Simplosys Solutions Blog

This blog was built using Joomla and a few blogging components and bots. I am planning to enhance this blog, mainly using tips from forums and other blogs. I will document my experience as I proceed, for the benefit of anyone that wants a blog in Joomla and chooses to go with mojoblog. If you are not decided on what blogging component to use just yet, I wrote a previous post about blogging options in joomla.

Pre-requisites:

1. A Joomla 1.0.13 - 1.0.15 installation. mojoblog is not guaranteed to work with other versions as of this writing, to my knowledge. I got it working on a 1.0.13 installation.

2. sh404sef: I chose to use the sh404sef, a free SEO component for Joomla. It is my favorite so far. There are others too such as opensef, but this is the only one I tried with mojoblog so far.

Step 1: Backups

I suggest you take a backup of the Joomla database before you start, especially if you are trying to do this on a live site. Honestly, it takes less than 2 minutes to backup the database on most sites and so knock it off and do it, even if you are the biggest risk taker. You are going to be working with some early alpha version software, so you don't want your production site to be down and spend all night bringing it back up.

Step 2: Install mojoblog

Visit their reviews at mojoblog. The download files are at http://www.joomlify.com/files/mojoblog/. Install the latest version (0.16 as of the time of this writing). Also install the Categories Module and the Sidebar module, at the very least. The installation procedure for the component and the module is very straightforward and similar to any other component or module. If you want help installing a component or module in Joomla, watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6OKgqA1aSo.

Next, install the mojoblog search mambot from here. This will make mojoblog 'visible' to regular Joomla search, a necessary integration for any Joomla blog. If you can't get stuff working this far, then I suggest you get help or give Joomla Commercial component My Blog a try which comes with support.

Next up is to install Wordpress plugins. You have to install some of them as a wordpress plugin so the regular Joomla installation procedure will not work. Download the FCKEditor for mojoblog. I tried TinyMCE as well but had some problems with it. The font size by defaut kept going back to the smallest font - 6 or something. I had to keep changing it back to 10. I tried FCKEditor and it worked just fine. To install it, just download th file, unzip it, and upload it via FTP to the /components/com_mojo/wp-conteny/plugins directory.  Then go back to the Joomla backend administration site and browse to Components > mojoblog > Plugins. Click the activate link next to the FCK Editor.

Step 3: Configure mojoblog

Mojoblog is a limited version of wordpress integrated into Joomla. If you are familiar with Wordpress, this should all be very familiar to you. If not, I am going through the steps here anyway.

a. Ensure that the Website URL and blog URL are entered as http://www.yoursite.com/components/com_mojo . You will be changing this in a later step but for now, keep it this way.

b. Enter an email, etc. and other options that you want to set normally in wordpress.

Step 4: Install mojoblog SEO plugin

1. Download the Joomla SEO plugin from this link - Mojoblog SEO Plugin. I am not sure why it's not on the mojoblog site and somewhere else instead. The page provides some instructions but those did not work for me as is. I suggest you try their instructions first and then if that does not work, try mine. I am assuming that you already have a Joomla SEO component installed. If not, I recommend sh404sef, that's the one I used.

2. Install and publish the plugin on the Joomla backend.

3. Go to Mojoblog > Options > General and change the blog URL to http://www.yoursite.com/blog (No trailing forward slash)

4. Go to the Options > Permalinks screen and enter Custom permalink structure - /%postname% (no preceding /blog as the site above suggests or the trailing forward slash)

5. That's it. All your blog posts (if there were any already) should become SEO-friendly with clean URL's. Note that Mojoblog does not change the actual link structure in Joomla but just creates a redirect from the new URL scheme to the old one. So your existing links to any posts should continue to work.

Step 5: SEF Titles: To get Search engine friendly titles on your mojoblog setup,you need to replace a few lines of code in the mojo.html.php file in the /components/com_mojo directory. The details are here - http://www.joomlify.com/forums/index.php?topic=147.0. The newest version of mojoblog may already have this fix in it. So make sure you check if you are already getting SEF titles before trying this.

Optional

Step 6: Install the Admin module and make the permissions on the module "Special". This will allow you to blog faster as you will not have to log in to the backend to blog but instead do it from the front end. Even easier would be blogging vie email but mojoblog does not provide that at present.

Step 7: Install additional plugins from the Mojoblog forums.

The biggest deficiency in Mojoblog in my opinion is that not all wordpress plugins work when you install it as Mojoblog. But the users at the Mojoblog forum have discussed hacks to get many of them working. If you have any of your own or have any experiences using the hacks to share with others, please post it at the forum. So far, the forums have been a good source of additional knowledge and documentation but not as active as I would have liked. I plan to try some additional plugins myself in the future and will update this post then.

I hope this helped. Please feel free to post your comments/critique.