In this for the time being last article in this series, I will go through the modules I see necessary for a blog. After adding this modules you should have a ready-to-use blog for your self. So lets get startet...

      1.      ARI Image Slide and About Me

I made the example with ARI Image Slide during the last article. This module will display the title of my blog. To make it even better I will embed a “Custom HTML” module displaying a short “About Me” notice. “Module Manager -> New -> Custom Html” will create a complete blank module. If needed, you can use a blank “Custom Html” module as a separator if you think two modules need some space between them.

In this part I will show you how the magic happens. We will talk about modules, plugins and how to set them up correctly. 

Categories

As we now have the basic knowledge we will start with the categories. First of all we will get rid of the preset categories. Go to “Content -> Category Manager”, check everything and hit “Trash” in the upper right corner.

Now press “New”. This category will contain subcategories for our blog. Give it a title and a Meta Description and hit “Save and Close”.

Now create another one for every category your blog will be about, give it a Title, a description and choose “Blog” under “Parent” to enable the hierarchy.

In order to have a category for everything else you need to create another category. I chose to call it “Home”. In that category I publish everything like the “About Me” page and so on.

As you might have noticed, I don’t use an out-of-the-box blogging system. I use the Joomla! CMS instead. Why? Because I like to have things the way I want them to be!

Joomla is one of the biggest content management systems on the market, thus there are a lot of extensions and it is open source, meaning it’s free. Wordpress as the market leader in terms of spreading works pretty much out of the box but lacks the flexibility of Joomla! The time you need to understand Joomla! will be greater but afterwards you will be able to set up not only a blog but even a sophisticated web shop or whatever website you like.

Therefore I use Joomla! for my blog. It took me a good deal of time to get Joomla! up and running so in this article I will share my knowledge with you.