Scripts Resource Intensity

Nowadays having a personal website is as common as having a cell phone. Some people use cell phones for just giving and receiving calls and messages and some cannot simply imagine their mobile telephony device without a camera, an MP3-player and so on. It really is likewise about the websites: some website owners use their hosting accounts to bring up pages on the web and use email at their own domain. The others want their websites to be an ultimate public project, which would support many options starting from integration with social networks and ending with, but not limited to provision of downloadable content.

The way the sites are built is a question of demand, of course. But this question raises another one in turn – a question of approach. Many website owners start with shared hosting but then face with the problem of resource overuse, as their projects keep developing. And that’s where the question of approach becomes essential – those who take such issues seriously usually decide to upgrade in order to avoid temporary suspension due to excessive resource usage.

Of course, the website owner may not always realize the influence of his/her particular account on the entire server. On the other hand, server administrators are always glad to assist with the resolution of the problem. Those suspensions are mostly a preventive measure, which doesn’t let the entire server go down. For example, our team is always open for a dialogue and we co-operate with our Customers to find out the way to get the issue resolved. However, if it is definitely not about some particular script or module which is enough to be disabled to let the account keep working on the shared server – an upgrade is the next step.

VPS as a Hosting Ground for Resource Intensive Websites

Several years earlier the word “upgrade” would definitely mean a setup of a dedicated server, which would be tens times more expensive, than a shared hosting plan you used to have. Modern technology, however, has introduced a more liberal solution – Virtual Private Server (VPS). Those virtual servers are containers, created by means of virtualization software on physical servers. Current platforms allow a VPS web hosting user to obtain almost the same level of performance as the server-carrier provides, which means that a user can get a dedicated server, though a virtualized one, for a significantly cheaper price.

A virtual server has the following key advantages, which are to be considered during the upgrade:

1. Isolation – none of several virtual servers on the carrier influences each other. No limitations are set.
2. Full root environment – the user is provided with the maximal administration privileges.
3. No hardware dependencies – server does not require file system checks and RAID array rebuilds after reboot.

As you can see, a VPS resolves the main concern of a shared hosting account user – mutual user dependency. The thing is that shared servers have such strict limitations primarily due to the problem of even resource distribution, i.e. those limits create fair equal conditions, which let any user run his/her applications without abusing the other accounts. This equality is also guaranteed on a server software level – all major services, like Apache, MySQL and PHP are configured in a standard way and can be slightly tuned up only on a user level by means of local configuration files (e.g. .htaccess, php.ini, etc.).

VPS web hosting, however, provides each user with isolated environment. This means, that there is no one to share resources with, i.e. there are no limits and that any server software may be tuned up according to the peculiarities of the hosted script/application.

Optimizing your WordPress Blog Performance

There are many scripts which require certain tune up. The more tasks a script is to carry our, the finer the tune up should be. As an example we take WordPress blogging tool, which is known for its resource usage peculiarities and a wide range of available plug-ins.

Surely, WordPress is one of the greatest scripts on the Web. This blog tool lets you create a nice and usable website by means of a user-friendly easy-to-comprehend interface. Its basic configuration is fine to be hosted on a shared hosting server and we offer a special plan Blog Hosting with WordPress preinstalled to those, who would like to start their own blog. Still, this platform is a rather resource intensive one, so depending on your goal and means of project realization, you may need to have your account upgraded.

Of course, it is essential to find out, what exactly makes WP resource intensive. Primarily it is the way, it works with the databases. Below you can find an example of a MySQL request created by one user, who is viewing one WordPress page:

