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Apr
17
2007
What Extensions Do We Use on the Alledia Blog?

On Friday, we talked about why people should blog on their own domain, rather than using a free hosting site such as Blogger.com or Wordpress.com.

 

This week, we're going to have a look at the best blogging alternatives for Joomla.

 

We'll start at home and provide a rundown of what we've found to be the most useful blogging tools for a default Joomla installation - these are the extensions and tools we use ourselves.

Design

Caldate from Joomlaicious.com. Its no fun to visit a bad-looking blog. My favorite sites all have simple designs with small, neat little twists such as the calendar dates provided by this mambot.

Comments 

Jomcomment from Azrul.com. As discussed by commenters in last week's article, Jomcomment does a great job of cutting down on spam, while still allowing guests to comment. 

User Profiles

Community Builder from Joomlapolis.com. If you open an account and click on "My Profile" you can see a list of all the comments you've made on the blog, manage your affiliate details, add an image and add personal details. This works at least as well as the functionality for members on most rival blog setups.

Metadata

The SEF Patch from Joomlatwork.com. Without the ability to create different page titles for the meta fields and online, we probably would have gone with Wordpress instead. SeoMoz recently got some of the smartest (or at least richest) people in the SEO world together and in their collective wisdome, they decided that Page Titles were the single most important SEO factor on a site. With the SEF Patch, the page title that people read can be "What Extensions Do We Use on the Alledia Blog?" but the Meta Page Title can be "Joomla Blogs - Joomla Blog Extensions Components Mambots Modules".

Blog Categories

Extended Menu from Daniel Ecer. This is amongst the most ridiculously complicated but ridiculously useful Joomla extensions available. It gives us a lot of control how to display each category page.

RSS Feeds

RSS Feed Manager from Run-Digital.com. Joomla doesn't allow you to create individual RSS Feeds for particular Sections and Categories. Run Digital's component does a great job of allowing you to do that.

RSS and Email Subscriptions

We take the RSS Feeds from Run-Digital and enable people to access them via Feedburner.com for RSS Feeds and Feedblitz.com for email subscriptions. We could just provide the Run-Digital feed, but Feedburner provides more detailed statistics.

Pinging

Inside of Feedburner, under the "Publicize" tab there's an option called "PingShot". This does a pretty good job of pinging at least ten major sites. For the ones we don't cover in Feedburner, www.pingomatic.com can help. Yes - it would be nice to have the option to drop in a list of 100s of sites to ping, as is possible with Wordpress, but I don't feel it to be essential.

Advantages to this setup

The key advantage is that we have most major blog functionalities, but they are wrapped up in Joomla. Because of this, people can use their account to make Ebook purchases, download our free components and generally be active on other parts of the site without needing to create an extra account. Also, we can use the same sitemap, same SEF URLs and same design on the blog as for the rest of the site.

Things we can't do with this setup

  • Trackback
  • Blog Calendar
  • Effective way to handle archives
  • Cross-categorization of posts
  • Tagging
  • An easy way to see the posts of an individual writer without having to view their Community Builder profile
  • An effective way to show related posts
  • Ability to search through blog posts only
  • Reply to particular comments, rather than just to the whole set of comments

Over to you...

Have we missed any great Joomla blog tools? Are we right to trust Joomla with our blog? Could we be making much greater hay with an alternative setup? Let us know...

 

Comments  

 
#1 Klaus Nitsche 2007-04-17 03:50
Thanks for the useful overview, Steve - I'm sure this will allow quite a few people to see what you can do with a Joomla install blog-wise.

Allow me a few comments and suggestions:

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# Trackback

There are several efforts underway to allow trackbacks. I think Lawrence is behind one of them.

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# Blog Calendar

ContentCalendar might be the solution: http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,583/Itemid,35/

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# Effective way to handle archives

Yes. Much needed and a major flaw in Joomla.

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# Cross-categorization of posts

Yes. Another long-standing weakness that *could* be overcome by ...

