In one of my previous jobs I managed over several hundred Joomla! sites. It was often the case that we needed to move these sites between Cpanels or servers due to the client’s needs. The easiest way to accomplish this in Joomla! is by using Akeeba backup.

Akeeba backup is much more than just a way to provide redundancy for your site. It is a powerful extension which will let you make clones of your site as many times as you want and install those clones on almost any host that meets Joomla!’s technical requirements.

A good rule of thumb when it comes to extensions is to use them sparingly and only if they provide functionality that you trully need.  The following is a bare minimum list of Joomla! extensions which should be installed on every Joomla! site.

Earlier this year I was tasked with building a Joomla! module which would allow non-techincal staff the ability to update a custom progress bar for a fundraiser. You can see the result of this project here.

The module makes use of some simple CSS and PHP. This tutorial will cover the basics of module building and walk you through the process I took to develop this particualr module. You can feel free to modify the code to your liking or comment below if you have any suggestions of how this can be improved.

Recently I was tasked with setting up a sample Magento site for one of my clients. Magento as most of you already know is a very powerful and flexible open source e-commerce system. The issue was that after completing an install of the demo site I realized that the demo content was missing. Typical me had not bothered to read the installation instructions  which clearly states that the demo data must be installed before you install Magento. Luckily this was a fresh installation and I didn’t have any products in the store yet so adding the default demo data was relatively simple. If you have a fresh install of Magento and decide you want to add demo data post-install follow these steps.

Recently I was tasked with adding a custom blog page and a static home page to a pre-existing WordPress site. Since the client was already using WordPress I assumed the task would be relatively straight forward as WP supports this natively, but this did not turn out to be the case.

Creating a local development site for testing updates and changes has always been industry best practice. Most of the time we are trying to move our development sites from a local server to production, but in some cases you will need to copy a live production site to a local server. In this article I will break down the process of transferring a live WordPress site to a local server.  I have also included some troubleshooting tips and solutions to problems I have encountered during this process. You may have other solutions or suggestions so feel free leave a comment.