What are Joomla Templates?

Templates define the general layout of a website:

• Fonts
• Colors
• Location of logos, text etc.

For Joomla you can get many free templates and many paid templates, here are some examples where you can get free templates:

• Joomla24, we need a Joomla 1.5 template

I downloaded JP_praisecorp.zip for this tutorial.

Install template

• Login to the administrator part of your Joomla site.
• Choose from the Menu Extensions, Install
• Click on the Browse button and select the Template file you downloaded.
• Click on Upload file & install, wait a while until you see a message "Install Template success"
• Now select from the Menu Extensions, Template Manager, you can now see all the templates.
• Select the template you uploaded and click on Default.
• If you click on the name of the template you can choose some additional options, which are different for each template. Many things are self explanatory, so just try them out and see what happens.
  • If you click on the top most Preview, you can now see how your web-site looks like.
  • If you click on the Preview button, you can see your web-site and also some light colored name tags, e.g. user3 etc. These names are important for the different modules we can use with Joomla. Modules can be latest headlines, most favorite articles, advertisement etc.
    Each template can arrange these modules in a different way, so here you can find out where all the module positions are.

Important news, a security for Joomla is available, it updates Joomla to V1.5.7. It fixes 1 critical, 1 major and 2 moderate vulnerabilities. Detail and download links are here.

Here is are some general instructions how to install a Joomla update, but MAKE A BACKUP FIRST!

Just installed it without any difficulties.

This Blog was quite busy these few days, there was a quite successful article on Digg and we were even blessed by a visit from Apple (see screenshot), I also want a screen like this guy had (Resolution 2560x1600). How do I know all this?

Actually this screenshot was taken from getclicky.com (aka Clicky) which we use to monitor our traffic.

Review

GetClicky (actually it's called Clicky) is a web service that monitors the traffic on your web site, similar to other services like Sitemeter or Google Analytics. To make it work you need to embed some Javascript into your website. Instructions for most common CMS (e.g. Jooma, Drupal) and Blog platforms (e.g. Blogger, Wordpress) are on their website.

Actually if you are using Joomla, you don't need to pay for the 3rd party plug-in they mention, you can download Jumi and use this to embed the Javascript into your website. If you need some more help for this you can send me an email or leave a comment.

What's great about Clicky are the nice statistics, you can find out almost anything about your visitors:

• Which pages did they look at for how long?
  
• How did they find you (i.e. referrer)?
  
• Which search words did they use?
  
• Which links did they click?
• etc.
  

But I think the most addictive is the "Spy", it shows the traffic on your website live, so you can see in real time what people are looking at right now!

I never used Sitemeter so I can't compare it to that, but I used Google Analytics. Clicky is for me the better choice, because I don't have to wait until Google updates the statistics. Google might have some more comprehensive analysis, but also some shortcomings compared with Clicky, e.g. you can't see details for each visitor. But there is no harm use both Clicky and Google Analyltics together on your site.

SInce a few days they now also offer a optimized web site for iPhone/iPod Touch (and other mobile phones) which is also quite nice to get a quick look at your statistics, when you are on the road. Of course the normal website also works on the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Demo

You can see how Clicky looks on their website, they have a preview of their actual Blog traffic and also a list to compare their features with their competition.

Pricing

Clicky has several plans:

• Free plan, it's free but quite limited, i.e. no Spy, less than 1000 page views daily
• Blogger US$ 3.99 per month or US23.99 per year. This is probably the right plan for most Blogs and Small Business.
• Professional US$ 9.99 per month or US$ 59.99 per year
  
• Professional (Mega Edition) US$ 16.99 per month or US$ 99.9 per year

If you are using Entrecard you possibly also heard of Entrebar a plugin for Firefox 3.0. I was a bit sceptical about this but I thought give it a try and I most say it works really great for me:

• I try to re-visit all Entrecard droppers, but the Entrecard website I always lost track where I have been. 
  With Entrebar just select Inbox and click on the double-arrow and 10 websites will be opened in different tabs! The good thing is: Only those websites will be opened where you have not dropped your Entrecard yet (unless you change some settings).
• Same if you want to browse Entrecard for Most popular, Random, Cheapest, Newest, Most expensive or Most advertised blogs. Just select your category, click on the double-arrow and 10 websites open. If you click on the single arrow only one website opens.

I used this the last few days and found some really nice and interesting blogs. You can also use Entrebar to add blogs to your favorites or to place your Entrecard-Ad onto a website. Entrebar shows you the price in "ec" and because you already look at this blog you know where the Ad will be placed.

If you use Firefox 3 and Entrecard you should give it a try.

In part 3 we installed Joomla V1.5 using CPanel, now we'll update it to the latest version, to have the most bug free and safest.

The following steps are necessary:

• Check which version is currently installed
• Download the correct update
• Upload and install the update (This tutorial assumes that your website has no content yet, otherwise make a backup first!)

Check which version is installed

1. Login into the administrator area of your website, i.e. go to http://domainname/administrator.
2. Enter username and password which you chose during the Joomla installation.
3. In the top right corner you can now see the version no, for example Version 1.5.2.

Download the correct update

1. Goto http://www.joomla.org/download.html.
2. Look for Download other Joomla 1.5.x package (you can also try to click this link directly.
3. Now look for a file with this name "Joomla_Your version no_to_1.5.X-Stable-Patch-Package.tar.gz and download this file.
   Replace "Your version no."w ith the the version number we found earlier, e.g. 1.5.2. "X" will be the latest version no, which is "6" as of today.
   Important: You must download the update file with the extension .tar.gz, to quickly apply this update patch with CPanel. ZIP works also but applying the Patch with CPanel is very troublesome.

Upload and install update

1. Login into CPanel, ie. go to the address http://domainname:2082 and login with the Username and Password, which your webhost gave you.
2. Look for the symbol for "File manager" and click on it.
3. If a dialog box opens with these options
   
   • Home Directory,  Web Root (public_html/www) , Public FTP Root (public_ftp), Document Root
     Select "Web root" and click go.
   • If you don't get this dialog you'll probably see a list of directories and files. Doubleclick on the folder symbol before the folder "public_html". The folder will open now.
4. Now you are in the folder on the webserver that will accessed when somebody uses this address: http://www.domainnname.tld.
5. If you didn't choose any path during the installation of Joomla you don't need to go any other folder now.
   If you entered a path doubleclick on the folder symbol before the name.
6. When you are in the Joomla folder, look for the symbol Upload or Upload file and click on it.
   Browse for the Joomla Update patch we downloaded and upload the file. Depending on your CPanel version you might need to close the upload Window manually.
7. Now look for the Joomla update patch in the filelist. Depending on your CPanel version:
   
   • If there is a checkbox in front of the file tick it and click on extract. You'll be asked for a path, leave it unchanged and click on Extract files.
     
   • If there is no checkbox click on the filename and click on Extract file contents afterwards.
8. The update patch will be applied, to check if everthing went smoothly follow the same instructions as above to check your version no.