Core Tips | Joomla Tips

How to change a websites php memory_limit

16 February 2010

Have you ever installed a Joomla extension and got nothing but a white screen?

Most likely you hit the memory limit on your server. Memory limits help to keep scripts from running out of control or using up all of your free memory. On the other hand, sometimes you are adding a fancy extension to your site, that simply requires slightly more memory then the default 8mb that Apache gives you. Let’s show you how to fix that.

How to disable ?tp=1 in Joomla

27 January 2010

3 Comments

We covered how to show your published module positions using ?tp=1 in a previous post.

Now, a few weeks have passed and for some reason you are hyper paranoid and want to know how to hide it. My first thought is to tell you that there are far more important things to be worrying about, but to each his own. *shrugs*

The easiest way is to add this to your Joomla .htaccess file. read more…

Lose the WYSIWYG editor in Joomla

15 January 2010

5 Comments

The editor is great in Joomla, don’t take this the wrong way, but if you want perfectly formatted content that displays exactly how you want it, there is no replacement for hand coding your articles.

Yes, it is great to be able to write a quick article and click a few buttons in the editor window to align things, but in the long run, you are really just hindering your education. Knowing basic html is going to help you make cleaner, more readable, and more reliable websites. Most articles consist of a lot of:
< p > and < h*> tags.
Why run the risk of using a editor that may insert all sorts of nonsense like using < p >< /p > as spacers? It’s not semantic, it makes no sense, and it’s invariably going to cause you issues over the long haul.

Get a html cheat cheat, keep it nearby, and go unpublish all your WYSIWYG plugins in Joomla. You will be glad you did.

Automatically change your footer copyright

5 January 2010

2 Comments

Another year passes by with all the usual fun and frivolity, however, Did you remember to change your Copyright on your website footer?

Chances are, this wasn’t too high on your list, and you might overlook it until somebody mentions it to you in May.
There is no reason to have to do this yearly maintenance if you don’t mind doing a little cut and pasting.

First, find where your copyright is inserted. In Joomla, it is generally at the bottom of the templates index.php file. Depending on the template, it may be in a different location. Your mileage may vary.

View module positions on a Joomla site with ?tp=1

16 December 2009

5 Comments

So, you have a Joomla site, but you can’t seem to figure out what position a module is situated into on your site.

Maybe you are looking at template companies demo and want to understand how they layed it out? Perhaps you are just a snoop.
Well it’s easy peasy to do this. Just add ?tp=1 to the end of a Joomla url, preferably a non SEF url.
You will then be able to see all the published modules on that page.

Here are a few examples.

You see how that last links layout looks all fancy? Thats because that site is powered by Morph. In Morph you can actually bring up a toolbar on your website frontend and easily enable or disable stuff like module positions or turn on or off the sites javascript. Pretty cool stuff.
Want to disable this functionality for some reason? Check out this post.