Introduction to Joomla Multilingual Sites

Introduction to Joomla Multilingual Sites

Would you like to know how to create Joomla sites with content in multiple languages? Joomla really can build professional-quality multilingual sites.

But before you begin, there are some key questions to answer:

  • What do multilingual sites look like?
  • Can I trust Joomla with my multilingual site?
  • Are there any advantages or disadvantages to multilingual sites? 

In this introductory blog post, we'll answer those questions. Let's start by seeing some examples of real multilingual Joomla sites.

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3 Different Approaches to Multilingual Joomla Sites

3 Different Approaches to Multilingual Joomla Sites

In our "Introduction to Joomla Multilingual Sites" you learned what multilingual sites look like, what companies or celebrities use them and their advantages and disadvantages. 

In this blog post, you are going to review different approaches to building multilingual sites. There are many different ways to build a multilingual Joomla site, but these are three of the most common:

  • Approach #1: Use Joomla's core features
  • Approach #2: Use different websites for each language
  • Approach #3: Replace Joomla's core features with a third party extension

The choice is not always straightforward. So in this post, you'll take a close look at all three approaches. You then will learn which of the three we recommend.

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3 Best Options to Prevent Fake Joomla Registrations

3 Options to Prevent Fake Joomla Registrations

One of our customers has been getting a ton of fake automated registrations on their Joomla site. Those spam bots clutter your genuine web traffic. Deleting fake accounts they create is also a very time-consuming task.

Here are the 3 best options to prevent fake Joomla registrations:

  • The core reCAPTCHA plugins.
  • Double opt-in registration.
  • OSpam-a-not extension.

In this post, I will give you a brief tour of these options to put the fake registrations to stop.

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How to Create Hidden Menu Items in Joomla

How to Create Hidden Menu Items in Joomla

Since the beginning of Joomla, users have created hidden menu links. This is a neccesary workaround because menu links control many of the features on Joomla pages - even pages that don't show in menus.

One very common use case is to create links to special sales pages and landing pages. Sometimes we need a menu link to set up the page, but we don't want that link to be easily visible. 

"Add Menu Title" is a menu option that makes it really easy to hide links. Here's how it works ...

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CSS Grid #15. The justify-content and align-content Properties

The justify-content and align-content Properties

In the previous CSS Grid tutorial, you learned about the align and justify properties to center and align items within a grid on the horizontal and vertical axes.

However, there are cases in which the total size of the grid is less than the size of the grid container. This happens because all items within the grid and the container itself are sized with fixed values (px, em, rem).

In such cases, it is necessary to align the tracks themselves, that is the whole grid, in order to exploit and fill up that additional empty space. In such a situation, you can make use of the align-content and justify-content properties. This is what I will explain in this tutorial.

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Joomlashack Templates Support Microdata for Joomla Articles

Joomlashack Templates Support Microdata for Joomla Articles

We're happy to announce that the Wright framework now supports microdata for Joomla articles. If you are using the Wright template or any of our commercial templates, you don't need to tweak the code anymore to add microdata. 

The major search engines use microdata to better understand the content of your site. Microdata allows search engines to easily see the key information for each article, including the main image, the author, the publication date, and so on.

To take advantage of this new feature, update to Wright 3.6.8. If you use any of our commercial templates, update your template to the version released this week. 

Read more: Joomlashack Templates Support Microdata for Joomla Articles

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.

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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