Remove the “Powered by Joomla” message on your site

Easily one of the most asked questions in Joomla existence. This is probably one of the easiest ones to change as well.

While it is best to leave this message on your site as it helps spread the Joomla love, sometimes your clients do not want to partake in the love fest.

In Joomla 1.5.xx if you want to remove the footer, go to Extensions > Module Manager and unpublish the footer module. If you want to change the text, you need to get out your FTP client and do some changes.
Go to the language directory, go to the folder of the language you want to change, (in our case English), then find the mod_footer.ini. Search for “powered by” and change the text to whatever you want your text in the footer to be.

In some cases the template you are using might have it hard-coded in, or done differently. In this circumstance you should ask the developer of the template you are using.

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Using and hiding phpinfo (with or without Joomla)

phpinfo is a valuable command that can allow you to find errors and learn more about your server. Don’t share it with everybody on the internet.

So last month you wanted to install this fancy new java-flippy-moo-fools-slider-transparency-bookmarklet-tab thingy on your website.  You installed it and it didn’t work as expected, so you asked the bookmarklet-flippy-moo developer what to do.  He asked you if you were using php4 or php5, and if you had GD libraries installed. You said:  “I dunno, what’s php?” read more…

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Back to the basics

New Joomla users are popping up left and right and thats great for the community.

We are seeing a surge of new users to the Joomla community. This is great news and encouraging for Joomla as a whole. We have loved and used Joomla for years, and anytime somebody else discovers the ease of use and flexibility that Joomla offers we get excited.
We have compiled a short list of helpful resources for new Joomla users. Check out some of the things we feel are useful. read more…

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Work on your new site, without Google snooping around and indexing it.

As many times as I tell people to not develop on a live site for numerious reasons, it is still commonplace.  I admit, I do it sometimes as well. Let’s block Google with robots.txt

The problem is Google and search engines will be actively indexing your new site and invariably you will be stuck with crappy search results for a period of time after you finish your site.  Read more to find out how to fix this embarrassing error. read more…

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Change the “site offline” page in Joomla

Sometimes you may have to take your site offline, or during development you wish to keep the doors shut.

That default Joomla page that proclaims your site is closed is pretty drab.  What to do? The easy thing is to simply change the grammar via your Joomla backend. By default it is:
This site is down for maintenance. Please check back again soon.

You could even go so far as to add some basic html to this area, but that still pretty boring, and not very semantic. Why not do something fancier? read more…

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