How to Update Joomla to Use PHP 7

How to Update Joomla to Use PHP 7

PHP 7 is the fastest PHP version yet. Simply changing the PHP version to 7 can make your Joomla site run 50% faster or more.

We get questions often about how to upgrade to a new PHP version, so we figured we should write a short tutorial for it. This tutorial will explain how Joomla interacts with PHP and how to update to PHP 7.

It's written at a beginner level and doesn't get into too much technical jargon - just enough to understand the process.

Read more: How to Update Joomla to Use PHP 7

10 New Features You'll See in Joomla 3.9

What New Features Will You See in Joomla 3.9?

Joomla 3.9 is now live and ready for you to use!

The Joomla team is putting most of their focus and energy into Joomla 4, but they still found time to release Joomla 3.9.

Joomla 3.9 introduces over 200 new features, improvements and bug fixes. The most important changes involve privacy and the GDPR, but there are many other helpful new features. 

Read more: 10 New Features You'll See in Joomla 3.9

How to Create Custom Layouts in Joomla 3

How to Create Custom Layouts in Joomla 3

Layouts are a feature in Joomla 3 that makes possible to re-use small portions of your design, using template overrides.

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to create really flexible and re-usable custom layouts.

Follow these 5 steps to become a master of custom layouts.

For the examples in this tutorial we're going to use Breeze, a free template you can download here.

Read more: How to Create Custom Layouts in Joomla 3

CSS Grid #14. Centering and Aligning Items in CSS Grid

Welcome to the 14th tutorial in our series on the CSS Grid.

We are presenting this series to help Joomla developers learn about CSS Grid. The introduction of CSS Grid will be one of the major changes in Joomla 4.

Vertically centering elements on a web page has been an issue for web designers and developers when working with CSS.

Read more: CSS Grid #14. Centering and Aligning Items in CSS Grid

How to Disable XML Styling in OSMap

How to Disable XML Styling in OSMap

One of our members was having trouble submitting his sitemap to Google. The message displayed at Google was:

"Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead."

This tutorial will show you how to disable XML styling in OSMap, which should fix the issue. Let's get started.

Read more: How to Disable XML Styling in OSMap

How to Find the Location of Your Joomla php.ini File

How to Find the Location of Your php.ini File

The php.ini file is a critical file you often need to manage to optimize your Joomla site. It controls many important aspects of what you can and can not do with your site.

For example, it controls the size of the files your server allows your Joomla to upload.

Different hosts use different schemes for storing and accessing critical system files like php.ini. You'll need to research where to find them.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to find the location of the php.ini file on any server.

Read more: How to Find the Location of Your Joomla php.ini File

Create a Joomla Sitemap for Google, Bing, Yahoo

Create a Joomla Sitemap for Google, Bing, Yahoo

Why should you add a sitemap to your Joomla site?

I'll be honest and say that I don't believe sitemaps improve your ranking in search engines. However, they do make sure more pages get indexed and that they get indexed more quickly.

Read more: Create a Joomla Sitemap for Google, Bing, Yahoo

Get Your Copy of the CSS Grid Explained Book

Learn CSS Grid Before Joomla 4 Arrives

CSS Grid is revolutionizing the frontend web-design industry.

For the last 20 years, web designers have used CSS to lay out web pages. However, CSS has always been missing some key functionality. Designers had to rely on workarounds, such as tables, floats, and positioning.

CSS Grid is different and better.

Read more: Get Your Copy of the CSS Grid Explained Book

How to Add Joomla Microdata to Articles and Templates

Add Microdata to Articles in Joomla 3

Microdata makes it possible to search engines to understand important details about your site's content. 

Microdata provides Google and Bing with extra information about your content such as names, descriptions, dates and ratings. And, because search engines can understand your data more clearly, they often reward you with a higher ranking.

In Joomla, some microdata support was quietly added in Joomla 3.3, which was released in 2014. The best to way to provide microdata is by using your template.

Some templates provide microdata support, including all Joomlashack templates.

However, if your template doesn't support microdata, I'm going to show you how to test your template and then add microdata support.

Read more: How to Add Joomla Microdata to Articles and Templates

How to Fix a 500 Internal Server Error in Joomla

How to Fix a 500 Internal Server Error

At Joomlashack, several customers have asked us about "Internal Server Errors" on their Joomla site.

In this blog post, I will cover what an internal server error is in Joomla and how to fix it.

Read more: How to Fix a 500 Internal Server Error in Joomla