This tutorial shows you how to display Google Adsense ads on your Joomla! 1.7.x website without installing an extension.

Requires you have a Google Adsense account. Should work for other ad providers that provide you with a code snippet for ads on your site.

Some images may be clicked for larger sizes.

It is very easy to place Google Adsense ads on your Joomla! site without installing an extension.

Yet, the last time I looked, there were dozens of different Joomla! extensions to help you with Google Adsense ads on your site.

Embedding ads directly within your article requires a plug-in and is not covered by this tutorial.

Determine Ad Placement

You need to find a place for the ads on your site.

Ads are typically placed at the:

• top of the page
• bottom of the page
• side of the page

See this article on how to enable Joomla 1.7 to display module positions.

To reveal the module positions available in your Joomla! template, append

?tp=1

to the end of your URL. As shown below, the various module positions available on this site are revealed:

You can choose to place ads in a currently empty module position, for example: position-6, position-8, position-3, position-0, position-12, position-2 , position-9, position-10, position-11 or position-14 in the case of this template. Or you can place them in already occupied module positions, for example, position-5.

Where you place the ad will determine the type of ad you place. For instance, if you choose to place an ad on the left position, then a narrow and tall ad makes more sense than a short, wide ad.

Remember the name of the module position where you want to place your ad.

Disabling the HTML Editor

Joomla! tries very hard to prevent users from entering malicious code. This also means it prevents adding legitimate code. To get around this we need to disable the HTML editor. A compatibility problem between Joomla! 1.7.0 and IE 8 means you will need to use a different browser to do this. FireFox 6.0 worked for me. Joomla! 1.7.1 does not have this problem.

1) Select Global Configuration from the Site menu item:

2) Select Editor – No Editor for the Default WYSIWYG Editor:

3) Click on Save & Close to save the changes:

4) Click on Article Manager from the Content menu (non-intuitive, I know):

5) Select the Options icon:

6) Click on the Text Filters tab:

7) Scroll down to Super Users and select No Filtering from the dropdown box.

NOTE: this step assumes you are logged in as an administrator and thus have super user privileges.

8) Scroll back up and click on Save & Close:

Adding Adsense

1) Select Module Manager from the Extensions menu item.

2) Click on New to create a new module.

3) Click on Custom HTML:

4) Fill in the module information.

Details

• Title: enter a title for this module. If you want to display the title, something like Sponsored by is a good choice.
• Show Title: select Yes to display the title, No to not display the title.
• Position:·from the dropdown list, select the name of the module position you decided on when determining your ad placement
• Status: set to Published to show / display the module.
• Access: ensure Public is selected.
• Order: if there are other modules occupying your selected position, you can choose the ordering of the modules.
• Start Publishing: leave empty.
• Finish Publishing: leave blank
• Language: leave as All.
• Note: optional note to display in the module list.

Custom Output

This is where you paste the HTML code that Google Adsense gives you.

Module Assignment

Ensure On all pages is selected. This will place the ad module on all pages of your Joomla! site.

If you want some pages to be ad free, then select one of the other Module Assignment options (No pages, Only on the pages selected, or On all pages except those selected) and then select only those pages were you want the ads to appear or not appear.

5) Click on Save & Close

6) Observe that the module has been correctly installed. To locate the newly created module, I find it easiest to click on the ID column and sort the column in descending order (the newly created module will have the largest module number):

7) Check that the ads show up and are correctly positioned on your site (in this case, I created a single Adsense module in position-10:

The post Adding Adsense to Your Joomla! 1.7 Site appeared first on Complete, Concrete, Concise.

Joomla! 1.7 is now obsolete. Joomla! 2.5 is the newest release with long term support.

Instructions for installing Joomla! 2.5 can be found here.

Instructions for viewing module positions in Joomla 2.5 can be found here.

Click on images for full size versions.

(1) Login to the Joomla! backend.

(2) Select Template Manager from the Extensions menu:

(3) Click on the Options icon:

(4) Click on the Enabled button of the Preview Module Positions entry.Then click on Save or Save & Close to save the change.

(5) Observe that module positions are now visible on your Joomla! pages when you append ?tp=1 to the end of your URL:

When you are done examining module positions, remember to set Preview Module Positions to Disabled.

The post How To View Module Positions in Joomla! 1.7 appeared first on Complete, Concrete, Concise.

Joomla! 1.7 is now obsolete. Joomla! 2.5 is the newest release with long term support.

Instructions for installing Joomla! 2.5 can be found here.

Some images may be clicked on images for full size versions.

Downloading Joomla!

1) Download the full Joomla install from here.

2) Choose to either save the ZIP file or to open it over the web. Saving the ZIP file makes it easier to install Joomla again, if you have to.

Extracting Joomla!

3) Open the downloaded file by double-clicking on it. From the File menu, select Extract All. NOTE: this step assumes Windows provides archiving functionality for you. If you have installed a different archiving program, the specific steps for extraction will be different.

4) Extract the Joomla! files to a subfolder of htdocs in your XAMPP folder. By default, XAMPP would be installed to your C:\ drive, so you would enter C:\xampp\htdocs\joomla as the directory to extract to. (In my case, I installed XAMPP to my D:\ drive and specified joomla17 as the folder to extract to). Click on Next to extract the files.

5) Click Finish when the extraction is complete. You can uncheck the Show extracted files checkbox because we don’t need to see the files.

Setting up Joomla!

6) Launch your browser and type http://localhost/joomla into the address bar. What follows http://localhost/ is the directory you installed Joomla! into (in my case, joomla17).

7) Select your preferred language, then click on Next.

8) Confirm you meet the minimum installation requirements, then click Next. It is normal for Display errors to be set to On.

9) Read the GNU license and, if you agree with it, click Next.

10) Fill in the database configuration information:

• Database Type: mysql (default setting)
• Host Name: localhost (default setting)
• Username: if you created a MySql User, enter the name here. Otherwise, use root.
• Password: this is the password associated with the user name entered above. If you used root as your username, then leave the password blank (the default XAMPP install does not assign a password to root).
• Database Name: this is the name of the database you created. Database creation instructions are here.
• Table Prefix: a unique prefix for accessing the table. Using the default (or suggested prefix) is fine.

11) Ensure FTP is set to No, then click Next.

12) Enter a site name (for example, Complete, Concrete, Concise or whatever name you want this site to have).

Enter Your Email address. Joomla! will send notifications to this email address.

Enter an Admin Username. This is the username you will use to log into the Joomla! backend. By default, it is Admin (and I leave it as Admin)

Enter an Admin Password – this is the password you will use to log into the Joomla! backend.

Confirm the Admin Password.

Choose if you want to install the sample data. I like to install it, since it saves me the trouble of populating the site with sample articles. The sample data is only available in English.

Click on Next.

13) Confirm you have successfully installed. Note that your user name for logging into the Joomla! backend is admin (if you accepted the default name, otherwise it is whatever name you entered into the Admin Username field in Step (12)).

Cleaning Up

As a security precaution, Joomla! requires you to remove the installation directory before the site becomes functional. In Joomla! 1.7.x, this can be done from the final installation screen.

14) Click on the Remove installation folder to remove the installation folder and complete the installation.

The post Installing Joomla! 1.7 Under XAMPP appeared first on Complete, Concrete, Concise.