How to create a blog on Joomla CMS

Every person who has decided to create a blog, there is the question: on what it create? There are many blog platforms (LiveJournal, Blogger.com, Ya.ru, etc.), which is completely free to create and start blogging. However, these platforms have some drawbacks - very bad adjustability, strange ads on the pages of the blog, or even impossibility of monetization, etc. Therefore, many bloggers (including myself) go towards the establishment of standalone blog. In this case, you have to pay for hosting, as well as install and configure the engine, but the result is usually worth it - you have almost no way constrained by functional and part of your blog, and monetize a blog is usually much simpler.

So, suppose you decide to create a standalone blog.

The first thing to do - is to take care of the domain name and hosting for a future blog. I advise to use the services of proven recorders (eg, RU-Center or REG.ru), or to register domains through the host. Well, as a host I highly recommend TimeWeb - I use their services for many years and happy as an elephant - they provide a quality service at a very reasonable price. By the way, and the domains they can buy much cheaper than directly from the registrar, besides paying the hosting for a year they'll give you a bonus domain for free.

What kind of CMS (content management system, or just the engine) to use?

From the title of the article easy to guess, I'll talk about creating a blog on a free CMS Joomla, but in fairness mention yet of a pair of engines.

First - Wordpress - is the most popular blogging engine. This is understandable - Wordpress-functional as it is sharpened by the creation of blogs. However, for all its popularity and functionality, Wordpress is very greedy with respect to the server resources, which means that if your blog becomes popular, then you have to switch to more expensive options for hosting services (for example, to place the site on a dedicated server).

The second engine, which I would like to mention - it MaxSite CMS, which is the antithesis of Wordpress-y on the part of the load on the server. It is very easy blog engine, which is quite suitable for a simple blog. However, this engine developed by one person, and to date has such a rich set of extensions as the more popular CMS.

Here we must note that the main reason that I took as a basis for his blog CMS Joomla, and not Wordpress or another CMS - this is what I used to work with Joomla, made her a great number of sites (already difficult to count exactly how many) . Therefore, the article could not be better suitable for such as "accustomed", as I do, the more so that after the completion Joomla works great as a blogging engine.

However, even novice users can use this article as a guide, especially as it is for them written almost all of the introductory part and a section on installing Joomla.

And one more remark kratenkaya before the technical part.

To date, the latest version of a Joomla 1.6. However, she came out recently, and therefore is not as stable as its predecessor version Joomla 1.5. In addition, for the same reasons for Joomla 1.5 has many more extensions. Therefore, in this article, I consider the creation of a blog on Joomla 1.5. However, with sufficient dexterity, you can apply the same principles and for more recent versions of the CMS.

So, doing a blog on CMS Joomla. Where to start?

In general, for there are specific Joomla components for blogging, but I suggest you go a bit the other way. Joomla - is primarily a CMS to publish articles, and it itself is a great engine for your blog. But in the set from scratch for a full Joomla blogopisatelstva lacks some things - comment systems, tags, social, buttons and other details. And I suggest to use as the basis for a blog "native" component for creating articles in Joomla («com_content»), and all what is missing - install and configure.

At this stage the detail will not, I think you can handle.

If you choose to use hosting from TimeWeb, you can install Joomla with just one click directly from the control panel account.

Problems should not arise in the event that you decide to install Joomla manually. Joomla installation process is described in great detail on many sites, you should be able to find lots of material on the subject. Also, if you have at-least the minimum experience with installing a CMS, then installing Joomla you probably right - step by step wizard will help even the complete novice. I can also advise address in which case the assistance to Russian-speaking forum Support Joomla, this is a very friendly community that is happy to help newcomers.

But now, the most important - on the extensions that will turn your website into Joomla to turn it into a full-fledged blog. All the extensions described below you can see the work on this very site (at least at the time of writing). All the considered extension of free (as herself Joomla).

The very first thing is to have - a component of comments, which will allow visitors to comment on your blog entries. The best comments component for Joomla. Set it as easy as any other extension for Joomla. You can also install a module that will display on the site given recent comments.

The next thing that distinguishes a blog from other sites - a system of tags.

But the best part of tags for Joomla in my opinion - this component is very easy to install and configure. Together with the component supplied modules, which allow you to display the site's most popular tags, most-read tags, as well as a random set of tags.

It's time to add to our blog a little sotsialschiny. You want your visitors to leave links to your blog on social networking sites and services? Very well, proceed.

Search "social" extensions for Joomla took me a long time. Despite their abundance, good of them not so much. Wanted something nenalyapistogo and accurate, but at the same time noticeable. In the end I found what I was looking for and found in his blog several extensions of this series, which wonderfully complement each other.

The first thing I advise you to place - this module «Ya.Share». How does this module to work, you can see at the top right of this page. «Ya.Share» allows users to publish a link to the page on services such as, VKontakte, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, My World, FriendFeed, Classmates.

The second recommended me, "social" extension - this plugin «VagrantWeb Social Buttons», see the work that you can at the very bottom of this article. He publishes a few buttons, but they are sufficient in my opinion. The first button allows you to post a link to current article on Twitter, and also displays the number of users who have already published such a link. Next - standard button "I like" on Facebook. Finally, the third button allows you to post a link to a service Google Buzz.

If you have an account on Twitter, on which you want to tell your readers, I recommend to also install the module «FollowMe», which is displayed on your site in the form of cute birds in one corner of the page (I have it at the bottom right). This little bird - a reference to your account on Twitter (my account name you specify in the module settings).

Also, if you prefer, you can install the module TweetXT, which will show a tape of your latest tweets (I have this module is not installed).

And now a word about the extensions that will be useful not only for the blog.

Plugin Page Navigation Titles instead of the faceless text of the previous and next pages show the names of articles of neighboring notes. This will be useful both for users of the site, and in terms of search engine optimization.

Plugin JUMultithumb - will create thumbnail images in the announcements of articles, as well as in the articles themselves show in beautiful full-sized lightbox image. I advise you to use version 2.5. There's a sense it is true that the development of plug-podzabroshena, and on JED be removed.

Update: Thanks to the discussion in the comments to this article, decided to allow blog readers to subscribe to the RSS-feed not only through an icon in the address bar of your browser (which is present in Firefox and Opera), but also directly from the site. At the same time decided to switch from the standard Joomla-vskogo RSS-mechanism for FeedBurner. So please those who read me via RSS, to register in your RSS-aggregator new address of my feed.

So, for the convenience of tracking statistics on visitors to encourage you to follow my example, to register at «FeedBurner» (registration is not necessary if you already have an account with Google), and create in this service RSS feed for your site.

To make the address bar and Firefox-and Opera display FeedBurner-ovsky feed instead of the standard, you need to start off a standard feed for all the items menu. This is done in the settings for each menu item in the advanced settings. Then you can go two ways - either to install and activate the plugin RSS in URL Bar, or manually register in the site template between and following line

Naturally, instead of the text in italics, you need to substitute your data.

As we already explained in the commentary, just links to the feed in the address bar is not enough because not all browsers support this feature.

Digging into the Joomla I found a good plugin «ITPSubscribe», which allows you to display on the pages of articles blochok that displays not only a link to the feed, but also the form to subscribe to notifications of new articles by E-mail. This form will only work if you use a RSS-feed from FeedBurner. How does this blochok, you can see on this page directly below the article.

That's it.

Very little body movement - and your website with Joomla turns into a full-fledged blog.