3 Query       SELECT option_name, option_value FROM wp_options WHERE autoload = ‘yes’
3 Query       SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘rewrite_rules’ LIMIT 1
3 Query       SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS  wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts  WHERE 1=1  AND wp_posts.post_type = ‘post’ AND (wp_posts.post_status = ‘publish’)  ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 0, 10
3 Query       SELECT FOUND_ROWS()
3 Query       SELECT t.*, tt.*, tr.object_id FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.term_taxonomy_id = tt.term_taxonomy_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN (‘category’, ‘post_tag’) AND tr.object_id IN (10) ORDER BY t.name ASC
3 Query       SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN (10)
3 Query       SELECT * FROM wp_posts  WHERE (post_type = ‘page’ AND post_status = ‘publish’)     ORDER BY menu_order ASC
3 Query       SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘page_for_posts’ LIMIT 1
3 Query       SELECT * FROM wp_users WHERE ID = 1 LIMIT 1
3 Query       SELECT meta_key, meta_value FROM wp_usermeta WHERE user_id = 1
3 Query       SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 10 AND comment_approved = ’1′ ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC
3 Query       SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 10 AND comment_approved = ’1′ ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC
3 Query       SELECT * FROM wp_posts  WHERE (post_type = ‘page’ AND post_status = ‘publish’)     ORDER BY menu_order, post_title ASC
3 Query       SELECT t.*, tt.* FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON t.term_id = tt.term_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN (‘category’)  ORDER BY t.name ASC
3 Query       SELECT wp_comments.* FROM wp_comments JOIN wp_posts ON wp_posts.ID = wp_comments.comment_post_ID WHERE comment_approved = ’1′ AND post_status = ‘publish’ ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 15
3 Query       SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 12 AND comment_parent = 0 AND comment_approved = ’1′ AND comment_date_gmt < ’2010-02-22 16:54:11′
3 Query       SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 12 AND comment_parent = 0 AND comment_approved = ’1′ AND comment_date_gmt < ’2010-02-22 14:25:24′
3 Query       SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 12 AND comment_parent = 0 AND comment_approved = ’1′ AND comment_date_gmt < ’2010-02-08 18:51:45′
3 Query       SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 12 AND comment_parent = 0 AND comment_approved = ’1′ AND comment_date_gmt < ’2010-01-29 02:58:05′
3 Query       SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = 12 AND comment_parent = 0 AND comment_approved = ’1′ AND comment_date_gmt < ’2010-01-29 00:23:01′
3 Query       SELECT YEAR(min(post_date_gmt)) AS firstyear, YEAR(max(post_date_gmt)) AS lastyear FROM wp_posts WHERE post_date_gmt > 1970
3 Quit

MySQL queries of the *SELECT type are one of the most abusive as they go over all the databases to find the needed value. This results into aggressive disk subsystem and CPU usage. By the way, the log above was for a simple WordPress page, which had no add-ons or plug-ins, so you can imagine, what it is going to be, if WordPress is run full-throttle.

It is absolutely logical to search a way for optimization of such queries, as far as the fewer queries are produced, the more free CPU time is left for other server services. That’s what caching is used for. All you need is to edit your wp-config.php file by adding the following two lines there:

// Enable the WordPress Object Cache:
define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);

But this is minor SQL optimization. Another reason for WordPress issues is webserver overload, caused by simultaneous http requests. WP does not offer any other built-in caching tools and the one –WP Super Cache, which is available as a plug-in – is rather resource intensive, so it is allowed for use on VPS and dedicated servers only (AUP, p. 10.1). WP Super Cache is a static caching plug-in, which generates html files that are served directly by Apache webserver without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. This plug-in is one of the means to increase your WordPress blog performance significantly.

Still, this is not all what you can do for webserver optimization. Now you should edit your Apache configuration file (full path: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf) as follows:

Note: Before you proceed with file editing, make sure you backed-up your configuration file.

# Timeout and Keepalive
Timeout 30
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 6

#Maximum Client Connections
&lt;IfModule prefork.c&gt;
StartServers       8
MinSpareServers    5
MaxSpareServers   20
ServerLimit      512
MaxClients       512
MaxRequestsPerChild  4000
&lt;/IfModule&gt;

Note: MaxRequestsPerChild parameter is a tricky one, so 4000 is not the fixed value, you may try a range from 1000 to 4000 to see, which configuration is better and leave it.
Note: #Maximum Client Connections may be not available in the configuration file, if “prefork” Apache module is not configured (if not, there’s a “worker mpm” module installed instead).

Once the file is edited, restart Apache with the following command: /etc/init.d/httpd restart.
Additionally you may consult more online guides on disabling those Apache modules, you are not using.
Such modules take CPU time and RAM to get loaded and then simply do nothing, while you can comment them out in the configuration file.

Another service to edit is PHP. Find a global php.ini file (should be located there: /usr/local/lib/php.ini) and copy it to the root folder of your WordPress. Open it for editing to set the following parameters:

;*Turn off for performance
register_globals = Off
register_long_arrays = Off
register_argc_argv = Off
magic_quotes_gpc = Off
magic_quotes_runtime = Off
magic_quotes_sybase = Off
;*Allow PHP to accept large data
post_max_size = 8M
file_uploads = On
upload_max_filesize = 8M

Conclusion

We really hope you find these tips useful. Those are not the only ones, of course, so you can find many other ways of WordPress optimization, which may come in handy. It is still advisable to consult your technical support team before making any changes to the essential services on your server and of course, do not forget to backup your initial configuration files.

