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Joomla Hosting - ASPHostPortal.com | How to Edit A Joomla 3 Template In Joomla Administration?

clock February 25, 2016 00:34 by author ben

How to Edit A Joomla 3 Template In Joomla Administration?

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content. It is built on a model–view–controller web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS.

Joomla is one of the most popular free content management systems (CMS) in the world that allows you to easily create and manage a dynamic website. It has an intuitive management interface to control all the features and functionality this powerful CMS possesses.

Joomla's primary focus has been on usability and extensibility since its initial release in 2005. It is because of this that the project has been the recipient of numerous awards, including being a three-time recipient of the PACKT Open Source Content Management System Award.

Joomla is a completely free open source solution available to anyone and everyone with a desire to build dynamic and robust sites for a variety of purposes. Joomla has been utilized by some of the Web's most recognizable brands including Harvard, iHop, and MTV. It is capable of carrying out tasks ranging from corporate websites and blogs to social networks and e-commerce.

Joomla is backed by a large and active developer community. With thousands of unique and useful extensions and templates available, it is presently one of the largest single site building platforms available. It is this incredible community effort that makes Joomla a great choice for developers searching for a single platform with which they can receive active support from their peers.

It is important to think of Joomla not as a limited platform on which a specific type of site is built, but a robust set of tools that makes it possible to connect visitors to data in a variety of ways. Joomla's extensive set of integrated technologies empowers site managers and developers to innovate well beyond the bounds of a simple website.

Steps Involved in editing a Joomla Template in the Joomla administration. This is handy to make small changes to your template files from the Joomla administration without having to upload files from ftp.

Steps Involved

  1. Log into your Joomla 3 administration.
  2. Click Extensions and then click Template Manager.
  3. In the menu on the left click Templates.
  4. From the list of templates select the template you want to edit, and then click the Template Details and Files link.
  5. Select the file you want to edit from the list of template files and folders shown on the left.
  6. Edit the file as required and then save and close the file.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.



Joomla Hosting - ASPHostPortal.com | Easy Way To Speed Up Your Joomla Performance

clock February 17, 2016 20:54 by author ben

Easy Way To Speed Up Your Joomla Performance

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the name given to activity that attempts to improve search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the simple activity of ensuring a website can be found in search engines for words and phrases relevant to what the site is offering. In many respects it's simply quality control for websites. Having said that, if there was ever an industry that was little understood by outsiders it's SEO.

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content. It is built on a model–view–controller web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS. 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.

Speed Up Your Joomla Performance

Want to increase the speed of your Joomla website? just start with a speed test. Speed is the most important factor directly influencing the performance of a website. Tools like Pingdom and PageSpeed Insight can test the speed of a website and give valuable suggestions to improve its performance. If the requested web page is taking too much time to load, user-friendly interface, high quality content, conversion rate optimization, and other techniques are not going to help you.

Update Joomla Core

To update Joomla to the newest version you can either click on “Update now!” notification which should show up on your dashboard, or you can manually update by navigating to “Components” → “Joomla! Update.” Remember to back up your website, especially on major release updates.

Update Joomla Extensions

To update your Joomla extensions navigate to “Extensions” → “Manage” → “Update.”

Content Delivery Network

Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with Joomla is an easy way to instantly see decreased load times. By doing this, you will ensure you are serving your assets (product images, javascript, CSS) from multiple locations around the globe so they are delivered faster to your visitors.

Caching

Joomla has an inbuilt caching system. This cache is provided to improve Joomla website performance. Whenever a user request a web page, Joomla has to perform some necessary actions to respond. Joomla has to retrieve images, text, videos and other content from the database. There are plugins, templates and other files associated with the requested web page. These all need to be loaded before the server could send the response. This ultimately results in increased page load time. However, when the cache is enabled, these actions are performed when a web page is loaded first time. Content and all necessary files are stored in the Joomla cache. Now, for all following requests, no data will be fetched from the database.

Image Optimization

As we mentioned in a previous post on lossless image compression, on average 56 percent of a website’s page weight is made up of images. So optimizing images can drastically decrease your page load times. Unfortunately in Joomla there is no built-in option for image compression. So we recommend either compressing and resizing them beforehand in a tool like PhotoShop (using the “Save for Web” feature) or an online tool.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.



