Customization
You can customize Joomla into anything that you need it to be. There are thousands of templates, components, plugins and modules that help you make your site unique. Whatever you need to do, you have the ability to do it. If none of the free themes suit your tastes, or you don’t know how to develop on the Joomla platform, check out some of the vendors that sell high quality themes to meet your needs.

Easy To Deploy
Whether you run a Windows or Linux environment, you are able to deploy Joomla. Within a matter of minutes you can get your Joomla site up and running, ready to serve up your content to your users.

Mature Platform
Joomla has been around for over six years, since it forked from the Mambo project. In that time it has evolved into a very advanced and stable CMS that is used in schools, corporate intranets and small businesses. If you need a website, Joomla will be there for you.

My Seven Iron
The last reason that I love Joomla so much is that it came naturally to me, kind of like my favorite golf club. I picked it up, looked at it and studied it, and within a couple of swings I was up and running. I have always felt comfortable not only with the software, but also the community, which in large part is why Joomla is so awesome to me.

Whether you serve a moderate amount of very large videos, or a large amount of smaller videos, you can push a lot of bandwidth to support the steaming. To alleviate some of the stress on your server, you can upload your larger media files to our Cloud Files infrastructure to be distributed over the Content Delivery Network (CDN).

In addition to not burdening your server, a huge advantage of serving the files over the CDN is that the content will be cached on geographically dispersed servers, which results in faster video streaming performance for your end user.

Finally, in order to keep the same look and feel on your website, you might want to use a Joomla component to stream your video instead of embedding your video from one of the video sharing sites. These video streaming components are available for purchase and can connect to your video media on the CDN while preserving your overall site design.

First, you can utilize a .htaccess file and cache all your images, scripts, javascripts and CSS among other things.

Second, you can add components into your Joomla site that give you more granular control into what you cache. Instead of caching an entire page, you can cache specific images, media or a gallery. By doing this, your visitor’s browser response time is sure to decrease.

Finally, you should consider integrating a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to store and serve some of the media for your Joomla site.  Use a component to such as CDN for Joomla to push all your media to our Cloud Files offering. When you do this, you take advantage of the geographically dispersed servers in the CDN to quickly push the files to the end user, which will result in a much better experience.

It’s a good idea to cache images, especially those that are used repeatedly on the site. However, there are many types of files that benefit the site if they are cached properly. Some files change rarely and other change more often, so it’s important to cache them for different lengths of time. However, for the cache to be useful, it must be at least two hours. Here are some common suggestions:

• 4 Hours: HTML files
• 2 Days: XML and TXT files
• 1 Year: ICO, PDF, FLV, JPG, JPEG, PNG, GIF, JS, CSS and SWF files

First, it is important that you backup your site and store those backups off of your server. You never want to upgrade your Joomla site without having a restore point. Cloud Files is an excellent option to store backups to ensure they are safe in the event that something happens during an upgrade. For more information, be sure to check out my previous post on backing up Joomla.

The first thing that you will want to upgrade is the Joomla CMS itself. You can refer to the backend of your Joomla control panel to find out what version you are running. You should compare that to the current version on Joomla’s official site, which will be the version with the latest and greatest feature set and security patches.

You also will need to update your Joomla template and components. The template is the overall look at feel of your Joomla site. Whether you used one that was available for free, or you paid for a custom theme from a store like Joomlashack; it is important to get the latest version. You also want to update your components — those mini applications that make your Joomla site truly customized. Doing this ensures your template and components are “hardened” against any previous vulnerability.

Find out more how Rackspace can help you focus on building your Joomla site instead of managing servers. Check out Joshua’s previous post where he talked about backing up your Joomla site.

Joomla is a dynamic Content Management System (CMS) that contains two things: your web files and your database. You must backup both of these pieces in order to be able to restore your site. Best practices call for you to store the backup files in a different place than your production server. You want to make sure that your backup files are safe if your production server has problems, goes offline or experiences a catastrophic disaster. An excellent place to store your backup files is on Rackspace’s Cloud Files platform.

One way to backup your Joomla site is to do it manually with scripts; however, you have to be disciplined to run them on your own. I choose to run my backups automatically with a component called Akeeba Backup (formerly known as JoomlaPack). I can select whether I want backups to be run weekly or daily, and the component saves those backups as a JPA file. All I have to do is check that the script is running properly.

Just having backups isn’t enough; you also have to make sure that you can bring your site back online with them. Don’t assume that your backups are running and everything will work fine. You need to test them out by doing a restore. When you test your backups, be sure to restore to another environment: you don’t want to accidentally overwrite your production server.

The key take away is that you need to schedule backups of your Joomla site and test that you can restore from those backups. Be sure to drop by the blog next week when I’ll discuss the importance of updating your Joomla site.

Find out more how Rackspace can help you focus on building your Joomla site instead of managing servers. Check out Joshua’s previous post where he gave an overview to Joomla.

Joomla’s official site lets you download the application and get it up and running on one of Rackspace’s cloud offerings in just minutes. A variety of different businesses, including enterprises, mom-and-pop shops, blogs and ecommerce sites use Joomla. Because Joomla is a free application, it is easily accessible by anyone who wants or needs to get a site up and running quickly. Additionally, there are hundreds of thousands of ways to customize your Joomla site with special templates (the look and feel of your site) and components (mini applications) to make sure your brand is unique on the web.

If you have any questions about Joomla or how to host it in the cloud, feel free to reach out to us here at Rackspace. Check back next week for my next post where I talk about setting up backups, one of the first things you should do when launching a Joomla site.

Find out more how Rackspace can help you focus on building your Joomla site instead of managing servers.