Joomla blog - What do you need to have a good one?
- Font size: Larger Smaller
- Hits: 8361
- 19 Comments
A lot of people want to create a Joomla blog. We know this because when we surf Joomla communities such as Joomla forum, we see questions such as "How do I blog with Joomla?" "Which extensions should I use for blogging?" and more.
We had the same questions when we started our Joomla blog about one year ago. Now, after blogging about 70 blog posts, we'd love to be here to share our experience with you guys.
The areas we are going to write about:
- What is a blog?
- Some good extensions for blogging
- How do we build our blog with Easyblog?
- Blogging resources
What is a blog?
The word "blog" is short for Weblog. In our opinion, there are 2 popular blog types - personal and business. The Personal blog is used to share your hobbies, daily life, etc. while the Business blog is to keep your website fresh and share informationwith your customers or potential audiences.
A blog should contain some of these essential elements:
- Blog posts: Includes articles, videos, infographics, etc.
- Categories: To organize blog posts neatly.
- A comments system: It allows readers to share their opinions and allows you to connect with your readers.
- Tags cloud: Shows keywords of your blog posts.
- RSS feed: Allows people to update your blog and access your blog immediately.
- Social media integration (Facebook, Twitter, Google+): To ensure your posts can be shared easily, to bring your blog more traffic.
- Trackbacks or Pingpacks: To broaden the audience and introduce your blog to more people.
Some good extensions for blogging
These extensions are developed for blog purposes, so they will provide you with essential blog functions. Besides, they support Joomla 2.5. Cool, right?
Blog extensions |
Free / Commercial |
JED rating |
PROs |
CONs |
Commercial |
4.96/5 - 275 users |
- Easy to use - Good support |
- Limited comment themes |
|
Commercial |
4.95/5 - 19 users |
- Easy to use - Light and clean layout |
- Not integrating trackbacks or pingpacks |
|
Commercial |
3.93/5 - 14 users |
- Easy to use - Many features |
- Commenting system and media manager are not available |
|
Free |
4.45/5 - 29 users |
- Automatically pings update-servers when you save an article |
- Not working for the list of servers to ping contains a lot of records |
|
Free |
4.35/5 - 17 users |
- Allows your users to create personal page |
- Users cannot customize their pages |
Note: The icon 
indicates that EasyBlog is our chosen solution.
Besides these professional Joomla blog extensions, you can consider applying CCK (Content Creation Kit) extensions such as K2, Zoo, etc. to create a blog.
How do we blog with Easyblog?
Build an interface
Almost all functions to build a blog are provided in a neat interface. After installing EasyBlog there is no need search for tools.
We set up areas such as Tags Cloud, Search box, Categories and Popular blog posts on our blog. It is very simple to do with EasyBlog. If you still want to "blog" faster, there are tips to help you blog quickly. You can utilize "What's next" wizard on the right side that guides you through the setup.
The Easyblog control panel
Blog's functions on our blog
Create good content
Our main purpose is to create good blog content; therefore we spend a lot of time and effort to build the content. As you see, it has detailed blog posts with images, videos and infographics.
You may ask "what do we write about?" or "where we find our blog topics?"; Well, we write about Joomla & Website development tutorials for beginners. We pick our topics from our experience - what do we use, what do we need and from Joomla users needs as well. If there are more topics you want us to write about, you can drop us a line. We'd appreciate that.
A blog post with images
Schedule posts
You should schedule posts to make sure that your blog is updated frequently and you can take a look at the blog overview.
We use Google Calendar to note blog posts which will be published in upcoming 2 weeks.
Google Calendar
Communicate with your readers
Thanks to the comment system, you can get readers' feedback immediately. Do they like your blog post or not? Was your post helpful for them? Is there any out-of-date information or what things do readers want you to write more about?, etc.
The comment system should be convenient for people to use. There should also be a spam-prevention function. We use the default comment system of EasyBlog, but you can consider some other comment extensions. There are extensions that allow you to make comments from your Facebook or Twitter accounts.
Using commenting system effectively
Promote the blog
There are a lot of ways to help your readers keep track of your latest blog posts. Thanks to them, your blog will be helpful to more people.
- Promote your blog post:
Joomlashine on Twitter
Utilize more extensions
Besides Easyblog, we use some useful extensions such as sh404SEF to manage URL's, Find us on Facebook to link to social media sites, so readers can connect to us more easily. The content of this extension is updated automatically when we update news on Facebook so it keeps the blog content fresh.
We also create another module to show our Social Profiles.
Sh404SEF
Find us on Facebook
Blogging resources
You can refer to some sources below about blogging:
- Problogger
- Copyblogger
- Daily blog tips
- Basic blog tips
- Successful blogging
- Joomla blogs on The Joomla Community Showcase
- 100 Nice And Beautiful Blog Designs
- Showcase: 30 Beautiful Blog Designs for Inspiration
- The blog designer network
Conclusion
There are many more tips and book about blogging with Joomla; this article has mentioned just a few of them. We hope that they are useful to you. If you have any questions or you want to introduce your new blog, just leave your comments here and tell us. We always welcome you!
Comments
-
Wednesday, 29 August 2012Hi Swagato, you can create a simple blog with Joomla itself and with Disqus, you have a blog and that's that. Bear in mind that the more plugins you install, the slower the site gets and its not good to your users. EasyBlog is the all-in-one solution to your blogging needs and yes, you can be assured of peace of mind when using this blog component.
-
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
Hi you,
DISQUS is just a comment tool, so it doesn't have full of elements for a blog. We choose Easyblog because just with Easyblog, we don't need to install other extensions to create a blog. Besides, the support of Easyblog is good, too. So, you will feel convenient to use it.
Hanh, -
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
Yes, that's right! EasyBlog solves many headaches that novice or professional bloggers may face. It is an honor to be of service to you and the JoomlaShine Team!
-
-
Tuesday, 04 September 2012
Great info, however, I feel as though one of greatly extensible CCKs was not anywhere close to being compared... I'm talking about k2.
It does all these:
Blog posts; Categories; A comments system; Tags cloud; RSS feed; Social media integration.
Install BlogPing and maybe jComments for more control over comments and you are golden ;-)
Not to mention - it is all free.
Nevertheless- grateful for the article. Thank you. -
Wednesday, 05 September 2012
Hello Dan,
You are right, K2 is great. And I see many bloggers use it as well.
But using Easyblog or K2, it depends on each user's desire and demand.
Btw, thank you for your comment, it's cool! -
Tuesday, 04 September 2012
Hi Han, that post was helpful. And am dazed cos it's coming from a lady. pls, I want to add a staff profile module to my site. I mean a module that show staff designation, name and clickable link for more information
-
Wednesday, 05 September 2012
Hi Adeyemi,
I don't know if this extension Thinkery Work Force http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/directory-a-documentation/address-book/10585 is suitable for your demand. You can check and try using it. I hope it works for you. -
Sunday, 09 September 2012
Hi Adam, these are some documents I found, you can refer it for trackbacks, pingbacks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback, http://www.geeklog.net/docs/english/trackback.html
-
Monday, 22 October 2012
Hi there,
Can I move my existing site http://www.talentsfromindia.com to joomla with easyblog ? right now it is hosted on a wordpress. Please be advice.
Regards
Alex -
Tuesday, 23 October 2012Hi Alex,
I believe that EasyBlog can answer this question best. Please contact them at http://stackideas.com/
Hope that you can continue your blog with Joomla and Easyblog soon. -
Tuesday, 23 October 2012
Thanks Huyennt for your support...
-
Wednesday, 24 October 2012
You are welcome, Alex!
-
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
Hello,
Firstly thanks a lot for sharing these kind of informative information. Basically my question is : How many types of feature should take place in order to make a super standard blog? I mean one of them may be, Category wise article showing, Social media share option at right side or left, Comments option in every article....etc. I understand it depends on type of blog but over all, how many they are, and what are them?
-Thanks· huyennt likes this comment. -
Wednesday, 28 November 2012
Hi Tulon,
You can take a look at this Joomlashine blog. In my opinion, it covers basic elements for one blog
-
Tuesday, 05 March 2013
Great examples here, I’m looking at having my comments section re designed, although its clean and simple now I think it could be a little more personal.
· huyennt likes this comment. -
Sunday, 14 April 2013
Thank you for these examples with screenshots. Really helpful
Get the latest Updates!
Search JoomlaShine
FIND US ON FACEBOOK
POPULAR
Content License
- to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
- to Remix — to adapt the work
- to make commercial use of the work
Nice info. I might try this Easy Blog too. However I have a question
Lets say for a simple blog, if I create a bog view (1 colmn layout) with DISQUS comment, doesn't that work for many clients too? What features will I miss then with this simple free easy version than by using EasyBlog?