Lots of websites use a discussion forum to help their users.

• Some websites have forums for people to chat freely on whatever topic they choose.
• Other websites use forums to provide support. People post their questions and staff members reply with the answer.

Our choice of discussion forum for Joomla is Agora from JVitals.com. We use Agora to support our Joomla training students and in this tutorial we're going to show you how to set it up on your site.

The hottest new extension in Joomla is K2.

Why? Normal Joomla articles provide you with a Title and Body. K2 gives you the flexibility to add much more information. Last week in Part 1 we covered the main administrator parts of K2:

• Installing K2
• The K2 dashboard
• K2 categories
• K2 fields and field groups
• K2 items

The hottest new extension in Joomla is K2.

Why? Normal Joomla articles provide you with a Title and Body. K2 gives you the flexibility to add much more information. For example, this is part of a K2 article about a camera called the Canon EOS Rebel:

Beyond just an article, you can add information about:

• Price
• Weight
• Color
• A link for more information

You can also add tags, videos, photo galleries, comments and more. You can see the full Canon EOS Rebel example article here.

That is the essential benefit of K2 ... you can create articles with far more information and features.

Following on from other newsletters where we showed you how to set up Joomla on a Mac and also how to develop locally and moving your site to a live server, this week we're going to walk you through installing Joomla locally, on a P.C..

We're going to use WAMP for this tutorial.

WAMP stands for "Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP" which are the different elements that allow you to run Joomla on your computer.

Here's how you do it:

Would you like to be able to update your Joomla site and automatically send that update to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, Ning and dozens of other sites?

This tutorial will show you how.

Our first part will be to create an RSS feed to export all our new posts. From there we'll use Twitterfeed.com and Ping.fm to distribute the posts to all our social networks.

This tutorial will show you how to take an RSS feed and import it into your  Joomla site. Each item on the RSS feed will become a separate Joomla article. We use this technique for a couple purposes:

• Distributing our content to other Joomla sites. For example, we use this technique to showing these tutorials on Alledia.com.
• Importing blogs and news on a particular topic from other sites. This way people can read them all in one place.

We're going to use a component called 4RSS from 4RSS.com.

It's no secret that Joomla's default editor lacks quite a few features. We often recommend that people upgrade to Joomla Content Editor (JCE). You can click here to find full instructions on how to install JCE, including a video.

What we're going to cover in this tutorial are 5 really great features of JCE that people often don't realise are there:

1) Cut and Paste Images Into Different Folders

One common complaint about Joomla's default Media Manager is that you can't move images around. Once you've uploaded an image to one location, you'll need to delete it and re-upload it if you want it in a different folder. JCE allows you to do that:

This tutorial is the answer to a question asked by a user in our support forum ... "how do I collect more information from my members when they register?".

The user's problem is that the normal Joomla registration form gives you precisely 5 fields:

• Name
• Username
• Email
• Password
• ... and, er ... Password again.

That's it. If you want to collect people's location, birthday, opinion or any more information about them you're stuck. What we're going to show you in this tutorial is how to collect more information from your users when they register.