Knowing and understanding the way people find, browse and leave your website is important for marketing purposes. This kind of data is generally called web tracking statistics. In order to obtain this information you will need a website analysis software. Today, numerous products exist for the purpose of tracking web visitors, as well as collecting reports about how they navigate around your web resources. The simplified concept of such programs is to get information about a user visiting a site (e.g. type of browser he is using, operating system, language etc.) from a requests made in a browser, combine it with data about the pages he is visiting at the moment, the source he came from and the page he left the site at, store this info and provide means for its convenient analysis. Understanding website statistics allows performing well-grounded changes to the site, plan and estimate efficiency of marketing campaigns and generally understand the behavior of visitors.

Probably, the best available service for collecting advanced web metrics is Google Analytics. It has a huge list of features and capabilities. The best part about it is that it is totally free to use. Moreover, it is hosted on the Google servers, so it causes no load to your host. Google Analytics setup is relatively simple, which makes it not only the best software with vast capabilities, but also a very popular and widely used one. In this guide you’ll find a step-by-step instruction on how to set it up and start getting quality information about your visitors as soon as possible.

As most Google products, web metrics with Google Analytics starts at Gmail.com. Even if you already have a Gmail account, it is still a good idea to create a separate one for setting up Google Analytics. Using a separate account will let you keep your personal and business things separate to avoid mixing them up. Once you have the Gmail account, sign into it and head to http://google.com/analytics. You will see the page like the one below:

Here you should simply click the “Sign Up” button. As soon as this is done, you will be taken to the page where you’ll need to fill in the information about your website and region. It is convenient to name analytics accounts with your domain name, this way it will be easier to navigate around if you plan to have multiple accounts. After you are done, click the “Continue” button.

The next page will require your personal and regional information. After you are done filling this in once again click “Continue”:

The page following the one with the personal information is the license agreement. Here you should tick the box “Yes, I agree to the above terms and conditions” after you read the agreement and click “Create New Account”:

Once the account is created, you will be taken to the Tracking Instructions page. I recommend going straight to the advanced tab. Here you can choose what kind of website you want to track: whether your site is located on a single domain, on domain with multiple subdomains, on multiple top-level domains, or if this is a site aimed at mobile users. You can leave the Adwords settings intact for now, because they can be edited at anytime later and are not crucial for functioning of Analytics. If your website is dynamically driven, then you should tick the “I want to track dynamic content” (accordingly, if it is written in PHP then you should tick the appropriate box). Once you tick these boxes, you will see additional instructions above the box with tracking code. In order for your site to be tracked you need to copy this code and paste it onto the pages you want to track immediately before the body tag. Use the following page skeleton to locate where to paste the code:

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<TITLE> Page Title Here </TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY>

Content of Your Site Here

***Google Analytics code goes HERE***

</BODY>

</HTML>.

In case you have a dynamic site, follow the instructions given above the mentioned box with the code (see the screenshot below). Once you select everything that is appropriate for your site and copy the code, click “Save and finish”.

Congratulations! Google Analytics account set up is finished. Now you need to paste the tracking code onto every web page you want tracked (or paste it onto the template in case the site is dynamically driven). Your newly created account will look something like the screenshot below. It will take approximately 24 hours after you paste the code for the first data about your visitors to appear here.

In about a month you will have first sufficient information to draw conclusions about your visitors and site. Your account report will look then somewhat similar to the following screenshot:

As you can see, setting up Google Analytics is quite easy – no complex coding or manipulations. Remember that the sooner you set it up the sooner you will be able to use it. Here are some useful pages on further configuration and usage of your Google Analytics account and tracking:

• http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide.cs&guide=19779 – Getting started guide. Will be useful to those trying Google Analytics for the first time.
• http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=11027 – More detailed articles about how to use Google Analytics reporting.
• http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55528 – Information regarding setting up e-commerce in Google Analytics for online sales.

