Step 19 - Bringing it altogether, what should I use?
Now you have read all my research let’s just review what has been said and then read the final conclusions.
Blogging System
Unless you want to use WordPress as a dedicated blogging system there is only one system you should use for Joomla, Easyblog. Easyblog has additional features such as remote blogging, inbuilt commenting, automatic Twitter and Facebook posting, Team Blogging, configurable URLs and much more rather than just dealing with the content. The beauty is you do not need to start finding additional plugins to do all the basics as you would with Joomla (only) or K2. There are other blogging systems for Joomla but they are paid and even so Easyblog seems to get the most votes and support. I can highly recommend the support, second to none.
My choice: Easyblog
Reasons: Lots of social integrations, configurable URLs and excellent support. Best blogging system for Joomla by far.
Commenting System
Local
If I were going to use a local commenting system I would choose, kommento. I would choose this over Jcomments. Komento it is well supported and has extra features such as automatic comment moderations, technology borrowed from WordPress. It is also made by Stakideas, the same producer as Easyblog. There would be no lag in displaying comments as they are stored in my database.
Remote
There is only one kid on the block for this, Disqus. It is everywhere and you can control comments from multiple sites in one control panel. The downside is the comments are not stored on your website. The comments are Ajax driven and Google has only really just started indexing them.
My choice: Komento
Reasons: Well designed, allows my to control comments from different areas on my website and the comments are stored locally.
www or non-www
This is a simple one to answer because I am runing a website with more than a blog on it and it is 2018. but for completeness there is another option if you are runngin a company website giving 2 options
- http://mydemosite.com/ - This should be used for personal websites or blog websites, but if you prefer www you can still use it.
- http://www.mydemosite.com/ - If running a company website you should always include the www as it seems to be the accepted standard.
My choice: non-www
Reasons: It is 2018 and QuantumWarp is more personal than corporate.
http or https
Again because it is 2018 and security and privacy is an issue an easy one to answer for all types of website.
My choice: https
Reasons: This is required for good ranking and security.
News or Blog
One thing to consider is whether your blog is a dedicated blog, personal blog, company websitee witha blog.
- If you are running a dedicated blog you should have your articles running from the root
- If you are running a website with more than a blog I would run it from a subfolder/menu item called ‘blog’
- If you are running a company website I would run it from a subfolder/menu item called ‘news’
My Choice: /blog/
Reasons: QuantumWarp is more personal than corporate and I have other stuff on my website.
URL Slug
The only options I would consider are the following basic structures
- Date Based
- Article Tiltle Only
Date Based: If you do 5 articles a year why would you need to divide your articles up in too months and days? The answer is you wouldn’t and just using the year would probably be ok. For medium article volume sites using the year and the month seems enough this also seems quite popular online. See my notes from earlier on deciding the segmentation based on article post frequency for more information.
If you move your articles from category to category its URL will not get affected and therefore any link juice pointing to that page or indeed incoming links will not be affected. However if you change the article title it would be.
Article Tiltle Only: This URL structure is the simplest and a few large online blogs use it. Again like option 1 changing of an articles category will not affect it and so this is quite resilient. The articles are not arranged by a date in the slug but search engines do not really need this information in the slug anymore.
Not having category information in the URL does not seem to cause many online blogs issues.
My choice: https://www.mydemosite.com/{article_title}
Reasons: This slug is resistant to category change and is a popular method.
Asset storage
NB: This is only required if your bloggin system does not have an inbuilt method of handling assets.
Now this might sounds a really stupid thing to consider but when you are creating your blog articles you want to know where to put the images because of rules rather than having a guess each time or randomly creating a folder or worse, just dumping files anywhere. At first these methods will save you time but the longer you do it the harder it will be to find images, what to call folders and so on... until you wished you started doing things properly in the first place. After research I have came up with an excellent method for storing your images. It is expandable and prevents folders from becoming infinitely full (which can be a pain when enumerating folders with an FTP software) See my notes from earlier about deciding the segmentation level based on article post frequency where you should of already decided what level you requrie.
- images/blog/{year}/{month}/{day}/{article_title} (For large sites)
- images/blog/{year}/{month}/{article_title} (For medium sites)
- images/blog/{year}/{article_title} (For small sites)
Again like URLs they can be slightly tweaked to match your needs. The above URLs use Joomla’s image folder as their root as do most content driven stuff in Joomla. I have denoted the blog content with its own folder. These URLs are to be used irrespective of how you actually set you SEF URLs, but that does not mean you cannot match them i.e. if you use in both /{year}/{month}/{day}/{article_title}/.
If you start off with just using the year you can always add in a month folder later if you find you are writing to much content for 1 folder. At the very least you can run with just the year, for one year and then after that start adding in month folders to accommodate your extra writings.
As for the article title, once you have finished tweaking the article you are not likely to ever want to change this, and in the unlikely event you need to alter the article and altering its links will not be the end of the world.
My choice: images/blog/{year}/{article title}
Reasons: My website will only a have a small posting frequency of high quality articles.
Step 20 - Copy and Paste This!!!
This is an overview of what I have chosen and will act as a checklist for my future blog developements.
My Choices
- Blogging System: Easyblog
- Commenting System: Komento
- Domain Prefix: non-www
- Protocol: https
- Location: /blog/
- Slug: /{article_title}
- Asset Storage: images/blog/{year}/{month}/{article_title}
- Full URL: https://mydemosite.com/blog/{article_title}