Joomla Hosting - ASPHostPortal.com :: What's New In Joomla 3.4.8?

clock January 6, 2016 19:24 by author ben

What's New In Joomla 3.4.8?

Joomla has just released version 3.4.8 of its open-source content management system (CMS) in an effort to lock down two new vulnerabilities, one of which could grant attackers full control of an affected website. As noted by SecurityWeek, the severity of these flaws didn’t go unnoticed: Symantec tracked an average of 16,000 hits per day attempting to exploit the issue. Here’s a rundown of what’s at risk with an unpatched Joomla install.

Joomla 3.4.8 fixes some issues found in the 3.4.7 release on Monday to do with browser sessions. All reported bugs from the 3.4.7 update have been fixed in this release:

  • Users were unable to edit or create items after the 3.4.7 update
  • Fatal error about connection->stat() not existing on external database connections
  • After session timeout users could still navigate the backend but without being able to create/edit items or use pagination/filters

Joomla Security Risks

For almost a decade, a critical remote command execution vulnerability has existed in Joomla; versions 1.5 through 3.4.5 are affected by CVE-2015-8562. According to Ars Technica, while Joomla security teams patched the vulnerability within two days, the bug was already being exploited in the wild on IP addresses 146.0.72.83, 74.3.170.33 and 194.28.174.106. In addition, any events using either “JDatabaseDriverMysqli” or “O:” in the user agent were likely attack vectors.

So what’s the big risk here? CVE-2015-8562 leverages an issue with poor filtering when Joomla saves browser session values. As detailed by Sucuri, exploiting this flaw and combining it with the result of MySQL meeting a UTF-8 character that isn’t supported by uft8_general_ci — which causes data truncation from a specific value — it’s possible to launch an attack that could fully compromise servers. Cybercriminals then use the servers as malware hosts or sell access to them for a fee on the Dark Web.

Big Numbers

Given the relative simplicity of the flaw and the substantial impact if exploited, its no wonder attackers were eager to jump on the problem in the wild. In an effort to determine which servers are still vulnerable, cybercriminals have been swinging for the fences, sending out HTTP requests and analyzing the responses of phpinfo() and eval(chr()) functions to find likely targets. The result? Symantec clocked a high point of more than 20,000 attempts in a single day, with day-to-day averages hovering around 16,000 hits, according to SecurityWeek.

It makes sense that cybercriminals would be working overtime trying to exploit the vulnerability. While WordPress still dominates the CMS marketplace, Joomla holds a solid second place with over 550,000 Web pages using the open-source service, including Linux.com, The Hill online newspaper and Harvard University. Full access to any of these servers would let malicious actors wreak havoc; Malware distribution, DDoS attacks and stolen data are all potential outcomes.

The takeaway here? Even with Joomla security on the ball, there’s no guarantee that existing code flaws won’t crop up and cause problems for big companies. The solution? Active monitoring for starters — just because an application, CMS or cloud-based service seems secure, that’s no reason to turn a blind eye if odd behaviors start to emerge. Immediate patching is also critical. Within two days, Joomla rolled out version 3.4.6 and closed the security hole but in the time hits were already skyrocketing. Two more days and 32,000 attacks could slip through. A week? More than 110,000.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.



Joomla Hosting - ASPHostPortal.com : Adding Javascript snippets to Joomla

clock October 29, 2015 00:19 by author ben

What is JavaScript?

JavaScript is a programming language used to make web pages interactive. It runs on your visitor's computer and doesn't require constant downloads from your website. JavaScript is often used to create polls and quizzes. JavaScript support is built right into all the major web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Provided that the visitors to your site are using web browsers that support JavaScript (most do) and have JavaScript enabled (it is by default), then your JavaScript will run when they visit the page.

Module position basics

If you've been working with Joomla, you know that a Joomla template consists of HTML and some PHP snippets.

For one, it contains a component area where the output from the different components are shown (articles, blog lists, third-party components etc). A Joomla template also contains several PHP snippets, which are called module positions. You can assign modules to these positions and they will appear in the given position in your template.

Easier way to insert scripts

Of course, you can use an extension for each third-party script you want to enter. Probably there is one available (isn't there for almost anything?). The problem with this approach, though, is that you need to keep track of X number of extensions and their updates. And for each extension you add to your site, the chance of being hacked increases. After all, code is made by humans, and humans make mistakes.