Many of web hosting newbies bring up a question about differences between a reseller hosting and a VPS and wondering which one is best for their project needs. Unfortunately, it is not that simple to answer this question. There is a number of touches that require a closer investigation on the subject to give a decent answer. First of all, a lot depends on the initial aim, i.e. whether the account will be used to resell hosting, utilized directly to host own content, used as a test ground for products in development or all at once. Moreover, Skills possessed by an owner of an account matter a lot as well as the price differences. Let’s take a closer look at both hosting types to draw reasonable conclusions…

Shared Reseller Hosting Plans

Reseller hosting is a variation of a shared hosting, which in turn is a kind of a budget solution for those who are just starting off or have moderate needs. The idea behind shared hosting is quite simple – a lot of accounts on one single physical server. It is basically a dedicated server with installed OS and set of software. All of the accounts share resources and are restricted to use them for limited amounts of time. If an account violates the restrictions, it gets frozen or suspended for abuse. Policy violators cause overall slowdown for other users on the server because they use everybody else’s resources. While a dedicated server costs a lot of money, a shared account is very cheap (around $5-10 per month versus $200-700 for a dedicated server).

Installed and configured sets of software are available to everyone on a shared server, and only a small amount of adjustments can be done to this software due to the fact that it is used by all accounts. In most cases specific software sets cannot be installed at all. Administration privileges are limited to a simple user. Therefore, all important configurations are done by system administrators.

Reseller shared hosting plans have more functionality though and allow creating other hosting accounts. This way an owner of a reseller plan becomes a user with advanced privileges as compared to regular resold account users on the server. He can create, modify and delete hosting accounts according to the limits of the plans. In everything else he is pretty mush no different form a regular user.

Virtual Private Servers

Virtual Private Server is a special kind of hosting account located on a real carrier dedicated server. These virtual containers are created with the help of virtualization platforms. Latest advances in virtualization technologies provide VPSs with performance levels almost identical to the ones of its carriers. That means that now it is possible to have a lighter “virtual” dedicated server at prices, which are far cheaper than a physical one would actually be. As a matter of fact, a single real machine can now be in a way separated into several parts while every part will still posses features of the original system. The main distinction of a VPS is that it is fully isolated from other similar units on the same carrier dedicated server. Root access is no longer a restriction on VPS. This opens up full customization and administration capabilities. Many software sets and bundles can be installed and configured to your preference on a VPS.

As you can see, resource limitations that exist on shared accounts are no longer of any importance for VPS owner. He himself creates limitations and policies and decides the way all resources are used. However, it is important to remember that amount of available resources is limited. As the entire VPS runs on a set of several software products, including an OS, it is crucial not to deplete the resources. It is also important to keep in mind that a VPS is normally not as powerful as a server which hosts shared plans. That means that part of the VPS resources is spent on a general system functioning upkeep. Therefore, resource depletion will cause downtime of an entire VPS. Such downtime will include a need to reboot the container the hard way (i.e. by power reset). However, unlike a real server, when a VPS is incorrectly rebooted during hanging, there is no need for file system check or RAID rebuild, because these things are controlled on the side of the carrier server.

Bottom line

Hopefully, the information given above will help beginners better understand the differences between a VPS and Reseller hosting. VPSs are more powerful, provide more freedom, require more administration and cost a lot more than reseller accounts. On the other hand, reseller plans are relatively cheap, are fully managed by hosting company and are at the same time limited in features. Resource problems caused by a single account immediately may lead to service problems for an entire VPS. On the contrary, resold account taking up too much resources will lead to suspension of itself only, keeping all other accounts created by reseller online. Of course, there are more peculiarities in differences between the two, but it is quite obvious that a VPS is a choice for an experienced user with some skills of administration. Reseller hosting, on the other hand, is the best option for beginners. At the end of the day you can start with a reseller and then upgrade to a VPS if you feel need to.

Take a few seconds and check out our extremely cheap prices for shared, VPS and dedicated server plans at Sitevalley.com

Welcome back to Sitevalley blog. In the previous post we have covered the basics of creating the content for your site when using ‘Joomla’ as Content Management Systems. Joomla can be easily installed using the ‘Installtron’ in your DirectAdmin control panel. The ‘Joomla’ installation is available on ‘All-inclusive’ Plan.

This is the second part of the tutorial dedicated to the creation of the simplest website. Here we will cover the creation of menus and layout of your website.

So far we’ve been pursuing the following goals:

• Main topic of the site should be information about computers;
• There should be 4 sections dedicated to history of computing, hardware, programming languages and computer networking.
• There should also be a section for the owner of the site that will be dedicated to his personal news and the like.
• The front page should be dedicated to special stuff.
• The sections for links, search page and news feeds dedicated to computers should be included. Also news feed should be available on the front page.

