Archive for the ‘Joomla’ Category
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010 One of the websites based on Joomla, that I’m managing, had to have the option to show a Visitors Counter on the page bottom.
I did some research online to check for some Joomla plugins that are capable of aiming my Joomla installation with the Visitor Counter feature.
There are a couple of plugins available out there that are able to provide a Joomla installation with a Web Counter, however I’ll just mention the few which I have tested myself.
The ones I’ve tested myself are;
1. VCNT
2. Count your Visitors
3. Cool Hits Counter
and finally the one that I really liked the most:
4. VINAORA
All the prior 3 aforementioned VCNT, Count your Visitors and Cool Hits Counter, are actually working right after installation. I haven’t had the time to test them thoroughfully but from a first look they appear to be counting the visitors.
The Count your visitors – joomla plugin’s download main page was in German with no option to revert to English, so that wasn’t nice.
Though the plugin seems to work fine after just downloaded and installed and configured from
Extensions -> Module Manager
The configuration options for Count your visitors are quite obscure but if you’re a looking for a really simple way to count your Joomla based website visitors it might be a good choice. The plugin is based on the initial Joomla module called Statistics.
By the way I’ve read some reports online that actually Joomla 1.5 also includes some kind of minimal integrated web counter embedded in itself throughout the Joomla Statistics module .
However I personally couldn’t really follow the methods describe to take advantage of the Joomla install integrated Statistics module, however if somebody has already succeeded in using the Statistics default joomla module I’ll be glad, if he shares with me.
I’ve found the VCNT visitor statistics plugin a handy one, but this module had this major problem that the VCNT 1.5 text which was appearing as a heading before the statistics was hard to wipe out of my web page, so eventually I got pissed of and thought and tested the Cool Hits Counter.
The Cool Hits Counter is actually a simplistic module which presents a counter about visitors on the web site in numeric digit numbers.
These module uses the integrated Joomla 1.5 module mod_stats the only difference is the support for numeric digit numbers.
As I’ve said none of the above modules wasn’t flexible enough and therefore wasn’t what I was looking for, thus I decided to use my installed VINAORA Joomla web(users) counter plugin.
The VINAORA is actually quite straight foward to configure, right after installation to start with the configuration I had to navigate to:
Extension -> Module Manager -> Vinaora Visitors Counter -> Module Parameters
Since I wanted just a simple counter without any external statistics I personally prefered using Vinaora’s counter with the optionsDisplay Mode: Simple as well as the Zero-Statistics turned on to (Yes)
Some of the other options I found to be best matching my desires for the Visitors Counter was:
Show Title: No and Position: Left
Now I had this shiny visitors statistics in my Joomla installation but there was the annoying Link in my Visitors Counter appearing on the page, thus in order to remove the default link Visitors Counter which was pointing to the VINAORA’s web page, I had to edit the file:
modules/mod_vvisit_counter/tmpl/default.php located in my Joomla Document Root directory.
First I’ve edited the code on line 21 where I’ve removed out the Vinaora string since I didn’t wanted any reference to Vinaora to occur in my Joomla HTML code.
In line 162 in the code:
$html .= ….
By removing it I’ve completed scraped out the annoying references to VINAORA and their link to http://vinaora.com website and thus made the Visitors counter a look a bit more professional.
Now the counter is working with a graphical numeric digits and everything is just fine with my Web counter Joomla counter thanks to VINAORA 🙂
Tags: configuration options, configure, count your visitors, download, Extension, feature, file, How to add visitor/visitors counter in Joomla based website using the VINAORA joomla plugin, installation, mod, Module, none, option, optionsDisplay, page, page bottom, Parameters, plugin, right, show, statistics, support, text, time, vcnt, visitor counter, website visitors, Zero
Posted in Joomla, Linux, System Administration, Various | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 You need to simply follow this 3 easy steps:
1. Login with your joomla administrator
Point in your browser to http://yoursite.com/joomla/administrator/ or to url wherever your admin panel is located
2. Go to Menu Manager
Menus -> Menu Manager
3. Click the new button located on the right top side of the joomla admin panel
Next the Select Menu Item Type dialog will appear:
There you will need to select the External Link option
Now fill in your desired url that you desire your Menu link to point to and choose among the few possible options on how do you want the new external website to appear after clicked on the menus link.
And that's it now you will have it. Easy 🙂
Tags: admin, admin panel, administrator, browser, Button, Click, dialog, Easy, External, How to add Joomla Menu link to point to external URL address, Item, Joomla, link, link option, login, menu, menu link, menu manager, menus, new button, panel, right, Select, side, type, type dialog, url, url address, website
Posted in Joomla, Linux, Various | 4 Comments »
Friday, December 3rd, 2010 ‘ve used the RSForms to build some custom Joomla Contact forms.
