How to fix fatal errors related to JSON decoding when updating you Joomla core version.
Continue reading "Fixing JSON Data Errors After Updating to Joomla 3.6.3"
Tag: Joomla3
How to Find the Full Joomla Version in the Site Files
Sometimes, for whatever reason, I need to find out the exact version of Joomla a site is running without being able to access the administration area.
Here’s where to find the version number in the file system.
Continue reading “How to Find the Full Joomla Version in the Site Files”
Adding a Compile LESS Button to a Joomla 3.2 Template
There was no big announcement, but you may have noticed that the Joomla 3.2.2 templates area now has a compile LESS button when viewing a less file.
I had a look at how to bring this into a custom template without having to use a plugin, giving you the possibility to compile a templates less files from within the template style administration area.
Continue reading “Adding a Compile LESS Button to a Joomla 3.2 Template”
How to Remove Joomla’s Canonical Tag Without Hacking the Core
For reasons detailed in an earlier post about why Joomla canonical urls are not implemented correctly it may be that you want to remove them. That’s pretty easy by hacking the core, but safer to unset the tag in your template so the changes don’t get wiped out on an upgrade.
Continue reading “How to Remove Joomla’s Canonical Tag Without Hacking the Core”
The Problem With Joomla’s Canonical URL Links
Joomla 3 introduced a new feature of canonical url links. There is no way to turn it off in settings, which wouldn’t be a problem if it worked correctly, but unfortunately it doesn’t. It has been plagued by problems since it was introduced and has led to some sites taking a massive hit on visitor numbers after upgrading to J3.
Continue reading “The Problem With Joomla’s Canonical URL Links”
The Easiest way to add Google Authorship to Joomla Articles
I wrote about this a while ago in my Joomla microdata article. It has struck me since that it was complete overkill to add authorship in that way and can be done without any code changes at all, just using the standard contacts component.
The reasoning is, that you don’t have to link each article on the site to the authors Google+ page. If there is an author page on the site, and each page is linked to the author page then you only need to add the link to the Google+ profile on that author page.
Continue reading “The Easiest way to add Google Authorship to Joomla Articles”
Adding Microdata to Joomla Articles
Google has been using microdata for quite a while now and adding it to your website can help with clickthrough rates from search engine results.
The most obvious is Google’s own authorship markup (not strictly microdata per se) where linking to your Google+ profile adds your profile image to pages in search results, but there are many other tags which can be added to display extra information next to your page title and description.
In this article I am going to look at adding microdata for article publishing times, images and authors to Joomla 3.
How to get Joomla’s Current Site Language
Sometimes there is a need to get the current content/site language to use in other places. An example being when you want to set social share buttons to display in the same language as the site. Luckily Joomla makes this easy for us.
Continue reading “How to get Joomla’s Current Site Language”
Using JLayout to Override Global Views in Joomla 3
Global layouts were introduced in Joomla 3 so that they are no longer limited to a particular view or extension.
In this example I am going to create a new view for the tags component which will output a plain comma separated list so that I can use it in a facebook opengraph tag.
Continue reading “Using JLayout to Override Global Views in Joomla 3”
Adding Facebook Opengraph META Tags to a Joomla 3 Template
There are hundreds of plugins, modules and components which add Facebook opengraph tags to your articles, but is it really necessary to add an extension for the sake of a couple of meta tags.
There was a time when Facebook ignored your standard meta tags and insisted that you add a specific opengraph tags for things like page title and description. They no longer seem to enforce this from looking at the linter with the exception of Joomla’s author tag which it doesn’t like because it uses meta name instead of property. In fact, after a bit of experimentation, it seems the only needed tag is the site type, everything else will be collected from the standard meta data. So lets add some tags.
Continue reading “Adding Facebook Opengraph META Tags to a Joomla 3 Template”