In this chapter you have seen that you can create a blog with a basic Joomla! site and some help from third-party services. So why use a blogging component such as MyBlog along with JomComment, or a combination of XBlog, IDoBlog, and a commenting component like yvComments? The answer is very simple. It will be good if you start a blog and have different authors for your blog.
However, there are also some downsides to the use of a blogging component. The drawbacks are:
- You have to learn how to use it the right way
- It can slow down your web site
- It adds a lot of bulk to your database since all the comments and posts are stored in extra tables
- With commercial components it will cost you money
- You have to update them separately from your Joomla! core updates
- If you want to use a blogging component look at what the Big Boys are using
By the Big Boys I mean the well-known Joomla! ambassadors such as Steve Burge from www.alledia.com and Barry North from www.compassdesigns.net. They blog with a basic Joomla! system, enhanced with commercial JomComment to handle the comments on their articles. And I must admit that I have rarely seen any spam comments on either of these sites. As for the Joomla! site, they use JXtended Comment from http://jxtended.com which is also a commercial commenting component.
This chapter wouldn't be complete if there was no mention of the most widely used blog component MyBlog from www.azrul.com. Therefore, I bought and installed it on one of my sites, just to make sure that you can get an insight of what is incorporated into this component. First there is an admin panel for the component, where you can work through the component:
What you need to know after installation is, how to configure the general settings.
If you look at the settings, all the things you have read about will come back:
- The Blog Title
- The Blog section which MyBlog will use to handle to content
- Enabling the RSS Feeds
- Use of FeedBurner service with the feedburner URL
If you start writing an article it is done in the same way a normal article would be done, but you have extra options such as Tags and trackbacks in a place that you can use. You can write metadata into the article by using a small link to your options screen called Meta Info. You can choose your publishing date just like you can in Joomla! articles.
As for the use of SEF URLs for this component, there is a separate section in sh404SEF that creates nice URLs to each post.
I think the best additions that this component gives you for blogging are:
Purchase and installation of this component is simple and it does the job well.
It is up to you to decide whether you want to pay for the extra functionality it brings. At the time of writing the standard version costs 35 USD, and the professional version without the backlink, and with more templates costs 45 USD.