.

You are now ready with the creation of your main menu and the first item in it. Once you have done that, you can add more items to your Main menu from the Menu Manager. You can check the different menu item types in order to see the differences in the way they visualize your content.

- Step 14. You should now add your content to the new site. You can look at each page of your static website as a Joomla article.

Looking for affordable Joomla hosting? Visit ASPHostPortal for further information.

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

Joomla and DotNetNuke are only two content management systems among many; however they are often regarded as best-of-breed for their respective technology stacks. DotNetNuke is an ASP.Net CMS written in Visual Basic, while Joomla makes use of the ever-popular PHP. Continuing in the path of our previous articles , we're going to examine the two frameworks to provide an impartial view of the advantages and disadvantages of both.

DotNetNuke  was created by Shaun Walker in 2002. Based on the 'IBuySpy Portal' code Microsoft released to promote their ASP.Net framework, the application quickly acquired a large development community. Originally named the ‘IBuySpy Workshop’, the moniker was later changed to reflect the 'Nuke' suffix commonly affected by open source content management systems. The DotNetNuke Corporation was formed in 2006 to be a steering committee overseeing development of the framework which, as of July 2010, is in active use on over 600,000 websites.

Joomla  was established in August 2005 as a fork of the Mambo CMS project. Senior developers, including Andrew Eddie, were unhappy with the direction Mambo was taking. So, in an open letter   to the Mambo community, they announced their intention to form their own development team. The new project got its name from a community vote, Joomla being an anglicized form of an Arabic word meaning 'all together'. The first version of Joomla, released in September 2005, was essentially a re-branded release of Mambo 4.5.23; but since then the previous codebase has been expanded upon at an astounding pace, resulting in it becoming one of the leading PHP based content management systems. 2008 saw Joomla 1.5 released to much fanfare, as well as one of the lead developers winning a Packt award for most valued person. Today it continues to go from strength to strength, with prestigious firms like IHOP and CitiBank making use of Joomla both internally and on public facing sites.

Core Functionality: Both DNN and Joomla offer similar functionality at first glance, but it soon becomes apparent that DotNetNuke offers much more straight out of the box. Joomla supports basic functions like polls, blog layouts and a built-in search engine. It even has some more advanced options which are not available in other PHP based content management systems, for example load balancing and a trash bin to ensure articles are not deleted accidently. However, in comparison to DNN’s much wider range of built in functionality like database replication, events management and a photo gallery, the initial selection seems a little weak. The lack of a built-in forum system can particularly hurt Joomla based websites which wish to form communities, although there are plenty of forum bridges available as extensions.

Customization and Third Party Extensions: What Joomla lacks in core functionality, it tries its best to make up for with third party extensions. The sitemaps, wikis and multilingual content which DotNetNuke supports by default are freely available as open source plugins. A common saying in the Joomla world is that 80% of any site is an add-on, which arguably means the core framework is light-weight enough to support any type of site without necessarily coming with everything and the kitchen sink installed by default. Templates for Joomla are easy to create, and this is reflected by the vast number available across the Internet. The low barrier to entry can sometimes result in wading through a morass of poorly designed themes, but higher end commercial designs are often stunningly well put together.
 
Where Joomla does fall down is in the flexibility it provides. Although there are add-ons for most things working with the framework can often feel restrictive, especially when it comes to design. The templating system is fairly proscriptive, and so themes tend to be orientated around similar basic layouts. DotNetNuke allows for greater freedom of expression, giving the opportunity to create a more unique site style. DNN’s assumption that most customers will have some development knowledge may put many off, but also allows for more flexibility in the same manner that Microsoft’s SQL Server is more flexible than Access.

Underlying Technology: In any comparison between DotNetNuke and Joomla it is necessary to take into account the different technologies on which they are built. Joomla uses PHP with a MySQL backend, a combination that is prevalent in the web hosting sphere. By contrast DotNetNuke makes use of Microsoft’s ASP.Net framework which, while arguably superior on a technical level, is also more expensive to use in a shared web-hosting environment. That said many small and medium sized businesses already have servers which run Microsoft’s Internet Information Service (IIS), which nullifies the open source software stack’s price advantage.

Both Joomla and DotNetNuke can interact with LDAP based systems like Active Directory. However DNN has an advantage due to ASP.Net’s built-in membership and role providers, which allow businesses with their own development team to tie the system into their back-end more closely. Similarly the Visual Studio line of development environments makes code modification easier than most PHP based solutions. DotNetNuke is really designed for corporate intranets which need to integrate with existing systems, and is built around this kind of functionality. By contrast Joomla is more orientated towards providing a quick but expandable web presence.

