Ever wondered how to export a copy of your Joomla site hosted by a hosting company to a home computer? The following practical steps will produce an identical copy of the site on your home computer.

A Joomla website consists of two separate components: 1) the databases and 2) the scripts and codes that make up the Joomla package. As a content management system or CMS, Joomla stores the data in mysql databases. In order to make a copy on your home computer, you will need to make a copy of the 1) codes, 2) the scripts and the database and 3) install the operating environment on your Windows computer Joomla understands. Although this may look complicated, it is not so difficult once you know what you are doing. As such, please visit our disclaimer before you to delete or otherwise render your website useless.

Step 1: Download WAMP from www.wampserver.com Please ensure you download the package from this website since there are many other versions of similar packages ...Read more...

Not everyone has access to fast Internet. In many developing countries, Internet is provided through slow satellite links. We managed to improve access to Joomla sites dramatically in terms of speed by using the following settings and guidelines:

Step 1: Enable the cache option in global configuration. Please be aware: with this option enabled, you may not see the changes you have made to your site immediately. And that is a bit the point of caching a site, so that the browser does not need to process information all the time.

Step 2: Enable GZIP Compression in Global Configuration. We tested access to our Joomla sites with and without this option enabled (using satellite internet links in Afghanistan), and it makes a big difference. I would not worry too much about this if your audience is in the US or Europe with fast internet, but for sites that reach out to people in developing countries or areas with slower internet connections, we recommend that you use the GZIP option. You can see our GZIP tutorial here.

Step 3: Minimize the number of components and modules you use. ...Read more...

Projects and organizations often need to report to clients on progress indicators as part of the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) requirements. Amchart is an excellent tool to include an indicator page in your Joomla empowered website. Below is a list of graphs provided by Amchart, each with their individual xml data and settings files. The data files can be easily maintained by field staff. We also added an upload facility so data files can be uploaded for each graph individually by authorized users - this is especially useful when data needs to be updated and FTP is not an appropriate method.