Compass Designs .net

Yesterday I showed how to Hide Columns When Editing the Front End of Joomla as it often causes overlap issues that make editing difficult. In this post I'll show a quick and easy way to show different content to different users.

Being able to show different content to registered and logged in visitors is a very common request for a Joomla site. By default, you can have Joomla show the "intro" copy to guests and they must to log in to see the rest. But what if you want to show some specific content to guest visitors, and then different content to registered users once they have logged in.

There are a couple of extensions that give this functionality, but as a rule of thumb, I'll always trying and use the core if I can to get what I want. In this case, I figured out a simple method that worked for my needs.

Editing articles from the front end of a Joomla website is one of its most useful features. Sometimes, however, if you have both a left and right column, when you try to edit, the editor screen/panel will overlap the right columns and make it difficult to read.

There is a simple trick to you do to hide columns, by adding a conditional statement to the place in the template index.php where the right column occurs.

Any web page, including one generated by Joomla can have "meta tags" or "elements" in the header information. The one's that get the most focus are the Title tag, the Description tag and the Keyword tag. This is mainly because it's thought that these have the most influence on Search Engine Ranking (which is not entirely true).

There are other tags/elements such as robots or language that provoke less discussion that the title, description or keyword, but are still important.

Lets take each Tag in turn and see how they are used in Joomla.

Joomla security - one of the most frequent topics of conversation among Joomie's (usability is a close second) - is a complex area and the technicalities of it quickly get ahead of most Joomla users. Often, it's a conversation about the reputation Joomla has about security that starts "Is Joomla secure?" People are often concerned about the seeming high number of hacked Joomla sites, and people defending Joomla pointing at the need to update 3rd party extensions or use good hosts.

There are many specific things you can do to make your site secure. They range from the obvious to making sure folder permissions are correct on the server, to esoteric like changing the jos_ MySQL table prefix that Joomla uses. For 99% of sites, security boils down to:

1. Use a good host, that means paying more than $10 a month.

2. Backup lots. Be like Nike... Just DO it

3. Patch often. Joomla and all your extensions.

Want to know how to do something in Joomla?

This summer I am starting a new project - a "Tutorial Request" program. Each week I'll be tackling an issue that trips Joomla users up and writing a detailed tutorial how to solve it.