Sid - Blogging for Newbie Webmasters’

OK friends. I’m using and have used different Content Management Systems like Joomla, Drupal or Some forum scripts like Simple Machines Forum; Basically, what I have felt is that CMS gives you an easy way to put your site online overnight without any HTML knowledge. Also CMS can be customised easily with different freely available templates, or better if you can edit CSS to give it an altogether different looks; updating CMS  based  Websites are also easy  as you get GUI to create new web pages, or modify existing pages. Undoubtedly, feature-rich CMSs available today seem to provide opportunity for everybody to have their own websites.

But this is just one side of the story. There are certain aspects of CMS that will put you into doubts before using them anymore.

1. Design and Layout Changes are easy but you must have some working knowledge in CSS  classes used in a particular CMS; otherwise, it will consume some appreciable length of time to modify the looks and feels of your website.

2. You may not get what you want: Fact is that unless you know how to use APIs used in a particular CMS, it is not that easy to alter an existing feature, or even adding new features as per your choice. And popular CMSs, being pretty hard-coded, it is not that easy to modify them. If you try to make such attempts on a production site directly without much knowledge of internal architecture, there  is every possibility that your site may even crash.

3.  Security issues and patches: As CMS codes are available for FREE, so anybody can see it and this exposes each CMS to vulnerable hacking attempts. Although update patches are available for download, but you may consider its significance only after your site has been hacked.

4. Popular CMS are often cluttered with different features, which may not be at all important for the kind of sites you are running. So, you have to take the trouble to deal with unnecessary features.

5. Problems using CMS: You may face problems while using a CMS arising out from nowhere; like the most infamous login loop problem, or access denied problem that webmasters using CMS have reportedly faced. Most fatal part of the story is that it is really difficult to figure out exactly what goes wrong in case you can’t login to your Administrative control panel. There is no alternative way. You have to login to administrative control panel for site administration and maintenance, and  when you can’t do that, your site is bound to be orphaned atleast for the time being.

So, although Free CMSs are great but only if everything goes right; in case you have a problem it may not be that much easy to locate what goes wrong without an in-depth knowledge of that CMS. You may even think, what was wrong with my good old HTML web site?

Manu item types in Mambo/Joomla cms are unique in the sense that it determines how to display the contents under a particular menu item. Though there are many different types of menu items, but, i’ve used only three of them.

1. Link URL : When you create a menu, if you select Link URL as the menu item type, an href link to the target url is created, and when someone clicks on that menu, the target url opens up.

2. Content Table: Selecting this menu item type will display all the content items under the menu in a tabular form, like, Date created, Title, Hits, and so on, by default.

3. Blog Section: This type of menu item shows the content items under them in blog format, with intro text and a live link to the detailed part, by default.

But for any reason whatsoever if you want to change the menu item type, so far as my knowledge goes, it is not possible to do so. The only option is to delete the existing menu item and create a new one with the same name with appropriate item type selected.

For Mambo/Joomla site, do not attempt to use Upload HTML File method to verify your site. It will not work in default Mambo/Joomla (I’ve studied upto version Joomla 1.0.11) installation.

You have to Add a Meta tag to verify site ownership.
Copy the Google sitemap generated meta tag you have to add, the name of the META tag is “verify-v1″ or may differ a bit and content = “abUjdndngYmakfkgkgmsksdds” - something like this. You have to simply copy and paste the tag in the head section of your homepage.

How to add the meta tag in Mambo/Joomla?

Simply open the index.php file under the template directory you are using.i.e., /template/template_name/index.php

Add the Meta Tag Code generated by Google anywhere in between the opening and closing head tag. Save the file, close it and upload it using your favorite FTP.

Now click verify button in the sitemap account., Google will give you the feedback that your site has been verified.

Done.

BTW.

You must have a google sitemap account to do the same.
Please leave your comments if you find this small tip useful.