For those reasons, I prefer using the 'Custom HTML' module when I need to insert code snippets. For best results, you should have special module positions for the JavaScript snippet modules. That way, you can control where in the source code the snippets appear, something which can be crucial for the workings of the snippet.

The method is simple, but effective.

You will need three module positions, and as many Custom HTML modules as you need (one for each snippet).

Inserting the module positions in your template

In order to make this as flexible as possible, you need three module positions:

  • endhead
  • topbody
  • endbody

Now you're ready to insert the module positions. You will need to enter the following code into your template index.php file. You'll find it here: /templates/yourtemplatename/index.php.

Make sure to create a backup of your index.php file before messing with it.

Enter this just before the </head> tag.

<jdoc:include type="modules" name="endhead" />

Enter this just after the <body> tag:

<jdoc:include type="modules" name="topbody" />

Enter this just before the </body> tag:

<jdoc:include type="modules" name="endbody" />

Save your template.

The next step is to add the actual modules that will hold your JavaScript. But before that, we need to do some adjustments to the text editor settings.

Allowing JavaScript in your editor

To be able to add the JavaScript to the Custom HTML module, you need to allow Javascript in your text editor. If you use TinyMCE, you find this setting in Extensions -> Plugin Manager -> Editor - TinyMCE 2.0. Make sure you have the setting for 'Code Cleanup on Startup' set to 'Off' and the 'Code Cleanup on Save' to 'Never'.

If you're using JCE, go to Groups -> Default (or other group you're using) -> Editor Parameters. Make sure the 'Allow Javascript' setting is set to 'Yes'.

Adding the script to the Custom HTML module

Now, you need to add the actual Javascript snippet to a Custom HTML module and assign it to the appropriate module position.

I'll use Google Analytics as an example. Go to the Module Manager and click New. Choose the 'Custom HTML' module type. You will see the module parameters.

Enter a title for the module, for instance 'Google Analytics code', enable the module, choose not to show the module title.

For the Google Analytics code, we assign the module to the newly created 'endhead' position. This has the Google Analytics snippet appear just before the closing HEAD tag (</head>). As you have not entered the new module positions to the template XML file, they will not appear in the module position drop-down. Not to worry: You can simply enter the position name 'endhead' in the field directly.

Lastly, enter the HTML mode of your editor and paste the Google Analytics code into the window. You can now save the module.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.



Joomla Hosting - ASPHostPortal.com : How to Customize Joomla CSS?

clock October 21, 2015 23:47 by author ben

How to Customize Joomla CSS?

CSS

  • CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
  • CSS describes how HTML elements are to be displayed on screen, paper, or in other media
  • CSS saves a lot of work. It can control the layout of multiple Web pages all at once
  • External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files

CSS in Joomla Template

Some templates use only one CSS file (called template.css, mostly), others have several. For optimal page performance, you should keep the number of CSS files to a minimum. This reduces the number of server requests necessary to show the page. You may sometimes see that the template uses a main CSS file which imports all of the other files by the following syntax (example):

@import url('reset.css');
@import url('joomla.css');
@import url('typography.css');
@import url('modules.css');
@import url('custom.css');

Don't repeat styles if you don't need to

When styling elements with CSS it's important to be specific. And to keep your stylesheet lean. What I mean is you don't need to repeat styling just because you want to restyle an element. Let's say, for instance, that you have the following style for the H1 tag in your main CSS file (template.css or similar):

h1 {
font-size:24px;
color:#d7d7d7;
margin-bottom:1em;
text-transform:uppercase;
}

The normal styling for H tags are bold. Maybe you want to add the styling to make the header tag use the normal and not the bold style of the font. And, at the same time you don't want to have uppercase letters in the H1. Of course, you could do it like this, adding the following code to your custom.css:

h1 {
font-size:24px;
color:#d7d7d7;
margin-bottom:1em;
text-transform:none;
font-weight:normal;
}

This works, but it's not good code. You repeat all of the styling even though you just want to alter one style and add another. This is a better way:

h1 {
text-transform:none;
font-weight:normal;
}

In this case, you only add the styles that are different from the original. The other styles are left untouched.

Use Firebug to Test Your CSS

One of the tools I use to test my CSS is called Firebug. It's an add-on to Chrome which gives you a lot of information about the CSS and HTML structure of a web page. When you have Firebug installed, you can right-click on an element and choose 'Inspect element'. The Firebug window will open at the bottom of the screen. Now, you can see the HTML structure (left) and the CSS (right).

