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.

One of the most common questions we get from Joomla learners is ... How do I set up a shopping cart with Joomla?

For several years the only option was Virtuemart. However, Virtuemart is a very large and complex product that it simply overkill for many sites.

Fortunately, some simpler and easier shopping carts have recently been released and perhaps the best of the bunch is RokQuickCart from Rockettheme.com.

It does have basic tax and shipping options, plus support for either PayPal or Google Checkout. It doesn't have the ability to put products into categories or have custom fields for products (except color and size). Really it's ideal for a website selling up to 20 or 30 products.

 

This tutorial which will show you how to create a business directory or Yellow Pages on your Joomla site. We're going to use a component called Sobi2, which is available from www.sigsiu.net.

Installing Sobi2

1. Click here to download the Sobi2 component.
2. Go to Administrator >> Extensions >> Install / Uninstall and upload the Sobi2 files.
3. Click "Install Sobi2 data"
4. Go to Menus >> Main Menu and click "New"
5. Choose Sobi2 >> Frontpage or Selected Category for your menu link. Give the link a title such as "Directory" and click save.
6. Visit the front of your site and click on the new "Directory" link. It should look like the screenshot on the right:

This tutorial will show you how to add a contact form to the front of your Joomla site. This will allow people to contact you easily and quickly without having to navigate through to a dedicated "Contact Us" page.

• Step 1: Click here to download the Rapid Contact module. Login to the Administrator area of your Joomla site.
• Step 2: Go to the Administrator area of your Joomla site and click on Extensions >> Install / Uninstall
• Step 3: Upload the Rapid Contact module.
• Step 4: Go to Extensions >> Module Manager then find and open the Rapid Contact module.
• Step 5: On the right-hand side, under "Module Parameters" enter all the details you'd like to use on the contact form. Click "Apply" and check the contact form on the front of your site.

A note of caution: contact forms are susceptible to spam. If you find yourself receiveing spam emails from this form, go to "Module Parameters" and right at the bottom you will be select and enable a spam-blocking question.

This tutorial will show you how to track search queries on your Joomla site.

Often these queries can be a great source of information about what your visitors want:

• They show you what visitors can't find: If one search term is really popular, it might be because people can't find it using your current menus ... it might be time to add a new menu link.
• They show you what visitors really want: You may think people want "pink widgets" but search terms might show that people really want "blue widgets".