The RSForms was recommended to me by a friend and actually it’s a pretty cool and quick way to create forms.
I’ve installed it and played a bit with it to create a custom forms for one of the website I had to bring up just recently.
After the contact form was ready however there was a problem with sending emails. It took me quite a while to find out how to solve the problemwith contact not able to mail whatever is filled in.
First time I tried the RSForms after filling in the details and pressing the submit button,I got the error message;
Could not instantiate mail function.
I should say that, I’m running a QMAIL email server on the server where I have the Joomla & RSForms installed and configured.
I’ve came up with a solution to this issue after some research in Google
In order to solve that you will have to login to your Joomla administrator and
Navigate to:
Site -> Global Configuration -> Server
Whenever it opens up you should be seing the Mail Settings on the bottom right corner;
From there you will have to change the Mailer from PHP Mail Function to SMTP Server
To give you a better idea check out the screenshot of the Mail Settings below:
Changing this simple setting resolved the Could not instantiate mail function for me.
Right after I tested the RSForms to send my filled in form content but this time the PHPMAILER_RECIPIENTS_FAILED message was there;
This error was caused actually by a mistake I made in the configuration of the Custom RSForm I have prepared;
In Components -> RSForm!Pro -> Manage forms whenever I was preparing my form I’ve made a mistake in the User Emails customized field in my custom prepared form in the To: field I had a wrong variable set (a different value was set from the E-mail caption I’ve set on).
Solving this solved the issue. Even though the PHPMAILER_RECIPIENTS_FAILED was gone now, next I was unpleasently surprised by another error message which prevented the Contact form to properly send the input data:
Now I had to fight with the error;
PHPMAILER_FROM_FAILED
It took me a while and a lot of forums reading before I figure it out again my custom prepared RSForm had an issue;
The problem was in the Admin Emails customization of the form in the From: fill in box I had mistakenly typed in proper email, setting a proper email there solved the issue;
I’ve red online many suggested solutions to the issue which dealt with changes in the the file joomla/components/com_contact/controller.php around line 112, 162 etc.
I should say that before I found and solved the actual problem I’ve tried modifing this file also but with zero success.
Sometimes Linux is so complicated, it really pisses me of, why is not life easier? 😐
Tags: amp, bottom right corner, Button, Components, contact forms, content, cool, custom, email server, Emails, error message, file, form, function, Global, global configuration, google, How to fix "Could not instantiate mail function", login, mail function, mail settings, Manage, mistake, php, phpmailer, PHPMAILER_RECIPIENTS_FAILED and PHPMAILER_FROM_FAILED on Joomla and RSforms, problemwith, RECIPIENTS, screenshot, site, time, User, value
Posted in Joomla, Programming, System Administration, Various | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 I’m using a template youbizz just recently for a website. The website is already configured to use Joomla as a CMS.
This is a website related to the university so joomla was the perfect choice for a quick and easy to configure Content Management System
The youbizz template really makes difference and make the website layout look & feel quite a business looking.
However I needed a way to make my general configured menu buttons on the website to have a dropdown sub-menus in it
I even didn’t know if Joomla is supporting this, but by a chance I’ve made a submenu to the website Home buttom menu and thus I learned it how I can make submenus.
It actually appears creating the submenus to a menu in Joomla is a piece of cake, all you have to do in joomla administrator is go to to:
Menus -> Main Menu
From there you can configure as website buttons and link them to the ones already prepared in Article Manager
Just in case if you don’t know to add a buttons to a new joomla installation it’s necessary from admin to first go to:
Content -> Article Manager
Next press the New button (a green button with an image of a plus sign)
Thereon put a Title , Alias and in the input box put on everything you want this button pressed to show up in ur website.
Completing that simply press the Apply button and it should be done.
Next step to make the article appear in Menus -> Main Menu is to go this section and respectively from there use the green button with the plus sign to add up a new element to the main menu.
Right after you will have the Menu Item: [ New ] to appear it looks like in the pic below:
From the list of items to select you need to select the Article menu element. A submenu will appear in your browser to the Articles reading:
Article Layout
Article Submission Layout
etc.
From this menu you will have to select the Article Layout
The next screen to appear will look like the pic below:
Here in article layout few things needs to be adjusted, again you will need to place the Title and the Alias, further after from the Parameters (Basic) located on the right you will have to select an article to link the new menu you’re just creating in Joomla’s new menu.
This is achieved via pressing the Select button located nearby the Select Article
Here it’s important to note the existence of Parent Item scrolldown field. This field will have all the created menu buttons in Main Menu . In case if this is the first one to create in main menu then it could be also empty.
The Parent Item field is really an important field and through it the menu’s submenus are created in Joomla.
For instance let’s say you want the current creating article to be listing as a sub-benu button to another already existing category, instead of listing as a separate button to the Joomla’s main menu navigation.
