5 Joomla tips and tricks you need to know

Joomla is the second most popular CMS which helps you create a website quickly and easily if even you dont have much knowledge in coding. But there are 6 important tips and tricks you must know to help you manage your site easier.

1. THE EASIEST WAY TO RE-INSTALL YOUR JOOMLA

After succesful installation, Joomla asks you to delete the installation folder. You can click to delete installation folder. But in some cases, you need to install your site again especially for testing and development purpose, thus, to save time you just need go to root folder and rename installation folder . You should change the name to something similar like "installation__ ..." . So any time you like to reinstall you joomla, just return its name back into installation.

2. RECOVER OR RESET ADMIN PASSWORD

There are many ways that help you retrieve admin password for your Joomla. This tip is one of those, following these steps you can create a new super user:

• a. Navigate to phpMyAdmin and select the database for the Joomla site in the left-hand drop-down list box. This will show the database tables on the left side of the screen.
• b. Press the "SQL" button in the toolbar to run an SQL query on the selected database. This will display a field called "Run SQL query/queries on database ".
• c. Delete any text in this field and copy and paste the following query below and press the Go button to execute the query and add the new Administrator user to the table.
• d. Use the SQL query below to add another administrator account.

INSERT INTO `jos31_users`
   (`name`, `username`, `password`, `params`)
VALUES ('Administrator2', 'admin2',
    'd2064d358136996bd22421584a7cb33e:trd7TvKHx6dMeoMmBVxYmg0vuXEA4199', '');
INSERT INTO `jos31_user_usergroup_map` (`user_id`,`group_id`)
VALUES (LAST_INSERT_ID(),'8');

Make sure you match your db table prefix! The above code uses jos31_ as the table name prefix which is only an example table prefix. The prefix when you first installed Joomla is RANDOM or what you set it specifically too. You will need to change all occurrences of jos31_(your install set prefix) found in the code above to the prefix your installation is using.

3. FINDING MODULE POSITIONS ON ANY GIVEN PAGE

To get a visual indication of all module positions used on a page you can follow this procedure:

• In the administrative backend go to Extensions->Template Manager. Click on Options and set Preview Module Positions to enabled navigate to the website page you wish to see the module positions for in your web browser.
• Click into the URL field in your browser.
• Look for any "parameters" at the end of the URL. These are separated from the main part of the URL by a question mark. For example, in the URL http://mydomain.com/index.php?id=17, the "id=17" is a parameter.
• If there are no parameters, append "?tp=1" to the URL and press RETURN. For example, http://mydomain.com/index.php?tp=1.
• If there are already parameters in the URL, append "&tp=1" to the URL and press RETURN. For example, http://mydomain.com/index.php?id=17&tp=1.
• The module positions will be outlined in red.

4. LINKING TO AN ARTICLE FROM A MODULE

The example above assumes that you have control over the URL used for the link. However, in some cases, the link is created automatically for you and therefore you don't have the option of manually changing the Itemid of the URL. Examples of this include the Latest News and Most Popular modules, both of which give you links to articles automatically. In this situation, you can still control which modules display when you link to an article. Here are three possible approaches.
a. The simplest trick is to assign modules to All menu items. That way they show up no matter what. But you have to be OK with having the modules on every page.
b. Another possibility is to use a hidden menu item with a Section or Category layout. You can do this on a "hidden" menu and not create a menu module for this "hidden" menu. If you don't have an article layout for the article being linked to, Joomla will try to find a "similar" menu item and use the modules for that item. This also works for category layouts. There is a hierarchy for this, as follows:

• Article Layout
• Category Blog Layout
• Category List Layout

c. Note that, if you have the Breadcrumbs module enabled, these hidden menu items will show in the breadcrumbs. This means that a user will be able to navigate to the hidden menu item (for example, the section list layout) from the link in the breadcrumbs.

 d. The sure way to fix this (but also the most work) is to create a separate menu item for each article. This is the most work, but it allows you to completely control the modules displayed for each article.

5. UNINSTALLING AN EXTENSION

If you wish to uninstall an extension on your Joomla site, then follow these simple steps:

• a. Select "Extensions" and then "Extension Manager" from the dropdown menu
• b. Select "Manage" on the left menu
• c. Select the type of extension you wish to uninstall. You will have the choice between Components, Files, Modules, Plugins, Languages and Templates.
• d. Find the extension you wish to uninstall and check the checkbox to the left of the extension title.
• e. Press "Uninstall" on below the title "Extension Manager: Manage".