The Joomlashack Blog
Large Joomla Sites Should Use Multiple Sitemaps
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 13 July 2021 13 July 2021
OSMap is the most popular way to create a sitemap for Joomla sites. Thousands of Joomla users rely on OSMap to help Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and others to understand their site's content.
Over the years of developing OSMap, we've spoken with Joomla users who have larger and larger sites. Some sites have 10,000 URLs, some have 50,000 URLs and we've even talked to users with hundreds of thousands of pages.
For these large sites, we do not recommend using a single sitemap. And search engines don't recommend it either.
If you have a big site, this post has our sitemap advice to help you get as many URLs as possible indexed by search engines.
All the Joomla News for June 2021
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 07 July 2021 07 July 2021
Thanks for using Joomla and Joomlashack.
Every month we post a round-up of news from around the Joomla community. Here's our guide to what's interesting in Joomla right now.
I try to post one of these helpful items every day in the Joomlashack Facebook group, so join if you do want daily Joomla updates.
How We Grow Joomlashack With the Freemium Business Model
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 05 July 2021 05 July 2021
Since 2016, we've managed we've managed to grow Joomlashack consistently. It's not been easy because Joomla's popularity has dropped during those years.
What's our secret? It's the freemium business model.
Our aim at Joomlashack is to give away enough free resources that people learn to trust us. We give away free extensions and hope that people trust us enough to sign up for the Pro version.
Freemium isn't the right approach for every business, but it works well in many industries. Here's a step-by-step guide how we have grown Joomlashack, and hopefully it has some useful tips you can replicate in your business.
Read more: How We Grow Joomlashack With the Freemium Business Model
How to Integrate OSDownloads Pro with Mailchimp Groups
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 01 July 2021 01 July 2021
Here at Joomlashack, our business strategy is "freemium". Our aim is to give away enough free resources that people learn to trust us. We give away free extensions and hope that people trust us enough to sign up for the Pro version. Click here for full details on our business model.
That is all possible thanks to the OSDownloads extension and MailChimp. We use these two tools to collect user emails in exchange for downloads.
However, it gets better because Mailchimp allows us to segment the email into groups. Each group can get emails that are targeted to their interests.
In one of our previous posts, we talked about how to create Mailchimp groups. In this tutorial, you will learn how to integrate OSDownloads Pro with your Mailchimp groups.
Read more: How to Integrate OSDownloads Pro with Mailchimp Groups
How to Create Awesome Certificates for Your OSCampus Classes
- Written by Alex Smirnov Alex Smirnov
- Published: 24 June 2021 24 June 2021
OSCampus is the best way to build an online training site with Joomla.
Did you know that you can create awesome certificates in OSCampus Pro? You don't even need any graphic design skills! This is because OSCampus supports certificates that you can download from sites such as Canva.com.
In this tutorial, we'll show you how to use custom certificates for your OSCampus classes. This image below has a preview of some of the images you can use:
Read more: How to Create Awesome Certificates for Your OSCampus Classes
A Joomla Guide to PHP Notices, Warnings and Errors
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 22 June 2021 22 June 2021
Websites inevitably have problems. Whether you're using Joomla or anything else, you'll need to spot and fix problems.
Joomla uses PHP and when PHP has problems, it tries to report them to you. These errors may appear on your site and could be visible to visitors.
In this tutorial, we're going to give you a quick introduction to these errors. We'll explain the different types that might appear on your site and how you can stop them from showing.
Read more: A Joomla Guide to PHP Notices, Warnings and Errors
Joomlashack Will Require PHP 7 When Joomla 4 Arrives
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 16 June 2021 16 June 2021
Over the last couple of years, the Joomla community has been moving to PHP 7 as a minimum requirement.
Leading extension developers such as Peter from Regular Labs and Nicholas from Akeeba have already dropped PHP 5.6 support on their extensions. Joomla itself is prompting users to update to at least PHP 7.3, with messages like this:
Read more: Joomlashack Will Require PHP 7 When Joomla 4 Arrives
OSMap Now Supports Phoca Gallery and jDownloads
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 16 June 2021 16 June 2021
OSMap is one of the first and most successful extensions here at Joomlashack. Every day, over 200 people download and install the Free version of OSMap.
Why do so many people use OSMap? It's because a Joomla sitemap will help Google and other search engines find and understand your site's content.
If you're using other extensions, there are many plugins available that integrate with OSMap. Today, there are two more because OSMap now supports Phoca Gallery and JDownloads. These are two of the most popular free extensions in Joomla.
OSMap Pro previously supported K2, Kunena, Mosets Tree, SobiPro, Virtuemart, OSCampus, and Shack Locations.
Create a Joomla Category List with Images
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 14 June 2021 14 June 2021
Joomla offers a menu type "Category List" that allows you to display a category and subcategories in a list format.
Normally a "Category List layout" looks like the image below. That examplle is using Protostar as a template. This default design is not very attractive, is it?
We can do it better. For example, we can add an image next to the title of each subcategory. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to do that, using Joomla's template overrides (click here to see all our template override tutorials).
OSCampus Now Has Much Better LMS Statistics
- Written by Alex Smirnov Alex Smirnov
- Published: 10 June 2021 10 June 2021
OSCampus is the best way to build an online training site with Joomla.
OSCampus is incredibly robust and is already used by thousands of people every week. OSCampus runs the video training on OSTraining, and its architecture is the basis for Joomlashack University and the official Joomla.org training site!
In the latest release, you'll find a revamped "Statistics" area with much better statistics on your classes and students.
In this blog post, I'll introduce you to the new OSCampus statistics in the Joomla administrator area.