Now the fun begins! You can start experimenting with the CSS directly in Firebug. Want to change the margin of an element? The background color? Remove the border? Every tweak you would like is available to play with, and the result is instantly shown in the browser. Of course, if you refresh the page the changes are lost. When you're happy with your changes, copy the CSS into your custom CSS file and upload to your server.

You can also use the Inspector or Firebug Lite in Google Chrome or Safari.

Take a look at my previous post about 8 Free Firefox extensions every Joomla user should have.

Take some time to learn CSS

I believe every Joomla user / web site developer should learn some CSS and know HTML by heart. It makes it so much easier to modify your templates and to achieve what you (and your client?) wants.

It's not like learning PHP. I hardly know more than a handful things about PHP. HTML and CSS, however, are like second nature to me. That's because I've invested time into learning and practicing the use of these skills. This is especially true for CSS.

Easy to get started with CSS and Joomla

The easiest way of starting to learn CSS is to look at your existing template.css. Look at the structure of it and try changing some of the styles. Do a backup of the file first.

You could try and change the header tags first. Want the H2 tag to be smaller? You got it :) And now it's a site-wide change, valid for all instances of the H2 tag. Other tags to change are the a (link) tag, the p (for instance adjusting the line spacing) and the UL and LI tags (bullet list).

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.



Joomla Hosting - ASPHostPortal.com :: Easy ways to protect your Joomla site against brute-force attacks

clock October 1, 2015 19:24 by author ben

Brute-force attacks on Joomla sites are common these days. The reality website owners must face is that hackers are in control of large farms of hacked computers. These computers can be used to coordinate massive brute-force attacks on a website.

As a website owner, in fact I'm hosting several sites, I'm constantly getting these types of attacks on my servers. In this post, I look at a few ways to reduce the chance that someone gains unlawful access to your Joomla websites by way of brute-force attacks.

So, what is a brute-force attack?

Let’s see what Wikipedia says:

In cryptography, a brute-force attack, or exhaustive key search, is a cryptanalytic attack that can, in theory, be used against any encrypted data (except for data encrypted in an information-theoretically secure manner). Such an attack might be used when it is not possible to take advantage of other weaknesses in an encryption system (if any exist) that would make the task easier. It consists of systematically checking all possible keys or passwords until the correct one is found. In the worst case, this would involve traversing the entire search space. When password guessing, this method is very fast when used to check all short passwords, but for longer passwords other methods such as the dictionary attack are used because of the time a brute-force search takes.

In short, a brute-force attack is trying to force itself into your website administrator by trying every combination of username and password it can come up with.

There are two main problems with this for you as a website owner. Obviously, it’s not good having people snoop around in your Joomla admin with super administrator rights. That’s a given. The other thing to be concerned a about is the fact that such attacks take away a lot of capacity from your server.
How to protect yourself from brute-force attacks

There are several things you can do to make things harder for those trying brute-force attacks. Longer and more complex usernames passwords is one, blocking access to the site is another.

Strong usernames and passwords

You’ve heard it time and time again: Make sure you have strong passwords! Usernames are important, too.

I have made it a habit to never use ’admin’ or ’administrator’ or anything like it as usernames on my websites. I choose a unique username for each site.

When it comes to passwords, I always use 20 random alphanumeric characters or more, in a combination of lower and upper case, and with some symbols thrown in. And I never use a password for more than one website.

20 characters, you say? How on earth do you remember that?

Three words: Password Management Software.
Manage your passwords with ease

Personally, I use LastPass.com to both generate and manage my passwords. I’ve heard lots of good things about 1Password as well, so if you’re on a Mac you might wanna try that out.

Using these tools, there is no problem managing hundreds, or thousands of passwords with ease. Just make sure you have a solid master password, and you might consider investing in a Yubikey for a two-factor authentication with Joomla.
Blocking access to the site

Another method of avoiding the perils of brute-force attacks is to restrict access to the website or server based on the attackers IP or IP range. There are several ways to do this:

    Using a Joomla extension
    Using .htaccess blocking
    Blocking the IPs in your firewall

Joomla extension

I recommend AdminExcile as an excellent plugin for Joomla 2.5 or later. It lets you block IPs after a certain amount of failed password attempts, and you can set how long the block will be in effect for. This has proven very effective for me, as I’ve avoided some very nasty attacks.

