Homepage von Tara, Nicole und Thorsten Rieß

(Some things are shamelessly stolen from here - I'd loved to use a trackback, but all I'm getting is an error message, that a link (like the one above) to the page is required)

What should a weblog provide?

• Comments (to interact with the readers)
• Blogping (to ping search engines)
• Pictures and videos (multimedia)
• Calendar (to make the search for articles easier)
• Tags
• Trackbacks (to link and to be linked to from other weblogs)
• Social bookmarks
• avatars and all articles by author

And of course all of the above should be managable in frontend.

So, here is my recommendation (almost everything is used hier on the page - maybe some day I'll pack all extensions to a bundle).

Comments

There are basically two possibilities, both of which do their job well. The first one is the component Disqus comment system, which integrates the webservice Disqus into the Joomla system. The advantage of this approach is that the management is completely done by Disqus, also there is spam protection and the barrier for new commentators is fairly low - sign up once and use for many blogs. Anyway, here I use the local system JComments. It seems well developed and maintained, and it provides plugins for other components (and is free (like in beer) unlike many other comment components).

Blogping

I use the plugin Blogping. Easy and functional.

Pictures and videos

I use the plugin All Videos Reloaded for videos, it helps to include videos into the content. For pictures a good WYSIWYG editor is recommended, for example the FCK Editor, in combination with FBoxBot, which automatically resizes pictures to thumbnails and makes them clickable.

Calendar

Simply Blog Calendar Reload (with customised colours).

Tags

I use a slightly customised version of Joomlatags. I changed the component such that tags automatically become meta keywords, which makes it easier to be found via search engines.

Trackbacks

I haven't found anything suitable, so I programmed this myself: Trackback.

Social bookmarks

Simply Sexy bookmarks.

Avatars and all articles by author

I use the plugins gAvatar and gAuthor to achieve this. Unfortunately, the code has to be changed slightly since it does not work properly with the latest Joomla release. But in exchange you get gravatar.com avatars on your site!

Conclusion

With a bit of patience and some effort it is possible to create a neat little weblog using Joomla and some selected components.