Set Up a Basic Blog in Joomla

: 14 December 2019

Recently I read a question on the Joomla Facebook group about how to set up a blog on Joomla, and comparing the process to Wordpress.

A blog can be an important piece of your Content Marketing strategy, along with Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing.

For background, Wordpress started life as a fairly simple blogging platform and evolved into a CMS, and the bones of it still revolve around blogging. In comparison, Joomla started life as a full CMS, of which blogging is just one component.

If you only ever want a simple blog, and will never want anything else apart from a blog, Wordpress might be your best bet.

However, it's also pretty easy to configure a blog in your Joomla website, no coding required. This blog is Joomla - here's what we did:

The Basics

1. Create a Category

In the backend, click on Content / Categories.
Create a new category. We call ours Blog but you may prefer News or something else. (Whatever you choose, will become part of the URL - for instance https://www.websolutionz.com.au/blog - so it pays to choose carefully).

=> Drag this category to the top of the category list. This makes it the default category.

2. Create a dummy Article

Click on Content / Articles and create a new article.
Give the article a Title, type some text, and make sure the Category is set to Blog. (If you've dragged it to the top in the previous step, the category should have defaulted to this).

=> This is your first blog article. It's useful to have this for configuration purposes, but it can be deleted when the blog is ready to go live.

3. Create a Menu

Click on Menus / Main Menu and create a new menu link.
In the Menu Title box, provide a name for the menu link (ie Blog - this is what appears on your site).
At Menu Item Type, click the Select button, then choose Articles / Category Blog (this determines the layout).
At Choose a Category, click on the Select button and select your new category.
Click on Save & Close.

=> Go to the frontend. Refresh the site and you should see a new menu called Blog. Click on this menu, and you should see the dummy article you created earlier.

Congratulations - you have now created a blog in Joomla!

Configure Blog Layout

Many configuration tweaks can be made in the Blog menu item to finetune the layout. For example, in this blog we have set:

Category tab

Show Tags: Show

Blog Layout tab

# Leading Articles: 5 (this determines how many blog posts appear per page)
# Columns: 1 (this determines how many articles appear across in Desktop view)
# Links: 5 (these are the title-only links at the bottom)
Article Order: Most Recent
Pagination: Auto
Pagination Results: Show

Options tab

Show Author: Show
Show Create Date: Show (or you may prefer to use Modify Date, or Publish Date)
Show Navigation: Show (this provides the Next/Back buttons below each blog post)

Further Configuration

Most blogs have a number of additional characteristics which make it a blog, such as a search bar, tags, links to previous or popular posts, comments, and more. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Add some modules

In our blog we've published modules to the right sidebar position. (In your template it may have a different position name, or you may want to place the modules in a different place).

Search module

Module - Search OR
Module - Smart Search (depending on which search system you choose to use in your site)

Display Latest Articles

Module - Articles - Category

Display Popular Articles

Module - Most Read

Use Tags

How to use Content Tags in Joomla

Comments

The Joomla core does not include in-built commenting, but there are a variety of third party extensions at the JED which provide this functionality.

User Info Box

If we were doing this today, we'd probably use Joomla Custom Fields to achieve this functionality.
There is a free plugin called AIB - Author Info Box by Viktor Vogel, which plugs into the User profile.
As we only have a small number of authors on this blog, we created a custom HTML module and assigned it to the Blog category.

Editing your blog

There are 2 ways to manage a Joomla website - via the backend, or via the frontend. We configure sites in different ways depending on a variety of factors.