Support: The DotNetNuke framework offers several different levels of support. The basic ‘Community’ edition provides assistance primarily through developer forums, while the paid-for ‘Professional’ edition offers unlimited tier 2 online and email support. The ‘Elite’ version even incorporates live phone support with a 2 hour maximum response time. Joomla’s development team does not directly offer commercial support, but a number of third-party companies have built up considerable expertise with the system. These now offer training and support in much the same way as a Microsoft certified partner could support SharePoint

The key issue which may sway business users in the direction of DNN is the fact that the professional and elite versions are officially tested and verified. This means they are guaranteed to be as stable as possible, making them a good choice for business critical applications. These versions also offer health monitoring and file integrity checking, which can ensure that potential issues can be detected and resolved early on.

E-Commerce: A qualitative evaluation  of the key success attributes for online sales sites, made for the 11th International World Wide Web conference, highlighted what had been known for a long time; security and integrity are essential for any E-Commerce website. When comparing DotNetNuke and Joomla it can be seen that both frameworks support similar basic security features, like SSL encryption and email verification. However the professional edition of DNN also supports some extra features, such as granular privileges and sandboxing, which just give it the edge over Joomla in terms of functionality. When considering past performance it’s best to turn to Secunia, an independent security consultancy which maintains a list of vulnerability assessments for close to 30,000 different pieces of software.

As of July 2010 Secunia’s website shows 28 vulnerability advisories  for Joomla, of which none are unpatched. DotNetNuke has only 7 total advisories , and similarly none unpatched. In both cases it seems that the teams are able to resolve their security issues, but the increased number of advisories for Joomla might make some business users wary of another potential zero-day exploit.

When considering actual E-Commerce functionality, all editions of DNN come with affiliate tracking and a shopping cart included as standard. By comparison Joomla supports most e-commerce functions through third-party extensions, and hence isn’t ready for Internet marketing out of the box.

Integrating some of the available shopping carts into Joomla can be difficult, and may result in them looking tacked onto the design. This likely isn’t an issue for smaller businesses just starting to dip a toe into online sales, but may become a limiting factor when looking to upgrade a few years down the line.

Ease of Use: The inline administration model of DotNetNuke allows for quick and easy editing of content, whereas Joomla requires you to sign into a separate area of the site before making changes. DNN’s use of the drag and drop paradigm when modifying the position of modules is especially useful compared to Joomla’s more clunky back-end system. Beyond that the two frameworks share similar ease of use features with mass uploading, built in macro languages and search engine friendly URLs available by default.

In a comparison between Joomla and DotNetNuke, several things become evident. DNN arguably has an advantage in core functionality, however is lacking some of the third party extensions which make Joomla so appealing. Joomla’s style of administration is not as elegant as DotNetNuke’s in-line editing, and generally the framework is not as flexible. However it can be very quick to get a site based on a generic layout up and running. As such Joomla is likely ideal for making quick, inexpensive and moderately interactive websites.

DotNetNuke is aimed more at the creation of business scale web sites and web applications. Tight integration with existing systems and a usable e-commerce solution out of the box make it a winning formula for companies who want to set up an initial online sales presence. At the same time the stable, professionally certified and supported version is ideal for use in business critical applications, as well as high traffic community hubs.  

Conclusion

Both Joomla and DNN are good. It depends on you. So, if you’re looking for Joomla or DNN hosting, ASPHostPortal will help to host your site. You can start from our lowest price $ 5.00/month to get this hosting.

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.

Joomla! is an easy to use CMS tool, which allows you to create a website with practically no design or programing skills. To start a Joomla site, you need to sign up for a hosting account and have Joomla CMS installed. At ASPHostPortal you can get a free professional Joomla installation with your Joomla Hosting account. You can always start from our Portal ONE hosting plan (from @$5.00/month) to get this application installed on your website. So, why wait longer?

When you find the template you like, download it to your local computer and follow the steps below to install it on your website:

Step 1. Log in your Joomla admin panel and go to Extensions -> Install/Uninstall

Step 2. There is a box "Upload Package File" and you have to use [Browse..] to find the template file you have downloaded.

Step 3. Once you find the file, click on [Upload File & Install].

Step 4. Now that you have your new template installed, you should apply it to your site. This can be done from Joomla's admin panel, Extensions -> Template manager

Step 5. Check the radio button next to your new template and from the top right menu choose "Default".

