Today's presentation the Auto-Frontpage. It's a Joomla Plugin that will automatically publishing articles on the frontpage of your Joomla website. First of all it will auto-publish all your new articles. No more messing around with publishing manually and struggling over the right order of articles. Secondly this plugin will also take care of the homepage when you don't have any new articles. in this case the plugin will republish one of your old articles, keeping your site fresh for visitors anda for Search Engines. It's great for SEO and the visitors doesn't get bored. You can define the time period for getting the frontpage updated. Almost any parameters can be configured easily.
Setting Started:
You will probably need to set up few parameters first to get you going. First you might wonna adjust the maximum number of articles to publish on frontpage, default value is 10. Make sure this value is not larger than the number of articles defined for your frontpage layout. Then you should specify which articles are always suppose to be published. Usually this will be the article with your homepage and it most likely should be a first. In order to do that you need to add the following line to the 'Fixed Pages' text area: 1=ARTICLE_ID where 'ARTICLE_ID' is the id of your homepage article and '1' mean that it needs to be first. Last thing to do is to define if we want to republish the old artciles when new one are not available. To do so just set the 'Force Publish' to 'Yes'. Now if you feel like you need more control over what is going on, just keep reading. Next section describes each parameter in details.
Parameters:
| Maximum Articles |
This parameter defines the maximum number of articles to display at once on the FrontPage. It includes all the items (also the fixed ones) no matter what mode selected.
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| Fixed Pages |
In this text box you can define the articles you don't want to be touched by Auto-FrontPage. Each artcile id on new line. The format of the values permitted is either a pair of "ORDER=ARTICLE_ID" or just ARTICLE_ID, in the last case the plugin will try to automatically identify the current article order position, or will use the first available. Article positions start from 1.
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| Minimal Interval Units | Time units of the 'Minimal Interval between Executions' parameter. |
| Minimal Interval between Executions | Minimal time interval between plugin executions. This is important for optimization, lowering this value will increase overhead. |
| Force Publish | When set to 'yes' will pubslih a random article if new arctiles wasn't found. Works with 'Force Publish Interval' parameter. |
| Force Publish Interval Units | Time units of the 'Force Publish Interval' parameter. |
| Force Publish Interval | Minimal time interval between forced publish. (Relevant only in 'Force Publish' Mode) |
| Include/Exclude Mode | Defines how to treat the content settings below - section, category and articles; whether to include or to exclude them from the articles publishing pool. |
| Include/Exclude Sections | Which sections to include/exclude in auto-publish (id's, comma delimited - 1,2,3,...) |
| Include/Exclude Categories | Which categories to include/exclude in auto-publish (id's, comma delimited - 1,2,3,...) |
| Include/Exclude Articles | Which articles to include/exclude in auto-publish (id's, comma delimited - 1,2,3,...) |
Source: www.joomlaworld.org