At this point you should have performed all actions described in the first part of the tutorial. Therefore you now have all the content related data in your Joomla.

Menus and Home Page

If we go to the front page of your site we will find only the articles which we have configured to be shown on the main page. But this doesn’t mean that other articles were not created. They are simply not shown on the front page. If we included everything we had created to the front page then the site would have been piled up and would take longer to load. What we will do instead is we will create menus to help the visitors access the parts of the site they are interested in. We will keep the main area of the front page for news and latest articles.

Menus in Joomla are based on three types of information:

• components;
• modules;
• plugins.

We will start with taking a look at how the articles on the front page of our website are placed. Login into your administrating section of Joomla (default link is http://yourdomain/administrator if you Installed Joomla into the public_html folder of your main domain).

Go to the ‘Menus’ menu and select ‘Main Menu’:

As you see the ‘Home’ is already added as ‘Main Menu’ item. The item ‘Home’ contains all the articles published on the front page. Tick the ‘Home’ item and then click ‘Edit’ button:

Take a look at the ‘Parameters Basic’ area:

Here we have the following options:

• ‘# Leading’ lets you configure how many articles are displayed on the front page with a ‘read more’  link. There (the) articles take up all the width of the news box.
• ‘# Intro’ lets you configure (set? Assign?)the number of articles displayed on the front page with a ‘read more’. These articles take up only the width of one column.
• ‘Columns’ lets you set the number of columns in which articles are displayed.
• ‘# Links’ lets you set the number of articles displayed only as links.

You can play with these parameters to reach the best appearance of articles on you front page. When done click ‘Save’.

Categories in Main Menu

The second thing we’ll do is adding our Categories to the Main Menu of your website. Right now you should be in ‘Menu Item Manager’ of the ‘Main Menu’ (Menu->Main Menu). Click ‘New’ to add new item to ‘Main Menu’. Choose ‘Category Blog Layout’ as a type of item.  This will display the article category in a blog layout:

Currently we have 5 categories with articles inside of them: Introduction, Peripheral, Computer busses, Assembly languages and High-level languages. Let’s start with Introduction. Type the Title of the item; choose the appropriate category from the list in the ‘Parameters Basic’ menu as show in the picture below:

Then go to the ‘Parameters System’ and type in the title of the page (the one that will be displayed when the Category link is clicked in the Main Menu:

Click ‘Save’. Perform these actions for all 5 categories. After you are done with all 5 category items go to your domain in a browser, you should see something similar to:

As you can see we have more items in the ‘Main Menu’ of our front page now.

Contacts

Well done so far! The site begins to show up better and better with every step you take. Now we will add the contacts item. Go to ‘Menu’ and choose the ‘Main Menu’ again. As before click ‘New’, but this time select the ‘Contact Category Layout’ as type for the item:

We will call it simply the “Contact us”. Select the ‘Staff’ for a category from the drop down list and remember to specify the title of the page in ‘Parameters System’ menu (the procedure is the same as with the categories items). When done click ‘Save’ and check how the ‘Main Menu’ has changed again on your front page.

Web links, News feeds and Search

Well guess what? All other menus are added in the same very manner. Pretty easy, what do you think? For ‘Web Links’ use the ‘Web links-> Category-> Category List Layout’ item type, for ‘News Feeds’ item use ‘News Feeds-> Category-> Category Layout’ item type and finally for ‘Search’ item use the ‘Search’ item type. Actually this is the part when Joomla becomes extremely enjoyable. Right now we have the following on our front page:

By the way don’t forget to click each link and check if it actually displays the items we put on our website in the previous post.

Modules

We have come to a point when our website looks much better, contains everything we have placed there and – which is most important – the menus let visitors to easily navigate to all areas of the site.

What we will do now is make the website look more attractive. For this we will use the modules. So what is the module in Joomla?

Module is a special part of the website that is situated in specially prepared box on the pages you choose around the main content. These boxes take such positions as ‘top’, ‘right’, ‘header’, ‘footer’ and so on. Actually we already have one module on our website and it is the menu we have been adding items to. For this tutorial we will use three more modules:

• syndicate (will let us use the RSS feeding of our own website and place a special button for this);
• login (will let our friends managing the site login to the back-end panel);
• breadcrumbs (will make navigating around the website even more pleasant and simple).

Syndicate

Let’s begin with the RSS feeds. Go to the ‘Extensions’ menu and select the ‘Module Manager’ from it:

As you see we have only one item there and this item is the ‘Main Menu’. Click ‘New’ to add a new item. Choose the ‘Syndicate’ module and click ‘Next’.

