Using Joomla!, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Starting a Blog

Blogs nowadays are used for much more than personal diaries. They’re a way to communicate ideas, business news, and even critical information to the world. They are your own “personal newspaper” or corporate newsletter that dynamically updates and allows for a two-way conversation with your audience.

At its inception, Joomla didn’t have many blog features—and is still missing quite a few—but it can be used effectively as a blog with a few customizations. In this chapter, we’ll walk through how to use Joomla as a blog, as well as explore a few other installable blogging options.

Joomla Articles as a Blog

A blog is essentially a collection of articles displayed with the most recent article first. Because Joomla uses articles to organize content, this is easy to set up. In fact, you’ve probably done the steps already.

1. Create a category for your blog articles by going to Content→Category Manager and clicking the New button. We’ll call ours Blog.
2. Add a description if you’d like to display a text introduction at the top of your blog. Otherwise, leave it blank. Leave the other settings at their defaults and click Save & Close.

All that’s left to do is to create a new menu item pointing to the blog as described in Category Blog Layout in Chapter 4. Make sure you edit the menu item and update the Article Order setting in the Blog Layout tab to Most Recent First, so your latest blog post will always be at the top of the page.

Note

If your blog is in a different language ...