Remove the Welcome to the Frontpage in Joomla
How to Remove the “Welcome to the Frontpage” Title in Joomla
Hey everyone. Today has been crazy and hectic so I wanted to cover something easy, but it’s a question that gets asked a lot by those who are new to Joomla.
The question is “How do I remove the Welcome to the Frontpage message in Joomla.”
When you first setup Joomla, a lot of the time people will choose the option to have Joomla generate sample content so they have something to mess around with while they learn the program.
This is a good option if you are new because Joomla will create menus, and articles using all the different features available in the program. Because Joomla has generated all the content right from the get go there are some settings that can be hard to find if you are trying to modify existing menus and articles for your site.
The biggest question that people seem to ask when they are changing these pages is “How do I get the rid of the Welcome to the Frontpage message in Joomla”. This is actually pretty easy to do. It is just really hard to locate where this setting is in the program.
In Joomla all menus and articles have different sections where you can set parameters for that item. In this case the title that is being displayed on the main page is actually a parameter that has been set in a sub menu.
To find this setting and change it you need to do the following things:
Click on the “Menus” tab and select the “Home” menu.
Once you are in the Home menu edit screen, you will see some extra options for this menu to the right hand side.
Basic
Advanced
Component
System
Click on the System option and drop down menu will open up. One of the options in here is “Page Title” where you will see “Welcome to the Frontpage!”
Go ahead and change this to whatever you like, for example “Welcome to Pseudorant!”
You will also notice that there is an option to turn these titles off entirely if you do not want them to show up on the pages.
This seems like a really simple thing and it is, they just decided to put this in a really out of the way place in Joomla.
I hope this has helped some people if they are running into this with a new install of Joomla. Thanks for visiting Pseudorant, please check back soon for new articles!
How to Install Apache, MySQL, and PHP on your Linux Box
Putting the AMP in your LAMP server
Hello and welcome! This is my first article / guide, so let’s get right into it.
This is intended as a guide for web developers who are new to Linux (namely Kubuntu) and wish to setup a local LAMP server on their machine. For those of you who don’t know, LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl / Python / PHP, although in this case the ‘P’ is for PHP only. When all four of these are installed on a machine, it is a full-blown web-server capable of running complex web applications.
In my case, I have installed Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) on my machine using the standard desktop installation, which does not come with Apache, MySQL, or PHP. To be specific, we will be using the following applications:
* Apache2
* MySQL 5
* PHP 5
All of these applications are available through the Adept Package Manager,which is a fast and convenient way to install and uninstall applications in Debian-based Linux systems. Click on the link above for a guide on how this works.
For simplicity, I will assume you know how to operate Adept and have installed at least one package before. Click on the K-Menu, go to ‘System‘, and select ‘Adept Manager - Manage Packages‘ from the list. When prompted, enter your root password and you will see Adept’s package manager interface.
Now, in the search bar, type ‘apache‘. After a short moment, you should see a list of packages. The very first one should be ‘apache2‘. Click on the arrow next to it and select ‘Request Install‘. Now, type into the search bar ‘mysql‘ and this time you will need to scroll down a ways to find the package you are looking for: ‘mysql-server‘. Click on the arrow and select ‘Request Install‘ again. I would also recommend selecting the package ‘mysql-admin‘ for a convenient GUI for managing MySQL server, but that is purely optional. Finally, type ‘php‘ into the search bar and scroll a ways down to find ‘php5‘. Once again, click the arrow and choose ‘Request Install‘.
After selecting these 3-4 packages (depending on whether or not you installed the MySQL Admin GUI), select ‘Apply Changes‘ at the top of Adept to install the packages. This may take a while, so now is an excellent time to take a break and get a drink.
After the installation is complete there is a couple of very important steps to take in order to save yourself a lot of frustration. The first and foremost, is to clear your browser cache! I’m not entirely sure why this is so important, but trust me, it is. If you are running Mozilla Firefox, go to the ‘Tools‘ menu, select ‘Clear Private Data‘, and uncheck everything except for the ‘cache‘ checkbox. You can clear out other information as well, but make sure cache is selected.
The other important step to take is to make sure that php files are parsing correctly. Go to your System Menu (the one next to the K Menu) and select anything, for example, ‘Home‘. The root folder is not in this menu, so you will have to navigate to the right folder anyways. For simplicity, select the ‘Home‘ folder from this menu.
On the left-hand side you should have a column labeled Bookmarks, with an option for Root. Select that, then click on the folder for ‘etc‘. Right-click on the folder named ‘apache2‘ and select from the ‘Action’ menu ‘Open as root‘. Enter your password to continue.
In this folder, select the folder ‘mods-available‘ and look for the file named ‘php5.conf‘. Right-click on this file and select ‘Edit as root‘ and make sure the second line says something like
‘ AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm .html .php .phtml .php3‘
In my case, all I had to do here was add ‘.htm .html ‘ before the ‘.php’ section. This is so that if you have PHP code inside an htm or html file, it will be parsed instead of showing the raw code.