Choose the title for your Syndicate Module (we will name it RSS). Next specify its position. The default theme of the Joomla has a special area predefined for the syndicate module. This section is called simply ‘Syndicate’. In the bottom left part of the screen you can see the ‘Menu Assignment’ menu, this one let’s you chosee on which page of the website the RSS feeds button will be displayed. When press ‘Save’:

Now go to your front page (your domain name in a browser) and look at the lower left part of your website – you will find the RSS feeds button there.

Login

Well done so far! Now we will add the second module. This one will be the login box to let your friends and helpers (remember Bill and Tom from the previous post?) to login into the administration and management areas of your simplest website on Sitevalley.com.

Right now you should be in your ‘Module Manager’ (if you are not go to ‘Extensions’ -> ‘Module Manager’). Click ‘New’ once again. Choose the ‘Login’ module from the list, then press ‘Next’:

The only thing we would actually want to change when creating this module is the title of the module, let’s call it ‘Login’. The best idea is to leave the login box available on all pages so do not make any changes in the ‘Menu Assignment’ panel. Click ‘Save’ and check what has changed on your site by opening it in a browser:

Breadcrumbs

The last but not least module we will use is called ‘Breadcrumbs’. It is an amazing thing that helps to navigate through your site fast and easy. What it basically does is creates your footprints in a form of links so that instead of clicking back in your browser you can also just click a link and get back to any specific place you have just visited.

Get back to the Module Manager. Click ‘New’. Select the ‘Breadcrumbs’ module and click ‘Next’:

Give the title ‘Breadcrumbs’ to this module. It is a good idea to disable the ‘Show title’ function as it will be of no use. And in the position field chose the ‘breadcrumb’.

Click ‘Save’. To actually see how the breadcrumbs work you need to go to your front page, then click on any item in the ‘Main Menu’, for example ‘Computer Busses’, and then click on ‘Read more’ on any of your articles. Look at what you should get:

Playing with layout

So far we have added everything we initially wanted to have on our simplest website. But maybe the way the site looks right now doesn’t suite you personal preference. But don’t get sad! The designers of the default template have prepared a few various positions you can place your modules in. To understand what is meant by various positions think of the ‘Position’ field we used when we were adding new modules to our front page. So far we used the ‘syndicate’ position for the ‘Syndicate’ module, ‘left’ position for the ‘Login’ module and ‘breadcrumb’ position for the ‘Breadcrumbs’ module. Using the picture below try adjusting the content to your own visual preference:

More information regarding the default template and templates in general you will find (can be found) at http://forum.joomla.org/viewforum.php?f=466.

You own Logo

So far we are done with both the content and the layout for the simplest design. The last thing that will make you site look like you personal achievement and creation is your very own Logo. The logo I am talking about is:

We are using the default template and the template defines the logo. Therefore go to the folder where the Joomla was installed. Let’s assume you installed Joomla for domain yourdomain.com into the root of the domain. Then the path to the logo image would be:

/domains/yourdomain.com/public_html/templates/rhuk_milkyway/images/mw_joomla_logo.png

So what we want to do is:

1)     Create your own Logo with the same dimensions as the logo in the mw_joomla_logo.png file (has).

• Note that using a transparent background makes the logo look more professional =)

2)     Rename the original Joomla logo in /…/images/ folder from mw_joomla_logo.png to mw_joomla_logo_bp.png for example. This step is not necessary but it lets you save a copy of the original file just for reference in case you need it.

3)     Upload your own logo, having saved it as mw_joomla_logo.png beforehand.

Open the front page and enjoy. You should get something similar to the following:

Summary

In two parts of this tutorial we have created the simplest functional website using one of the most popular content management systems on the Internet. We covered the basics of adding content, personal information, links and news feeds. We have gone over categorizing added content.

In the second part we have managed to set up the menus to navigate around the website and have learned few basics about the layout of the default Joomla template. Few additional modules were added to enhance the look and feel of the website. In the end of the tutorial we have changed the Logo to our own one.

We at Sitevalley.com hope this tutorial was both interesting and useful for you!

You can find whole lot of other deeper information about using Joomla at http://joomla.org

Enjoy your hosting with Sitevalley and let us know if you would like to see more tutorials similar to this one.