I recently had an attack on a website where over 4000 machines tried to brute-force their way into a Joomla site. It didn’t succeed, and we managed to block the IPs permanently rather quickly. Another day, I had 25000 brute-force attempts on another website. That’s when I adjusted the AdminExcile plugin to block the perpetrators after fewer attempts and for a longer period of time. That definitely helped.

The main reason the attack didn’t succeed was strong passwords. AdminExcile, however, can prevent your site from going down by blocking the IPs after X failed attempts.
Using .htaccess blocking

On Apache servers, you can add IP addresses to your .htaccess file. This will prevent those IP addresses from even reaching your Joomla administrator page or any other page on your website.

Here’s a tool that makes it easy to create the snippets you need for your .htaccess file:

http://www.htaccesstools.com/block-ips/

Example code:

    Order Deny,Allow
    Deny from 199.442.33.32


Read more about using .htaccess to block visitors with various methods.
Blocking the IPs in your firewall

If you’re on a dedicated server or your own network, blocking IP ranges on the firewall might be a good option. Be advised, though, that this may block some valid traffic to your site. For some sites, this won’t be a problem. If I have a local site that has no clients from outside my country, I can block IP addresses from a whole country if I so wish. It won’t affect my business. If you’re business is international, you need to consider this more carefully and pinpoint specific IP addresses or limited ranges.
Conclusion

To conclude, brute-force attacks is probably something we need to live with. There are, however, quite a few things you can do to limit the chance of someone succeeding with such an attack. The first thing you should do is increase the complexity of your admin passwords.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.



Joomla 3.4.4 Hosting - ASPHostPortal :: What's New in Joomla 3.4.4?

clock September 21, 2015 09:47 by author ben

What's New in Joomla 3.4.4?

What's Joomla?

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content. It is built on a model–view–controller web application framework that can be used independently of the CMS. Joomla is written in PHP, uses object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques and software design patterns, stores data in a MySQL, MS SQL, or PostgreSQL database, and includes features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, search, and support for language internationalization.

Jommal provides an online collaborative community manual for Joomla! users, developers or anyone interested in learning more about Joomla! Currently, they have over 4000 articles written and maintained by Joomla! community members.

New in Joomla 3.4.4

  • Further en-GB language cleanup
  • Fixes for MSSQL and PostgresSQL Joomla installations
  • jQuery, HTML5Shiv and CodeMirror updates
  • Finished implementing the Joomla codestyle rules

Joomla can be used for

  • Specialist websites
  • Simple websites
  • Custom applications
  • Many design options

The benefits of having a Joomla website:

  • Website is easy to update
  • Website can be updated from anywhere with an internet connection
  • Multiple people can access the administration site at the same time
  • Design changes are easy to implement
  • There is no need to pay a specialist to do the updates
  • You control when you want to do the updates

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.



Joomla Hosting - ASPHostPortal.com :: How to Migrate Blogger to Joomla

clock September 11, 2015 06:00 by author ben

I'm hoping to make a website for myself, which I want this blog to be a part of. But how to do it. Well, at first I thought I'd just have it as a feed, but actually I want to incorporate it fully into the joomla site. So.... as for blogger posts, here is the way to do it:

Export from Blogger

Log into your blogger account, go into the Settings page of the blog that you want to export. Under Blog Tools, click Export Blog. Click on Download in the next page. Download the .xml file that Blogger packs for you. It is a collection of all your posts, comments, settings, widgets and template.

Upload .xml to Server

Upload the file you downloaded to your server.

Feed2Post configuration

After that, download Feed2Post for Joomla. It is a commercial component that costs $15. If you want to download it for free, source it on your own :).

Log into Joomla, install Feed2Post component. Go to Component>Feed2Post>View/Edit Entries

  • Put in your feed title. The title will not appear in the posts you import.
  • Point the URL to the address of the .xml file that you have uploaded to your server. It should be something like http://yourdomain.com/blog-xx-xx-xxxx.xml
  • Fill in the Section and Category that you want the posts to appear in. If you intend to import into different categories, you need to repeat this procedure.
  • For Post as User, you can assign the author of the blog posts to your current username. If you have multiple authors, you need to repeat this procedure.
  • Make sure that Full Text Gather, Show Intro, Open Readmore Link at iframe and Include Original Date is set to No.
  • Set feed date as created date to Yes and Store Author to Don’t Store.
  • Save.