Well it’s pretty easy just choose from the Parent Item the name of an already existing menu button in Joomla main menu to be the parent of the sub-menu button you want to have.
That’s it now you will have the sub-menu button to appear as a drop down button (if of course your template supports dropdown menus).
There are few more options to choose in between which I found to be quite self explanatory, so I want explain them
But I hope I was able to explain at least the basics how menu subbuttons can be created in Joomla 1.5I find it a bit harder to explain in a bit plain way, but anyways if some of my dear readers is not understanding how to achieve the sub-menus I’m more than willing to help out further via the comments.
Tags: alias, article layout, article manager, article menu, article submission, buttom, Button, cake, chance, cms, configure, content management system, difference, dropdown menus, element, everything, green button, home, How to Add sub-menus to Joomla main navigation buttons (Making dropdown menus) in Joomla, Image, input box, installation, Item, menu, menu buttons, menu element, menus, navigation buttons, new button, new element, parent, perfect choice, piece, piece of cake, Plus, submenu, template, Thereon, website buttons, website layout, youbizz
Posted in Everyday Life, Joomla, Linux, Programming, System Administration | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010 Two months ago, I’ve developed a contact reservation form in PHP. The form is really easily customizable and is straight forward to integrate.
I’ve developed the form for a small restaurant which was missing the feature on it’s joomla based website in order to be able for restaurant clients to reserve tables.
Here is how my restaurant reservation form looks like:
Later on I found there are plenty of possibilities to easily make a reservation form in Joomla but at that time I had no idea that custom contact forms can be prepared with Joomla, so I developed my own one from scratch in plain PHP and MySQL.
The form’s fields are in Dutch, because the form I’ve developed for a Dutch restaurant.
However changing the form text is really easy,to do so open the php file and modify it, according to your needs.
I decided to share here the reservation form in hope that it might be helpful to somebody out there.
The Reservation form is licensed under GPLv2 so you’re very welcome to distribute and modify it freely.
The form installation is described in the README file you will find bundled with the reservation form archive.
You can d Download my PHP restaurant reservation form here
Feedback on the form is very welcome!
Tags: archive, contact, contact forms, feature, feedback, file, form, idea, installation, Joomla, My PHP/MySQL Restaurant Reservation Form, Mysql, order, php, php mysql, possibilities, README, readme file, Reservation, Restaurant, restaurant reservation, scratch, somebody, text, time, website
Posted in Joomla, Linux, Programming, Various | 14 Comments »
Monday, December 20th, 2010 A joomla installation I’m managing needed to have created a sitemap.xml
From a SEO perspective sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz are absolutely necessary for a website to bewell indexed in google.
After some investigation I’ve found out a perfect program that makes generation of sitemap.xml in joomla a piece of cake.
All necessary to be done for the sitemap.xml to be created comes to download and install of JCrawler
What makes JCrawler even better is that it’s open source program.
To install Jcrawler go in the joomla administrator panel:
Extensiosn -> Install/Uninstall
You will see the Install from URL on the bottom, there place the link to the com_jcrawler.zip installation archive, for instance you can place the link of the downloaded copy of com_jcrawler.zip I’ve mirrored on www.pc-freak.net ,by placing it on https://www.pc-freak.net/files/com_jcrawler.zip
The installation will be done in a few seconds and you will hopefully be greated with a Installation Success message.
Last thing to do in order to have the sitemap.xml in your joomla based website generated is to navigate to:
Components -> JCrawler
There a screen will appear where you can customize certain things related to the sitemap.xml generation, I myself used the default options and continued straight to the Start button.
Further on a screen will appear asking you to Submit the newly generated sitemap to; Google, MSN, Ask.com, Moreover and Yahoo , so press the Submit button.
That’s all now your joomla website will be equipped with sitemap.xml, enjoy!
Tags: bewell, Button, com, customize, default options, download, downloaded copy, Extensiosn, freak, google, gz, How to build website sitemap (sitemap.xml) in Joomla, Install, installation, installation archive, installation success, investigation, JCrawler, link, MSN, open source program, order, panel, perspective, piece of cake, Press, Start, start button, success message, Uninstall, xml, Yahoo, zip installation
Posted in Joomla, Linux, SEO, Various | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010 To change the Main Menu link menu entry in Joomla, from Joomla administ rator I tried to:
Menus -> Main Menu -> Menus
I’ve changed the title but the change didn’t appeared in my Joomla based website .
I tried to change it directly in the source code of the website by looking for ‘Main Menu’ string with:
debian:/home/mysite/www# grep -rli 'Main Menu' *
but it appeared too complicated and after trying few string changes in few files I decided to drop this kind of approach.
A bit of investigation online led me to how to achieve what I was trying to dire ctly from Joomla.
