I'm very proud of myself today. I'm in NO way a PHP programmer, I've just been a Joomla user since before Joomla was Joomla and have never been afraid to jump in and beat it to submission whenever I've had an idea. Sometimes, extension developers will solve your crisis for you. Other times, you have to dig in and create your own solutions.

Yesterday, I was customizing one of my sites and working on getting JomSocial looking pretty. It's often a case of viewing the source to see what IDs and classes are involved and then going into Dreamweaver and using the 'find and replace' function to find every instance of a CSS call. It can be crazy, but I'm stubborn about getting what I want.

Nothing can be more frustrating than installing a hot new component or module, going to your Joomla website, hitting refresh only to be presented with some blasted error such as "Fatal Error: Call to a member function get() on a non-object in blah blah on line blah blah."  It makes you want to scream and pull your hair out!

This has happened to me countless times and unfortunately, when you're using an Open Source system like Joomla and open source extensions (and sometimes PAID ones,) it's going to happen to you at some point.

Here's just a basic rundown of what you can do if you get a kooky error: 

In an earlier tutorial, I explained how your frontpage content item will disappear if you don't have the default 'Home' link at the top of your Main Menu.  But, what if you don't want your 'Welcome to the website' content item on the Frontpage, but you would rather have Sobi or CMS Realty to display instead?  Believe it or not, I didn't at first realize how to do this (but should have).  

Since I recently did this for a client, I thought I'd create a quick (well, maybe not so quick) and easy (ok, not so easy either) tutorial on how you can backup your Joomla site and move it to a new web host.

Since Joomla is made up mostly of files and folders with a MySQL database, we'll want to backup both.  The best way to start is to create a backup folder on your PC and then:

1. Using FTP, copy your Joomla site's configuration.php file over into your backup folder.

If you've ever wanted to frame a page of your website on another site or another area of your website for any reason, attempting it in Joomla may have given you fits as there's no obvious way  to do it without also pullng in your pretty header and columns. 

This one can be frustrating - you're working hard on your Joomla site and suddenly your front page content doesn't show!  First, check and make sure you've got a link to the Frontpage component in the Main Menu - and be certain it is published. 

For this article, I'm going to assume you've managed to get Joomla installed on your website host and now you're looking around in the back end and unsure what to do next.