Sometimes you want to create more than one link to a given item in your Joomla site. Let's say you have an article that you want to show up as subnavigation under Item A and Item B on your menu.

You could create two identical articles, linking one to Item A and the other to Item B. We used to do that in the static HTML days. Unfortunately, that generally meant that you had a maintenance nightmare, since when the page's content changed, you had to change it in two places.

With Joomla, you could create two links, one from Item A and the other from Item B, to the same piece of content. This works, but now you have two different URLs for the same page. That can lose you points in search engines.

Every once in a while, you might want to create links on your website that aren't directly linked to one of the menus displayed on your website.

A great way to accomplish this is to use a hidden menu. Here's how to do it.

1. Go to the back end of Joomla and log in. Under Menus, pick Menu Manager. Click New to create a new menu. Call it hiddenmenu (all one word). Fill in "hiddenmenu" for the 4 blanks presented.

I just got back from a great week at Lynda.com, recording two more titles, hopefully out soon.

The first title is "CMS Website Strategy and Planning", and it covers all of the things you should think about and talk about with your client before building your website.

The second title is "Preparing CMS Web Graphics Using Open Source Tools". It covers how to think about a good design for a CMS as well as create an HTML page using GIMP for graphics and KompoZer for writing the HTML and CSS.

Everywhere you look, usability problems exist everywhere.

Sometimes those usability problems are a direct result of branding.

Let's take this example. Health insurance! Now, there's plenty of usability problems in the health insurance industry, but I want to focus on one tiny little problem, a direct result of branding conflicting with usability.

Know your target audience! And do a little testing before you launch.

Those of you who freelance or work for a firm have heard this story before.

The client needs it now! The Joomla site is 90% done and the developer has disappeared and there's just a few more buttons to click and the site will be totally done. The client thinks you can finish this in just a few hours. Plus, of course, you don't have anything else to do, so you can drop everything to get this job done.

Then they find out the price. And they're shocked, shocked!!! at how much it costs to get that little bit of work done. They'll just ask their kid/nephew/the CEO's son/go to eLance and find someone else to do it.

If you ever installed the sample data in Joomla, you've seen that little "welcome" message over on the right side of the screen, right in the control panel.

Ever wondered how to get rid of it? Ever wondered if you could make your own, so that it was actually useful to your client and not just you?

It's easy to do!

It's been way too long since I've posted, but that's because I'm spending many hours each day writing a book. Joomla! Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site is due to be published in January next year by Wrox Press.

Writing a book has definitely been the most challenging project I've had for quite a while. Knowing something and teaching it are always two separate things. You have to know what you're talking about at a very deep level to really teach it well.

I've also been learning a ton about Joomla, not to mention noticing a bunch of little usability problems that I'd overlooked for years. Why, for example, is there an option to "show hits" in the menu item for a Category Blog when there's no place that hits ever actually show in that layout? Why is it called Published in the Article Manager, but Enabled in the Module Manager?

Great news for Joomla developers! Elance, a site putting clients in touch with freelancers, says that the 8th most popular freelance skill out there is Joomla. PHP came in at #1, MySQL at #4, and WordPress and #10.

I can certainly confirm this based on how many calls for help we've gotten lately here at 4Web. We're taking projects with a September start right now -- in this economy!

The Marlboro College Graduate Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, just released its Open Source Web Development certificate in a wholly online format.

If you've been working with Joomla, but you want to know a lot more about it, this is the certificate program for you.  The certificate introduces students to Joomla, as well as planning a website, understanding the code that runs it, and developing and executing an online marketing plan.

The certificate consists of 12 credits: