It's not a blog, it's a feature

After a few weeks work with Joomla to set up a new Homepage for our club PCCP I can say that I am really satisfied with the Joomla CMS system.

Now I want to share a few experiences that may be helpful for others.
If there is already an existing Homepage it makes more sense to install the Joomla version to a sub-directory, where you can set-up everything in peace and fill the CMS with content.
When you are ready to go online with the new webpage just copy all content from the Joomla subdirectory to your root directory.
Then you have to adapt the variables $log_path and $tmp_path in the file configuration.php to set-up the new path of your homepage and everything works :)

Screenshot PCCP.AT

I was so shrewd to deinstall everything from the Joomla installation which I thought we will not need. But a few weeks later I noticed that some components would be very useful.

For example the weblinks component was one which we really missed and it was not that easy to reinstall it ... but this is how it works:

- Install the original files to your Joomla installation:
Take the directory com_weblinks from the directory /administrator/components/ and also com_weblinks from the directory /components and put it with ftp on your server.

- Database updates for the menu entries and the base structure:
INSERT INTO `#__components` VALUES (4, 'Weblinks', 'option=com_weblinks', 0, 0, '', 'Weblinks', 'com_weblinks', 0, 'js/ThemeOffice/component.png', 0, 'show_comp_description=1\ncomp_description=\nshow_link_hits=1\nshow_link_description=1\nshow_other_cats=1\nshow_headings=1\nshow_page_title=1\nlink_target=0\nlink_icons=\n\n', 1);

INSERT INTO `#__components` VALUES (5, 'Links', '', 0, 4, 'option=com_weblinks', 'Existierende Weblinks anzeigen', 'com_weblinks', 1, 'js/ThemeOffice/edit.png', 0, '', 1);
INSERT INTO `#__components` VALUES (6, 'Kategorien', '', 0, 4, 'option=com_categories§ion=com_weblinks', 'Weblink-Kategorien', '', 2, 'js/ThemeOffice/categories.png', 0, '', 1);

CREATE TABLE `#__weblinks` (
`id` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`catid` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
`sid` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
`title` varchar(250) NOT NULL default '',
`alias` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
`url` varchar(250) NOT NULL default '',
`description` text NOT NULL default '',
`date` datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
`hits` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
`published` tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '0',
`checked_out` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
`checked_out_time` datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
`ordering` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
`archived` tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '0',
`approved` tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '1',
`params` text NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `catid` (`catid`,`published`,`archived`)
) TYPE=MyISAM CHARACTER SET `utf8`;

replace #_ with your database prefix.

You can find this sql commands (and many more) in the directory /installation/sql/mysql/ in the file joomla.sql.

And the weblinks component will work again :)

By the way: When using weblinks a highly recommended plugin is All Weblinks Plugin, you can publish just a few categories in an entry or do many things more with this plugin.