How to Setup Joomla on BlueHost – Video Tutorial
This is a quick walk-through video showing how to setup Joomla on BlueHost. BlueHost are an exceptionally good Joomla host who offer excellent support, up-time and are also very competitively priced. To top it all off they are currently sponsoring a FREE JoomlaBear Premium Template Membership when you signup to host your site with them. Simply email your receipt to us here at JoomlaBear and we will activate your free 3 month membership worth $47 – absolutely FREE!
For more information on this offer view our main Joomla Hosting area, or go straight to BlueHost and signup.
Now watch the video below to see how easy it is to setup Joomla on BlueHost.
How to Edit SEF URL’s in Joomla
This is a quick video showing how to customize your Joomla SEF URL’s (search engine friendly URL’s) using the Alias field in your Joomla article manager. It’s a really simple tip and at the end of the video I quickly explain how to activate your SEF URL’s if you have not done this already. I demonstrate the principal on our new healthy recipes site, And the design of this site will soon be released as a template here on Joomla Bear.
For people who are short on time I have included a quick summary below the video. And if you find the info useful you should subscribe to my feed as I make Joomla videos regularly.
In the Alias field for your Article enter the URL you would like to use, as seen below.
In the example screenshot above the URL will result in:
www.example.com/test-article
or,
www.example.com/test-article.html
The result depends on how you configure your SEF URL setup in Joomla’s Global Configuration, and whether or not you use a 3rd part SEF extension like sh404SEF.
The built in Joomla SEF is fine as slong as you are not incredibly fussy about URL structure. It will insert the numbering into the URL.
On the healthy recipe website demo linked to above I have set my Global Configuration for SEF so it looks like this:
To use the Apache mod_rewrite option you will need to be running on a linux based host and you will also need to FTP into your Joomla site root directory, and rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess if you have not done this already.
A final tip is that this also applies to Section and Category URL’s – you can edit the Alias field for each to customize.
Using the Web Developers Toolbar To Troubleshoot CSS – Video Tutorial
Very quick video today showing the basics of how to use the web developers tool bar to identify troublesome CSS issues. This one is for Mandy who left a comment asking how to identify problematic CSS when Joomla extensions are calling additional style sheets. The quick tip shown should help.
Web developers tool bar can be found at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
You also need FireFox http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html
Using The Joomla Search Engine Friendly Patch (Video Guide)
Today’s video is again quiet long winded, I apologize in advance 
I’m still getting the hang of this… We cover the most important enhancements that the Joomla Search Engine Friendly Patch provides to help you improve your Joomla SEO (Also known as the SEF Patch for short). Links and some important notes below video.
You can download the SEF patch from Joomla At Work.
View the template demo at http://chromatic.joomlabear.com/
IMPORTANT: I don’t talk about this in the video but you must use FTP to upload the patch files and replace core Joomla files. You can’t install this like an extension. I don’t generally approve of ‘hacking’ Joomla like this – but for the SEF patch I make an exception because the features shown in the video are essential, in my opinion.
Also note that when you update your Joomla installation in the future the patch files will be overwritten again by Joomla core files and you will need to grab the latest SEF patch and reapply before your SEO modifications are live again. A pain I know, but until Joomla includes HTML title editing in the software I will keep using the SEF patch. Rankings = Traffic, need I say more.
Another thing I do not make clear in the video is that modifying the Title Tag parameters in mainmenu > home is a function that you can apply to any menu item – not just the home page – sorry about that the way I phrase it you would think it’s just a home page thing.
And lastly I don’t state that by updating the Black Bear Chromatic Title Tag this will also be visible in Google eventually – but not until Google re-indexes our Joomla template demo.
Thx for listening – If you have something you’d like to know about Joomla! then leave a comment and I’ll consider it for the next Joomla Video Tutorial.
Adding Gradients to the Edges of your Background Images
You can see I’m quite enjoying making video posts – this is the second one in 4 hours!
This time we’re looking at how a gradient can be added to the edges of a background image so that it seamlessly fades into the background color of your HTML page.
Basically we will be turning the image below, and to the left, into the image on the right – apologies in advance for the long-winded video – I’m still getting the hang of talking while I’m working and sometimes it’s hard to remember what I want to say while I’m concentrating! Bear with me…
And a big thanks to Matt for letting me play with his really nice pool table background image – you can see the background in action at Matt’s Pool and Snooker site – click here.
I should also add that the software used for image editing in this video is Adobe Fireworks – You could use similar techniques to achieve the same effect in Photoshop, Gimp, etc.