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.

Introduction

There are many competing requirements for web designers ranging from accessibility to legislative to personal preferences.  Rather than trying to over-parameterise views, or trying to aim for some sort of line of best fit, or worse, sticking its head in the sand, Joomla! has added the potential for the designer to take over control of virtually all of the output that is generated.

Joomla! has generally been labeled by some for not giving due attention to accessibility or being archaic in their approach to web standards.  However with 1.5, the responsibility, but more importantly the power is back in the designer's hands.

In addition, except for files that are provided in the Joomla! distribution itself, these methods for customisation eliminate the need for designers and developers to "hack" core files that could change when the site is updated to a new version.  Because they are contained within the template, they can be deployed to the Web site without having to worry about changes being accidentally overwritten when your System Administrator upgrades the site.

The aim of this tutorial is to introduce the how four areas of the output of Joomla! are able to be customised by the template designer.

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MVC 101

MVC can be a scary acronym.  It stands for Model-View-Controller and the concepts behind MVC are responsible for the extra flexibility that is now afforded to the designer.  While parts of the theory can be rather involved and complicated, the only part that the designer need worry about is the V for View.  This is the part that is concerned with output.

Different extensions display output in different ways.

Components, as you would already know, are fairly complex and have the ability to display different information in different ways.  For example, the Articles Component (com_content) is able to display a single article, or articles in a category, or categories in a section.  Each of the ways of representing the different types of data (an article, or a category, or a section) is called a "view" (this comes from our MVC terminology).  Most components will have many views.  However, the view doesn't actually display the output.  This is left up to what we call a "layout" and it is possible for a view to have a variety of layouts.

The main thing to remember here is that components can have multiple views, and each view can have one or more layouts.  Each view assembles a fixed set of information, but each layout can display that information in different ways.  For example, the Category view in the Articles component assembles a number of articles.  These articles could be displayed in a list or in a table (and probably other ways as well).  So this view may have a "list" layout and a "table" layout to choose from.

Modules, on the other hand, are very simple.  They generally display one thing one way.  Modules don't really have views but they do support a layout.  Some developers might even support a choice of layout through module parameters

Template versus Layout

It is very important to distinguish between the role of template and the role of layouts.  The template sets up a structural framework for the page of the Web site.  Within this framework are positions for modules and a component to display.  What actually gets displayed is governed by the module layout, or the combination of view and layout in the case of the component.

The following image shows the structural layout of a typical Joomla! template (rhuk_milkyway, the default for 1.5).  The module positions are displayed by adding tp=1 to the URL (eg, index.php?tp=1).  You can clearly see where the module output is contained within the overall template, as well as the main component output starting in the lower-centre region.  However, what is actually output in those regions, is controlled by the layouts.

Ancillary Customisation

While not strictly related to the MVC, there are two other important areas to consider when looking at customising the output of Joomla!.

In addition to layouts, modules have what we call "chrome".  Chrome is the style with which a module is to display.  Most developers, designers and probably some end-users will be familiar with the different built-in styles for modules (raw, xhtml, etc).  It is also possible to define your own chrome styles for modules depending on the designer result.  For example, you could design a chrome to display all the modules in a particular position in a fancy javascript collapsing blind arrangement.

In the screenshot above, you can just make out the names of some of the built-in module chrome used (rounded, none and xhtml).

The second area has to do with controlling the pagination controls when viewing lists of data.  We will look at that in more detail later.

Component Output Types and Layout Overrides

To understand layout overrides we must first understand the file structure of a component.  While there are many parts to a component, all fulfilling different roles and responsibilities, we want to look just in the /view/ directory.  Here is the partial structure for two of the com_content views:

/components

  /com_content

      /views

        /articles

            /tmpl

              default.php (this is a layout)

              form.php  (this is a layout)

            view.html.php (this is the view that outputs the HTML)

            view.pdf.php  (this is the view that outputs the PDF)

        /category

            /tmpl

              blog.php     (layout)

              blog_items.php (a sub-layout

              default.php     (layout)

            view.html.php     (HTML view)

            view.feed.php     (RSS feed)

So what you see here is that under the /views/ directory, each view is placed in a directory of its own.  The content component actually has three other views not shown: archive, frontpage and section.

