Joomlashack Blog and Updates

How to choose the best Joomla Template for your project

: Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge; Published: 31 July 2014 31 July 2014

Invest your time better when desiging a site

You already know that Joomla is a versatile platform with a theming system that provides great features and flexibility. As a Web developer working on your own projects or a client site, you also already know that it’s a great idea and the best use of your time to invest in purchasing a professional template to build upon. When you do this, you don’t have to focus on laying out the groundwork for your web-design project, because the template will take care of that. Instead, you can spend your time on the small details, the customization, the incorporated features, and the site design.

The Joomla theme market is huge, so it’s important to go into the process with a list of features, requirements, and theme characteristics that will work best for your needs, skill level, and the particular project.

Easy Social Icons with a fresh new look!

: Written by Oscar Rodas Oscar Rodas; Published: 17 July 2014 17 July 2014

Updated and Optimized for Joomla 2.5.22 & 3.3.1

The team has been busy giving Easy Social Icons a great new update. It now works seamlessly with the latest versions of Joomla, 2.5.22 & 3.3.1. Use it with all Joomla Templates to add cool and easy icon sets.

New Features and Social Icon Sets

A great value: Easy Social Icons contains 6 different icon sets that have now been updated and revised. These icon sets will give your site a classy look and a social capability. Our graphical design team worked hard to give the icons a fresh new look. They now include new Social Networks like Dribbble & Vine.

Easy Social Icons: Easily add icons for all of your social networks!

The Easy Social Icons Joomla module by Joomlashack is very easy to use:

Go to the configuration menu.
Add a link to your network(s).
Select the icon style, direction and order that best matches the look of your site.
Publish the module.

Do you know an easier way to add social networks to a site?

Re-Launching OSTraining from the Command Line

: Written by andersonsantos andersonsantos; Published: 10 July 2014 10 July 2014

ostraining redesign We redesigned this site at the end of the June.

This was a complete redesign and, in addition to the new template and images, the whole process required deep changes to your site structure.

We need to change menus, modules, categories, articles, extensions options and apply many other updates. We started to worry about the complexity of the upgrade and what could go wrong during the process.

This post outlines how we approached the problem and how we managed to successfully complete a complex update inside 20 minutes.

Joomla SEO: A Practical Guide

: Published: 08 July 2014 08 July 2014

Joomla SEO Steven Johnson is an affiliate marketer who has run several successful sites around TVs, iPhones and iPods.

Steven is also a long-time Joomla user, and he's really learned how to optimize Joomla for high rankings.

In this presentation, Steven gives a practical guide to optimizing your Joomla site. He covers popular SEO extensions, metadata and plenty of off-page factors.

6 Web-Entrepreneurship Books you Must Read

: Written by Joomlashack Joomlashack; Published: 03 July 2014 03 July 2014

The path to becoming a successful web entrepreneur and freelancer takes a great deal of time and effort. Your friends and colleagues are good sources of advice, but you also want to hit the books during the course of your research. From marketing to work-life balance, there's plenty of resources out there for web entrepreneurs and freelancers who want to get the most out of their unconventional careers.

1. The 4-Hour Workweek

Keystone reading for any web entrepreneur or freelancer, and for good reason. When you start your own business, you put in a lot of time to get everything just right. The problem with this is that over time, you may find yourself unable to actually scale back the amount of hours you're working. "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss lets you figure out out how to work smarter instead of harder, so you can enjoy your success and have a good work/life balance.

I have never been able to work just 4 hours a week, however, this book helped break many paradigms about what I need to be doing vs what I want to be doing. I learned how to delegate tasks I was not skilled at in order to make more time for the areas of my business I excelled at.

Social Networking Extensions for Joomla

: Published: 20 June 2014 20 June 2014

Alex Andreae is an experienced Joomla developer who focuses on social apps.

In this talk, he introduces you to the complete world of social tools.

Alex covers social network authentication, share buttons, comments, Facebook Open Graph, X / Twitter Cards, Google Structured data and more.

How to Correctly Duplicate a Joomla Template

: Written by Nick Savov Nick Savov; Published: 19 June 2014 19 June 2014

joomla-duplicate-template One of the mistakes I see often by new Joomla users is modifying a core Joomla template and using it directly.

The problems occur when updating Joomla and all their changes are lost in the process.

The solution is to create a copy of the template and modify the copy instead. This will preserve your changes when you update Joomla.

OSShow - a Simple Joomla Slideshow Module

: Written by Nick Savov Nick Savov; Published: 18 June 2014 18 June 2014

OSShow Logo This week, we have another nice little extension for you: OSShow.

OSShow is a lightweight slideshow module.

The OSShow Module will scan a folder on the server and flip through all the images. Using the Weblinks component, you can also add a name, description and URL for each of the images.

We made the slideshow easy so you can focus on managing your content instead of configuring it.

5 Blog Ideas for Joomla Marketers When There's Nothing to Write About

: Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge; Published: 18 June 2014 18 June 2014

Video on building a blog with Joomla

The thought of blogging can sometimes just make us cringe. What do I write about? Where do I begin? Why do I have to do this again? Why can't my brain focus today? Is it time to eat my lunch yet?

You may even end up wasting time just staring at the blank document wondering, how does everyone else do this all the time? How are they always coming up with fresh ideas to blog about?