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# Tagging

... if there were a robust tagging component that worked with common SEF components.

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# An effective way to show related posts

The Related Items module works very well on a directory site I run: http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,192/Itemid,35/

Thanks again, good stuff. (BTW ... could you increase the vertical size of JomComment's textarea a bit?)
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#2 Steve Burge 2007-04-17 08:25
Hi Zorro - thanks for the detailed.

Its great to know that Lawrence is working on trackbacks.

Its interesting that a lot of these limitations are overcome by both MyBlog from Azrul.com and the Wordpress integration from J-Prosolution.com. With these, trackbacks, tagging, pinging and more are all possible.

When I started to blog last year, MyBlog didn't exist and the Wordpress integration was much less stable than it is now. I'm not sure if I'd go with a default Joomla installation if I was starting today.

Steve
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#3 fabs 2007-04-17 13:03
I use TagJ for tagging. Best solution so far apart from Tags by Phil Taylor which is not multilingual unfortunately. Otherwise it would do the Job even better:sad:
See TagJ here:
http://www.ffaabbiiaann.de/content/blogsection/25/352/lang,es/

For Trackback i use this:
http://forge.joomla.org/sf/projects/trackback
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#4 sean 2007-04-28 07:41
as much experience I have (I'm a complete newb with regards to PHP and MySQL, tho) setting up Joomla!, I still haven't the foggiest idea where to begin setting up a blog with the default Joomla install. I've tried MyBlog, but it's limited in that you can't set it up to display separate categories (at least I haven't been able to). So, if possible can someone please give me even the slightest clue of where to begin
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#5 Steve Burge 2007-04-28 08:09
Hi Sean

No problem - look for a follow up post in the next week or two. I'll try and convert this information into a step-by-step guide.

Steve
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#6 sean 2007-04-28 08:13
Amazingly quick response!
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#7 mwq27 2007-12-05 10:26
Hi, I was wondering what the best blogging component is out there. Right now I have mojoBlog, but is there anything better? It doesnt matter if it's not free either, but I also dont want to play hundreds of dollars either. THanks
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#8 David Towers 2007-12-05 10:45
Mwq27, I think the best component out there is MyBlog from Azrul. It's limited, but it is an out of the box simple solution... It depends on your needs, but you should check out Steves review of it. Otherwise, you could blog within Joomla, here is a simple walkthrough for starting a blog with Joomla without needing to buy a blogging component:

http://www.dart-creations.com/joomla/tutorials/setting-up-a-free-joomla-blog.html
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#9 mwq27 2007-12-05 11:17
Hah, that was actually my next question. I'll read through the tutorial and see how it works. My site will pretty much just be a blog, except for a few pages where we will just have content. So I need something that looks nice and is easy to use (commenting, posting, showing images...). But thats a lot for the quick response Good Web Practices
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#10 David Towers 2007-12-05 11:46
Hi again mwq27! You're welcome. I've tried MyBlog and would recommend it for someone who wanted a very straight forward blogging system for Joomla. It is especially good if you have multi-users blogging on the same website.

If you are more comfortable with the Joomla setup then there isn't a big advantage on moving to MyBlog. Nevertheless Azrul have a 30 day money back gaurentee, so there is nothing to stop you giving their MyBlog product a try and making your own mind up.

Whether you go for MyBlog or stick with Joomlas own setup, for an effective comments system I would definately recommend Azrul's JomComment. Although it is not perfect, it is the closest thing I've seen to perfection for comments on Joomla! Their latest version has trackbacks enabled which is kinda cool.

For showing images you can obviously do that within the Joomla wysiwyg editor or try a sweeter setup like simple image gallery: http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,1468/Itemid,35/ I tried it yesterday and I'm going to use it :-)

I've just recently built my first Joomla site, so had all the same questions as you. When my site goes online I'll post an article about what components I used, so go to goodwebpractice s.com in the new year and have a nosey :-)
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