Importing Posts

  • Go back to the View/Edit Entries page and check the feed that you have just created. Make sure that the feed is set to Published.
  • Click on Items next to Post All at the top right corner.
  • You may need to wait a bit for it to load. When the page loads, you will be able to view all comments and blog posts from your Blogger account.
  • Check those items that you want to export as blog posts to the Category (and author) that you have defined earlier.
  • Once that is done, click Post at the top right corner.
  • This may take quite long to load if you select a lot of items.
  • If the import is successful, you should see a notification. Your posts should now be in the Article Manager. Your job is done if you are importing all the posts into one category.

If you have Multiple Categories and Authors Set Up..

  • Go back to View/Edit Entries page and check the feed. Click on the Change button at the top.
  • Set the Section, Category and Post as User to the next setting.
  • Repeat the steps in Importing Posts above.

If this helped you, I would appreciate a word of thanks or a tweet. :) I am still trying to import comments into Joomla. If anyone can help, it’ll be great!

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.



Joomla 3.4.3 Hosting - ASPHostPortal :: How to insert a PDF file in a Joomla article with JCE File Manager

clock August 24, 2015 10:23 by author ben

How to insert a PDF file in a Joomla article with JCE File Manager

Joomla is an open source content management system that allows you to build web sites and powerful online applications. This award-winning web site software contains easy-to-use features and it is freely available to everyone. In this tutorial, I will show you how to accomplish the same using the File Manager plug-in for JCE.

Using the JCE File Manager makes the job a lot easier. The File Manager is a plug-in to the very popular Joomla Content Editor. The plug-in is part of the package you get when subscribing. JCE itself is free, but the File Manager, Media Manager, Image Manager Extended and some other plug-ins are paid.

 

This is how you insert a PDF file into a Joomla article with JCE:

Create a new article and a text. Select the text and click the "Insert / edit File" button

You will see the File Manager window.

Select the folder you want to upload your file to (or create it using the "New Folder" button).

Then, click the "Upload file" button.

You will see the upload window.

Click "Browse" and select the file from your harddisk. If you're using Firefox, you can drag and drop the file into the upload window. You can add as many files as you want to in this step.

If you try to upload a file that is bigger than 1024 Kb, you will get an error message like this:

To adjust the file size allowed, go to JCE Administration -> Profiles -> The profile you are using (normally "Default").

Then click the"Plugin Parameters" tab at the top and the "File Manager" tab on the left.

You can now see your server's max upload size and adjust the allowed size. In the below example I've set it to 5 Mb (5000 Kb).

Go back to your article and try to upload again.

You should now see the file(s) in the upload window after browsing for them (as long as they are below your set maximum upload size, that is).

Click "Upload"-

The file(s) will upload to the web server

When the file(s) are uploaded, close the upload window and you will see the file(s) in the File Manager.

You can now adjust the parameters available before you insert the PDF link into the article.

As you can see, you can add an icon (will be set automatically according to the file type), a size parameter or the date. You can also adjust the actual anchor text (the link text) from this window as well. When clicking the document file, you will notice that the File Manager asks you if you want to change the link text to the file name. Sometimes this is a good idea, other times I want to have a more descriptive text as the link. That's really up to you to decide.

Click "Insert" and you will return to the article with the link inserted.

In this case, I chose to add the size to the link. However, if I decide that I don't want it after all, I can remove it directly from the editor. It is actually a normal link, so it behaves exactly the same way as any other link. So, if I remove the size, I get the final PDF link like this:

Even though it seems like a lot og steps, once you get the hang of the technique it is really fast to do. And much more efficient than doing it with the Joomla core, which really is a kind of workaround.



Joomla with Free ASP.NET Hosting - ASPHostPortal.com :: Joomla SEO Tips You Must Know

clock May 26, 2015 06:21 by author ben

Among the millions of websites running on Joomla, tremendous numbers of sites follow the effective Joomla SEO tips. As every website owner desires to improve his web presence on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) consistently, developers implement the effective SEO strategies on their site. Being a developer, if you are not getting the improved results, you must be looking for some Joomla SEO tips.
After introducing the top WordPress SEO tips, we will illustrate some of the more effective Joomla SEO tips in this article. These tips are followed by millions of Joomla developers. You must know these strategies to improve your website ranking on the SERP.