Save your changes, and depending on which editor you used, you might want to delete the temporary ‘~php5.conf‘ file that it creates as a backup. It should not hurt anything to leave it there, but I like to delete the extra backup files to prevent clutter.
In any case, make sure to restart your computer at this point to make sure that the apache web server picks up the configuration changes. You can probably accomplish the same effect by just restarting the apache service, however I haven’t done that yet and restarting the system seemed like a simpler approach.
Alright, now we’re getting to the fun part! Open your favorite web browser and type in the address bar ‘http://localhost‘ to see if apache is running properly. If it is not, you can blame me and probably find some help on the official Ubuntu/Kubuntu forums, however if it is running, it should show the words ‘It Works!‘ in your web browser. We’re almost done now…
All web files will be hosted from ‘/var/www‘. To make sure php is working properly, we will need to first navigate to that folder. Select ‘System Menu‘ -> ‘Home‘, and then select ‘Root‘ from the bookmarks section on the left. Click on the ‘var‘ folder to open it and then right click on ‘www‘ and choose ‘Action‘ -> ‘Open as root‘.
In here, right-click on ‘index.html‘ and choose ‘Action‘ -> ‘Edit as root‘. Add this line right before the closing tag for the body (body tag > added line of code | below):
Save your changes, and refresh your browser window. You may want to clear your browser cache again, just to be sure. You should see ‘It Works!‘ followed by a neatly formatted table showing all of the current settings for PHP. If it did not, right-click on the page from your browser and click ‘view source‘ or whatever the option is called for your browser to see the HTML code directly.
If the output from view source shows the “?PHP” part of the code, then something is wrong. PHP code should never be sent to the browser without being parsed. If you haven’t already, try restarting your PC again, otherwise you are on your own (along with the thousands of others with similar problems). Again, I recommend checking the official forums for Ubuntu / Kubuntu.
Hopefully, all went well and you saw the neatly formatted PHP text. To make sure that MySQL is working correctly, I will assume you have the GUI installed. I said it was optional, and it is, but it’s the easiest way I know of for verifying that everything installed correctly. Go to the K-Menu, select the ‘Development‘ menu and choose ‘MySQL Administrator‘.
For the server hostname, choose ‘localhost‘. The login name will be ‘root‘, and the password is the root password for your machine. If you can connect OK, then all is well. If not, fall back on the official forums or google to find a solution, but I suspect that this will work right off the bat.
That’s all I have for this guide for now. There is a mountain of information for all three applications mentioned here, and this guide barely scrapes the surface of any of them. Expect some guides in the future for configuring Apache, MySQL, or PHP.
Content Management Systems – Joomla
Joomla… JOOMLA… It’s fun to make up words!
What is a content management system? It is basically a program or front-end to a resource like a website, forum, wiki etc that allows a user to focus on producing content without needing to worry about coding or technical considerations. In other words it is a system that manages the content you produce for you.
Why is this significant? Because in the past few years more and more CMS applications have become available which are making it easier for users to produce and distribute their content on the internet. Ok… So what is Joomla then?
Joomla is a CMS system that allows users to create websites, leaving the design and function aspects in the hands of the program. For users who are familiar with WordPress, you have probably heard of Joomla or even used it.
The reason I am talking about it today is because a client of mine needs their website revamped. They used to work with an old site designer who has basically dropped off the face of the planet. I usually just do troubleshooting for this client but they told me they were in desperate need of someone to redo their website.
I told them I would take a look at it but once I saw the site was done in PHP I had reservations about whether or not I would be able to handle to project. I am an HTML designer by trade and have not really worked with PHP much until lately when I picked up WordPress.
After doing some research on the person who originally implemented Joomla on the site and looking into what Joomla was exactly I had a lot more confidence that I would be able to make the new website happen for this customer.
There has been so much added to the site already that I felt it would be pointless to strip out the current infrastructure, so instead I am going to spend the next two weeks becoming familiar with Joomla and all it’s functions and I will pickup where the other designer left off on the site.
For anyone that has not seen Joomla I would highly recommend you check it out. Especially if you are a blogger or a freelance web designer, but have been working mainly with HTML up til this point. From looking around at all the web 2.0 type sites out there, I feel that traditional HTML as we know it is almost dead. Sure it will still be used here and there, and knowing basic HTML will always help, but I don’t think people will rely on it anymore for producing sites. It’s just not practical to do so.
With that being said I should get back to studying about Joomla. I have two weeks to learn it which should be more than enough time but I would really like to be fast and efficient with it, by the time I take on the project. For anyone that is interested in learning more about it you can check out the Joomla website at the following link:
As always thanks for checking out Pseudorant and please check back for more interesting articles and rants about computers and technology!
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