Welcome back to Sitevalley blog. This time we will talk about setting up the simplest possible site using one of the most popular Content Management Systems. The script we are going to use is ‘Joomla’. It can be easily installed using the ‘Installtron’ in your DirectAdmin control panel. The ‘Joomla’ installation is available on ‘All-inclusive’ Plan. All the content data used in this post was taken from Wikipedia.org.

We will pursuit the following goals for the site we will be creating (let’s think of this as of a technical task):

• Main topic of the site is information about computers;
• There should be 4 sections dedicated to history of computing, hardware, programming languages and computer networking.
• There should also be a section for the owner of the site that will be dedicated to his personal news and such.
• The front page will be dedicated for the special stuff.
• Also sections for links, search page and news feeds dedicated to computers will be included. News feed will be also available on the front page.

This tutorial will consist of two posts. The first one (i.e. this one) will show you how to create the content for a site meeting the tasks above very easy and fast. The second post will show how to configure the menus and various modules in order for all of you content to be comfortable accessible from you front page. It will also give description of the basic theme’s layout and several instructions where to place what on your site.

Creating sections

Content is the most important part of any website. So far we are starting with a blank website. Therefore the first thing we will do is add the articles. Sorting of articles is done in two ways:

• Sections
• Categories

Generally sections contain numerous categories and the categories contain numerous articles. Now we will create the sections required by our goals.

The process is as follows:

1. Login into your administrating section of Joomla (default link is http://yourdomain/administrator if you Installed Joomla into the public_html folder of your main domain).
2. Click on the ‘Section Manager’ to manage the sections of your website:
   
3. Click the new button as shown in the picture below:
   
4. Input the title of the section, leave the alias blank, add description if you want to (optional):
   

When done simply click ‘Save’. Add all the sections we will need in a similar way. As a result you should have the following sections: history of computing, hardware, programming languages, computer networking, from owner, links, search and news feeds. You should have something similar to the following picture:

Creating Categories

Now it is time to go ahead and add several categories. Categories are aimed at managing more specific grouping. We will add 3 categories (Introduction, Colossus Mark 1 and Colossus Mark 2) to the ‘History of computing’ section. We will add the ‘About me’ category to the ‘From Owner’ section. The ‘Hardware’ section will be given ‘Peripheral’ and ‘Computer busses’ categories. The ‘Assembly languages’ and ‘High-level languages’ will be the categories of the ‘Programming Languages’ section. So the idea of the categories should be a little clearer now. Let’s take a look at what we have to press to get stuff done:

1. First we go to ‘Content->Category Manager’ to create and manage the categories:
   
2. As in the case with sections we press ‘New’:
   
3. Here we fill in the ‘Title’ field (in this example ‘Introduction’), chose the section (in this example it is the ‘History of computing’) from the drop down menu and add the description:
   
4. Now using the same technique add all other categories we have talked about.

So far your ‘Category Manager’ should look like this:

Articles

The main purpose of sections and categories is to sort the articles in the most convenient way. Therefore we have to create the articles that contain the content itself. Joomla makes creating articles as simple as typing documents in any text editor. Go to ‘Content->Article Manager’ in your Joomla:

This will bring you to the screen of the article manager which lets you see all articles you have on your website and also displays the information about them. As we don’t have any articles yet we need to proceed with creation of our first one. Click on ‘New’ to begin:

At this point we are looking at the article screen. Two things you will most often do from here besides creating the articles itself are:

• You will be adding or changing titles for the articles, and putting the last into sections and categories.
• You will be publishing or un-publishing your articles, you will also be able to configure the option to display the article on the front page of your site.
  

The text editor of the articles lets you do whole bunch of things like changing fonts, styles, alignment, adding lists, links, pictures, special symbols etc. There are also three extremely convenient buttons on the bottom of the editor, they are:

• ‘page break’ – let’s you divide the article into pages;
• ‘read more’ – let’s you divide the article into two sections: summary and full views.
• ‘image’ – let’s you add an image using convenient upload form and Joomla’s media manager.
  

