Welcome to 3rd Rock IT. You will find tutorials on almost all kinds of software at this site. Currently we are adding tutorials for open source software packages but we will start adding classes for commonly used software very shortly. Please browse through the site to find what you need. Please contact us for any information or for tutorial requests.
I have seen a lot of people ask for instructions on how to setup and configure sh404SEF for their Joomla website. So here it is, my step by step guide to configure Joomla for SEO.
The article assumes that you already have a Joomla website setup and are familiar with how to install and configure extensions in Joomla.
sh404SEF is a must have component for any Joomla site, it is essential to create Search Engine Friendly urls which are very important for anyone wanting to get into Google,Yahoo or any of the other similar search engines.
Installation
Installation of this component is pretty straight forward, go to the install/uninstall page and install the sh404SEF package.
Joomla native SEO Configuration
Before configuring sh404SEF, the native SEO settings of Joomla need to be turned on. You can do this in the Global Configurations page on the top right corner.
If you are using a .htaccess file, you can turn on the mod-rewrite option as well. The easiest way to use the .htaccess file is to rename the htaccess.txt file that is provided with the default Joomla installation.
Once you have the SEO settings turned on you can test your urls and see if they look better. Although the SEO feature in Joomla makes the urls pretty, it still lacks a long ways as to how the urls should look like for search engines to pick them up.
A favicon is the little icon like image that appears to the left side of the url when you go a website. Most websites now have great looking favicons. Favicons are also added to the toolbar when you bookmark sites.
How to add it to your website?
There are a lot of sites out there that create favicons for you for free. Heres the one I like
Open office is an open source office software suite word processing, spreadsheets, presentations etc. It is intended to be an open source substitute to Microsoft Office.
Although it is not as sophisticated a MS Office, it has almost all the features of any other software package and it is very easy to use. And did I mention its free!!!
Since its creation in 2000, phpBB has become the most widely used open source forum solution around the world. It has a very easy to use framewok similar to the more advanced open source CMS systems available today.
The installation is a breeze and takes only a few minutes to setup. It has a front end view which is the forum view and an admin console where you can administer the board settings and styles.
I will take you through a step by step process of creating a website using the open source content management system, Joomla. A Content Management System (CMS) is basically a software package which gives you a way separating the content from the view giving you more flexibility and ease of operation and maintenance. It also provides an easy to use framework to add and publish content to your site. In some ways it is similar to Wordpress but is more advanced and gives a lot more options both for view and content management.
If you need more information on what a CMS is, you check out the Wikipedia here.
Open office is an open source office software suite word processing, spreadsheets, presentations etc. It is intended to be an open source substitute to Microsoft Office.