Top 10 Joomla SEO Tips

 

Listed here are the SEO strategies for Joomla sites that you must know.

Meta Description and Title on Home Page

As your home page is one of the most important parts of your website, you must ensure that it contains attractive title and meta description. For this, you should navigate to the SH404SEF URL manager and open the home page meta. On the next screen, you will find many fields, where the page title and Description tag are the imperative areas to be filled up with relevant content. You may skip all the other fields, as Google doesn't takes these information into consideration while ranking.

Article Meta Description

When your target audience searches for content related to your niche, the first thing they notice about your site on the SERP is your article's title and meta description. As the title relates directly to the content, the relevancy of meta description ascertains whether the visitor will click through your link. Therefore, you must write a user-friendly as well as SEO-friendly meta description and insert the keyword at a relevant place.

Image Alt Text

Search engines do not have the ability to understand the images on your site. Keeping this in mind, every content management system comes with Image Alt Text that is accessed by the search engine. Hence, when you add an image on your articles or blogs, you should explain the relevancy of the image. However, you should make sure that the principal keywords are used naturally and not stuffed inappropriately.

Internal Linking

Internal Linking Link-building has been an imperative SEO strategy in the last decade. But with the implementation of the new SEO guidelines, using too many external links can create a negative impact. Therefore, instead of creating external links, you should opt for internal linking. It is the type of linking where you offer the links to other articles on your site from one article. Hence, you should practice the internal linking strategy by creating links to multiple relevant articles.

Merge www and non-www prefix

In Joomla, you get an option to choose from the prefix; i.e. whether the “www” will be added to your domain or not. Moreover, if you remove the “www” prefix and someone else uses the address with the prefix, there can be an issue with duplicate URL. Hence, to play safe, you should configure the presence of prefix from the Google Webmaster Tools and redirect the visitors to your address, with or without the www prefix.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

The Google Penguin SEO update is quite strict with the use of keywords in articles and blogs. The articles you publish on your Joomla site must be relevant to the topic and the keywords must be used in appropriate places only. In addition to this, you should not overuse the keywords in the content because it is treated as a Black Hat SEO technique.

Sitemap

Joomla SEO Tips - SitemapSearch engines appreciate when you offer easy navigation on your site. However, the sitemap accessed by human traffic cannot provide any assistance to search engines. Keeping this in mind, you should create two sitemaps on your Joomla site; one for human traffic and another for search engines. This would provide assistance to both, visitors and crawlers, and hence your SEO ranking will improve.

Prevent Duplicate content

Duplicate content has been in the list of Black Hat SEO strategies for years. If any of your articles or blogs have plagiarism issues, your SEO ranking can degrade drastically. Hence, you must always check your articles for plagiarism before publishing them on your site. In fact, you should make sure that your content, address of the web page and title are unique.

Use SEO Extensions

As Joomla is an advanced CMS and offers compatibility with plugins and extensions, there are tons of SEO tools for this platform. You can install various plugins such as SEO-Generator and SEOSIMPLE, that boosts up the SEO strategies of your site. However, it is recommendable that you must only install the most appropriate tools. Installing too many extensions on a Joomla site may slow down the loading speed and, ultimately, degrade the performance of the site.

Reduce Social Links and PDF files

Social links and PDF files distract the visitors from exploring your Joomla site. As your primary aim should be to drive traffic on multiple pages of your site, you should treat social links as a secondary option and reduce the usability of PDF files. This is because the visitors may forget to explore your site once they find the social links. Similarly, they may spend too much time on reading the PDF file, although it doesn't give you any assistance in SEO.

Best Joomla Hosting Recommendation

ASPHostPortal.com

ASPHostPortal.com provides our customers with Plesk Panel, one of the most popular and stable control panels for Windows hosting, as free. You could also see the latest .NET framework, a crazy amount of functionality as well as Large disk space, bandwidth, MSSQL databases and more. All those give people the convenience to build up a powerful site in Windows server. We offers Joomla hosting starts from $5/month only. We also guarantees 30 days money back and guarantee 99.9% uptime. If you need a reliable affordable Joomla Hosting, we should be your best choice.



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