Now let’s create 1 article in the ‘Introduction’ category of the ‘History of computing’ section. We also need to create 2 articles in each of the following categories: ‘Peripheral’, ‘Computer busses’, ‘Assembly languages’, ‘High-level languages’. You can go ahead and create as many as you wish, for our tutorial purpose the mentioned above will be enough, don’t forget to try ‘page break’ and ‘read more’ features. In every category, you have created the articles for, only one article should be published on the front page. When you’re done you should have something similar to:

Users

Some of you may want to let some other people be able to add, edit or delete content from your site. Here is where users come in Joomla. Let’s create a couple of users. Go to ‘Site’ menu and choose ‘Control Panel’. Click on ‘User Manager’:

Once in the User manager click ‘New’ to add a user:

Let’s first create a user with administrative privileges by adding him to a group Administrator. Fill in the appropriate fields as shown in the picture below:

When done simply press ‘Save’. The administrators can introduce changes not only to content but to a whole site. We would also want to create a person who will be capable of adding articles to the categories and this will be a ‘Manager’ group representative. So when creating such user instead of ‘Administrator’ you need to select ‘Manager’ in the ‘Group’ filed.

So as a result of performed operations we have 3 users in total: Administrator, Tom (also an administrator) and Bill (a manager):

Contacts

Now we will be creating the contact page content. So far we have three users so we need to add some contact information about them. Go to the ‘Components’ menu, select ‘Contacts’ and then ‘Categories’:

Once in the ‘Category Manager’ of ‘Contact Details’ press ‘New’ in the top right part of the screen (this button is located in the same place as in all previous cases). Let’s create a category called ‘Staff’:

After you type the title of the category ‘Staff’ and press ‘Save’ you need to select the ‘Contacts’ tab:

Here we will add the contacts themselves and then place them into the ‘Staff’ category. As usual press ‘New’ in the top right part of the screen. Let’s start with the webmaster of the site (who is actually you). In case of this example the webmaster is the same as the ‘Administrator’ user, so we need to remember this when creating this contact. The other thing we need to keep in mind is the fact that we have already created the category for our contacts, so make sure you add every contact to the category ‘Staff’ as in the picture below:

Input all important contact information available and decide which info should be available to the public:

When you’re done simply press ‘Save’ as usual. You can add as many contacts as you need, but for our tutorial 3 contacts corresponding to the users we have is enough. When finished you should get something similar to this:

Weblinks

As the World Wide Web is the greatest net of all known to mankind the main brick of it are the weblinks that actually bond resources together. So you would definitely want to have a ‘Weblinks’ section to link to other websites with related resources.

Go to the ‘Components’ menu, there select ‘Web Links’ and then ‘Categories’.

In the just opened window press ‘New’ in the top right region of the screen.

Create a category for ‘Computer Information’, then press ‘Save’. Now go to the Links tab:

Here once again click the ’New’ button. Let’s add one link just to see what it looks like. Type ‘The Computer Information Center’ in the ‘Name’ field (this is the name of the web link). In the ‘Category’ field choose the ‘Computer Information’ we have just created. In the ‘URL’ input the link ‘http://www.compinfo-center.com/’ (this is a real link actually). You can add some information to the ‘Description’ section to make it easier for your visitors to find the links they actually need. Now press ‘Save’.

News Feeds

The last piece of information we need to add to our content is News Feeds. New feeds are pretty useful as they keep trace of all the latest news and automatically display their titles on your website. To use the news feeds we would need to let the Joomla know where to take the news from. There are plenty of news feeds available on the net. In this example we will use the following ones:

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/techtarget/wordoftheday
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/OurLatestDiscovery

These are just examples that suite our topic ‘Computers’. You will easily find the feeds for your own topic in the Internet. Now go to ‘Components’ menu, select ‘News Feeds’ and then ‘Categories’:

Here press ‘New’ (by now you already know where to find that button for sureJ). Create the category named ‘Computer Information’. Press ‘Save’.

Now go to the ‘Feeds’ tab and click ‘New’:

Fill in the ‘Name’, ‘Category’ and ‘Link’ fields as shown in the picture below (you can use any RSS feed, in this example we used http://feeds.feedburner.com/OurLatestDiscovery:

When done press ‘Save’. So far your front page should look like this:

Summary of part 1

So far in this part of the Tutorial we have covered the creation of content for your website. We have created several Categories and Sections and then added articles to them. We have also introduced two additional users (Tom and Bill). We have added the contact information to every person who will take part in management of the site.

To interconnect with other resources on the Internet we have added content for the Web Links section and also added two resources to get the news feeds from. So far all of the above is the content of your website.

But the content itself is not too useful if not represented in an appropriate way. Right now most of the content you have created is not available from your front page.

The second part of this tutorial will cover actions required to present the content on your site using Menus . We will also see how to place the various menus exactly where you want them to be placed (simply put – the layout of your website). The last but not least we will do is change the Joomla logo to your own.