Creating a Joomla blog - a guide with tips & tricks

The best-known CMS (content management system) tool for so-called weblogs is clearly WordPress(market share of 70 %). It is followed by the open source software "Joomla".

In this guide, I will show you some helpful tips & tricks on how to turn your Joomla website into a weblog in just a few simple steps. As a Joomla agency, we deal with this on a daily basis.

Build your own Joomla weblog or buy a ready-made one?

On the official Joomla website you will find a large collection of extensions of all kinds.

In the category Home -> Authoring & Content -> Blog you will find a collection of ready-made solutions on the subject of "Blogging on your own Joomla website".

To create and run a Joomla blog, you have two options:

1. Joomla blog with plugins
2. Joomla blog without plugins

1.joomla plugin "EasyBlog" under the magnifying glass

EasyBlog is a paid all-in-one solution for your website. This extension only needs to be installed and you can start your blog immediately.

Easyblog is also ideal if several authors want to write and publish on one blog. The author is displayed under each article and links to a personal biography page.

At a price of $79 per year (smallest package), the extension is well worth it.

Conclusion

A lot of thought and expertise has gone into "Easyblog" and you get a good tool for your personal blog.

Up to 24 different templates are available for the blog, but they are very similar. If you want to make graphical customisations yourself, this is usually very time-consuming. Good for a standard blog, but if you want more, you have to do it yourself.

2.build the Joomla weblog yourself: the category blog

Joomla already offers many functions out-of-the-box that help us to create our own blog - a so-called category blog. I would now like to introduce these to you:

Category, text and images:

The first step is to create a category (Content / Categories / New category) and name it "Blog".

We then create three new posts in the following form:

• Title: Test (e.g. 1-3)
• Alias (is created automatically when saving)
• Content:
  1. An introductory text in the first line
  2. Then add the "Read more" object, which can be found under the content field.
  3. Next line the full content in the form of text.
• Select "Blog" on the right-hand side of the page under Category
• In the "Images and links" tab
  1. Select the introductory image
  2. Select complete post image
• Save and close.

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The right menu entry, the right overview:

Now we have the right content, but we still need a proper overview of all blog posts.

To do this, simply create a new menu item (Menu -> Select menu -> New menu item). The correct parameters are important here:

1. Menu title: Please select the name of your menu item here (e.g.: Blog)
2. Alias: You can leave this blank
3. Menu item type: Select / Posts / Category blog
4. Select category: "Blog"

Now you have to make some settings.

5. Select the "Blog layout" tab and enter the following parameters:
6. #Leading: "0"
7. # Introduction: "12"
8. # Columns: "1"
9. #Links: "0"
10. Post sorting: "Newest first"
11. Sort date "Created"

Now call up your website and your new menu item. You have successfully created your blog view. Here is an example of this configuration.

Here is also a well-explained video on this topic:

The most important modules:

The basic structure of your blog has now been created. Now we can expand it with modules. I suggest integrating the following functions into your blog:

1. A search
2. A newsletter subscription
3. Links to the authors
4. A greeting
5. A categorisation of the posts (e.g.: all posts about topic X)
6. A short list of the most interesting (or newest) articles

I present some of them here:

The search

The simplest but most important extension, especially if there is already a lot of content on your Joomla blog, is the search.

You can create this under Extensions / Modules / New /"Search" (search index with a filter (e.g.: Only allow search for blog articles, would also be possible here).

Now enter a title and select the position in your template where this module should be displayed.

Add your own content such as text and images to the side menu

Regardless of whether you want to add a welcome text, images or additional links, the out-of-the-box module "Custom content (empty module)" is suitable

You can now create any content you like in this module and then display it with the correct positioning on your blog. Here is an example of our blog welcome text:

Comment function with Joomla!

To offer your readers a comment function, you need a plugin. At the moment we prefer to work with Disqus. This is a commenting system that is free of charge and very intelligent.

Once you have created an account with Disqus, you can generate a PHP code. You can insert this into a Joomla module and position it under the blog articles. Now you have a commenting solution that also has integrated spam protection.

More information about the integration of Disqus.com https://help.disqus.com/installation/universal-embed-code

Other comment plugins are Komento (for a fee) and JComments (free).

Conclusion Create a Joomla blog - (almost) without plugins

Joomla is just as suitable as WordPress for creating and running a blog. WordPress also requires some configuration. The effort is probably the same.