Here is how. In Joomla administrator move to:
Extensions -> Module Manager
In the list you will the Module Manager appear under the list Module Name , therein you have to click over Main Menu text and change it to whatever you like to.
The new text you entered will appear on the joomla website immediately, enjoy.
Tags: administ, change, Click, grep, home, How to change from default main menu to other text in Joomla, investigation, kind, link, link menu, Main, menu, menu entry, menu link, menu text, menus, Module, move, mysite, online, rator, rli, source code, string changes, text, title, website, www
Posted in Joomla, Linux, SEO | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010 My blog’s index has suddenly started redirecting to my last post. That was rather strange, since I haven’t done anything special, all I did before the problem occured was a change in wordpress wp-admin to my latest post.
There in I changed the post Visibility from Public to Private
Right after this my blog’s home started redirecting to the blog post where the changes was made.
This was really strange, so I reverted back the changes in Post’s Publish Visibility to the default setting.
Though the change the redirect to the latest post by accessing my www.pc-freak.net/blog/ was still there.
I tried completely wiping out the post by sending it to Trash and issuing the same post again, but now things became even worser.
Accessing my blog was opening 404 not found error message . Everything seemed fine in wordpress admin and therefore I suspected the redirect is being applied from info read in my wordpress database in MySQL.
A bit of investigation prooved my guess was correct, for some reason a record was made to the MySQL blog database in table wp_redirection_items.
The incorrect redirection wihtin the database looked like so:
| 4 | /blog/ | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0000-00-00 00:00:00 | 2 | enabled | url | 301 | /blog/how-to-change-from-default-main-menu-to-other-text-in-joomla/ | url | NULL |
Removing the incorrect redirect was kind of easy and came to simply issuing:
mysql> delete from wp_redirection_items where id='3';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
This fixed the redirection issue and opening my blog main page started correctly opening the main page again! 🙂
Tags: blog, change, error message, everything, fine, freak, guess, home, How to fix wordpress blog sudden redirection to present post problem, info, investigation, issue, kind, null, page, private right, Public, Publish, Query, read, reason, redirect, redirection, visibility, wihtin, worser, www
Posted in Joomla, Various | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, March 15th, 2011 Just in case if you are looking for a quick way to set Google Analytics on newly installed Joomla powered site, here is how:
1. Download the Google Analytics Tracking Module
The module is available from Joomla Extensions on joomla.org
At the current time of writting you need to download the analytics_tracking15,zip file
2. Install the Google Analytics Tracking Module;
Login as joomla admin and navigate to;
Extensions -> Install
Place the analytics_tracking15.zip url to the Install URL: field.
Again as of time of writting you need to place https://www.pc-freak.net/files/analytics_tracking15.zip;
3. Open the Module Manager
Extensions -> Module Manager
4. Click over Google Analytics Tracking Module
On the right pane you will notice in the Module Parameters the Analytics_uacct_code field. In the uacct_code field you need to paste your UA obtained from your created google-analytics account.
This code is usually something like UA-2101595-10
Now place your code their and press the save green button located near the right top of the screen. You should see the text in blue Item Saved which would indicate your UA code is stored already in the Google Analytics Tracking Module, now press the Cancel button located again on the right top.
As a last step before the Google analytics is set-up on the Joomla you need to enable the plugin to do you need to press over the tick left sided from the text reading Google Analytics Tracking Module in the Module Manager
5. Click over the Enabled button in Module Manager;
Google Analytics Tracking Module -> Enabled
Cheers! Now, your Joomla website visitors count will start logging to Google Analytics.
Tags: analytics, Button, Cancel, cancel button, Cheers, Click, current time, Enabled, file, freak, google, google analytics, green button, How to easy place Google Analytics to track website visitors on Joomla, Install, Item, login, Module, module parameters, Open, org, Parameters, plugin, Press, reading, something, text reading, tick, time, ua, uacct, way, website visitors, writting, zip file
Posted in Joomla, Linux, SEO, System Administration, Various, Web and CMS | 1 Comment »
Saturday, May 28th, 2011 If you’re installing some PHP based CMS/blog like (Joomla or WordPress) or some kind of template and suddenly you stumble on a error:
Deprecated: Function split() is deprecated in /usr/local/www/websitedomain/templates/youbizz/html/modules.php on line 78
In order to fix that the file which spits the error message, in my case modules.php needs to be modified and the split php function has to be substituted with explode on every occuring place.
I experienced this error on FreeBSD 7_2 with php version 5.3.5 installed from ports.
This simple fix works fine.
Tags: blog, cms, Deprecated, ERROR, error message, file, fine, fix, freebsd, function, kind, line, order, php 5, place, ports, template, usr, version, websitedomain, Wordpress, www, youbizz
Posted in FreeBSD, Joomla, System Administration, Wordpress | 4 Comments »