Output Types

Under the /articles/ directory we have a number of files.  There is almost always a file called view.html.php.  This is what we call the view file, but there can be more than one depending on the type of output to produce.  It has a specific naming convention, view.output_type.php, where the output type can be html, feed, pdf, raw or error. What this means is when we want html output for this particular view, the view.html.php file is used.  When we want the RSS output, the view.feed.php file is used.

The affect of these different output types is most apparent when the Global Configuration setting for Search Engine Friendly URLs is set to Yes, Use Apache mod_rewrite is set to Yes, and Add suffix to URLs is also set to Yes.  When this is done, the site URLs will look something like this:

http://domain/sports.html
http://domain/sports.feed
http://domain/sports/rowing.html
http://domain/sports/rowing.pdf

The exact URL will vary depending on how you set up your site but the point here is to show that sports.html will use the category view's view.html.php file to, and that sports.feed will display the RSS feed for the category using view.feed.php.  It should be noted that you cannot currently customise feed or PDF output types.  However, you can customise the html output type and this is where layouts come into play.

Layouts

Under the view directory there is a /tmpl/ directory in which the layout files reside.  Each PHP file in this directory represents a layout.  For example, article/tmpl/default.php is the default layout for an article whereas article/tmpl/form.php is the edit form for an article; category/tmpl/default.php is the default layout for a category whereas category/tmpl/blog.php displays the list of article differently.

The relationship between component views and layout is most plainly seen when adding a new menu item.  The next screenshot represents the typical display of the New Menu Item page.  Having clicked on Articles (which represents com_content), the tree expands to show the list of views and each layout within the view.

You will notice that while there are extra files in some of the /tmpl/ directories (like pagebreak.php in the article view), they are missing from the list.  This is due to instructions in the XML file for the layout (for example, pagebreak.xml) to hide the layout (or even the view) from the menu item list.  However, this is another broad topic which will be covered in another tutorial.

Armed with all that knowledge of how all the parts relate to each other, we are now ready to actually create our layout overrides.

Copying or Creating layout Files

Layout overrides only work within the active template and are located under the /html/ directory in the template.  For example, the overrides for rhuk_milkyway are located under /templates/rhuk_milkyway/html/, for the JA Purity template under /templates/ja_purity/html/ and for Beez under /templates/beez/html/.

It is important to understand that if you create overrides in one template, they will not be available in other templates.  For example, rhuk_milkyway has no component layout overrides at all.  When you use this template you are seeing the raw output from all components.  When you use the Beez template, almost every piece of component output is being controlled by the layout overrides in the template.  JA Purity is in between having overrides for some components and only some views of those components.

The layout overrides must be placed in particular way.  Using Beez as an example you will see the following structure:

/templates

  /beez

      /html

        /com_content    (this directory matches the component directory name)

            /articles   (this directory matches the view directory name)

              default.php (this file matches the layout file name)

              form.php

The structure for component overrides is quite simple: /html/com_component_name/view_name/layout_file_name.php.  Let's look at a few examples.

The rhuk_milkyway template does not have any layout overrides for any components.  If we want to override the default layout for an article, first we need to copy this file:

/components/com_content/views/article/tmpl/default.php

to this location, creating the appropriate directories in the event they don't already exist:

/templates/rhuk_milkyway/html/com_content/article/default.php

If we wanted to override the blog layout in the category view, we would copy this file:

/components/com_content/views/category/tmpl/blog.php

to:

/templates/rhuk_milkyway/html/com_content/category/blog.php

Once the files are copied, you are free to customise these files as much or as little as required or desired.  You do not have to honour parameter settings if you don't want to.

Overriding Sub-layouts

In some views you will see that some of the layouts have a group of files that start with the same name.  The category and frontpage views have examples of this.  The blog layout in the category view actually has three parts: the main layout file blog.php and two sub-layout files, blog_item.php and blog_links.php.  You can see where these sub-layouts are loaded in the blog.php file using the loadTemplate method, for example:

echo $this->loadTemplate('item');

// or

echo $this->loadTemplate('links');

When loading sub-layouts, the view already knows what layout you are in, so you don't have to provide the prefix (that is, you load just 'item', not 'blog_item').

What is important to note here is that it is possible to override just a sub-layout without copying the whole set of files.  For example, if you were happy with the Joomla! default output for the blog layout, but just wanted to customise the item sub-layout, you could just copy:

/components/com_content/views/category/tmpl/blog_item.php

to:

/templates/rhuk_milkyway/html/com_content/category/blog_item.php

When Joomla! is parsing the view, it will automatically know to load blog.php from com_content natively and blog_item.php from your template overrides.

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