So there I was working furiously on a new Joomla 1.6 template and out of the blue I am "randomly contacted via email" by a friendly gentleman offering to let me test out his Joomla extension called EasyBlog.

Of course, I was skeptical at first but it looked pretty cool in the screen-shots so I figured it would be worth a try. I am glad I did give it a whirl because I am super impressed! And super happy I have a brand new blogging tool to actually help me get into gear again.

There are a lot of features in EasyBlog which will definitely help to improve my blogging experience and encourage me to blog more often. It should also feed traffic to my site because when setting it up I found myself wanting to sign up for FeedBurner and Twitter and some other things I should have done long ago. Not to mention it also allows visitors to sign up and post blog posts of their own!

A few months ago I opened up the ability for visitors to post articles and whatnot to this site. Now you still have that option but we have taken it to a whole new level with EasyBlog installed on here.

So go for it! Create an Account in the Members area on this site and go to My Account > Dashboard on the top drop down menu. Try EasyBlog out for yourself right here and right now! Post an entry about your own Joomla website or products. Please try to keep it clean and spam free and Joomla related if at all possible but it doesn't hurt to describe your site, and post a link. I should warn you, a link to your post may be sent to Twitter.

EasyBlog also integrates with social networks like Twitter and Facebook and can tweet to the configured Twitter account automatically when posts are published. It wasn't hard for me to setup EasyBlog at all. Especially with the great documentation that they provide for it.

Not only does EasyBlog come with all you want to get started, it has a huge list of modules and plugins available for download in the members area on their website. A small sample of these are a tag cloud module, latest posts module, latest comments module, and search plugins for posts and comments. There are many more.

Other benefits include:

• Use on unlimited websites.
• They will even install it for you on one site if you like.
• Tech support for a year.
• They allow you to remove their copyright notice for free.
• Migration from Joomla articles which worked perfectly for me. Also can migrate from SmartBlog.
• Categories to organize posts in which will be created automatically from Joomla categories upon migration from Joomla articles.
• Tags, so posts can be tagged with keywords allowing for a more specific categorization.
• Meta tag management - posts can have meta tag keywords and descriptions added to them to help with search engines.
• Extensive support for trackback URLs providing your posts with trackback URLs as well as allowing you to add other peoples trackback URLs to your posts.
  
• Permalinks will help ensure search engines and websites linking in can always find the post they are linking to.
• ACL management so you can control permissions for what users are allowed to do throughout the system.
• Built in commenting system with the option to integrate with your existing comment system such as Intense Debate, Disqus comment system, JomComment, or Jcomments (which is the one I use on my site).
• It also will integrate with Recaptcha to help prevent comment spam.
• Multiple themes available to choose from by default. No searching for different looks.
• Great control over your blogs layout and appearance. You can customize it pretty much however you like but the default options all look great to me. In fact, I didn't change too much at all yet.
  
• Team blogs! A group of bloggers can be organized to blog as a team.
• Subscriptions to blog posts so visitors can get updates on new posts. Visitors can subscribe to blogs and categories as well as specific bloggers.
• Optional notifications of new posts to a given email of new blog entries and comments. Also sporting the options to notify bloggers and subscribers of new comments or posts. You also can modify the emails that go out for notifications.
• Bloggers can have their own profiles and avatars and can be integrated with other systems such as Community Builder or Kunena among others.
• Integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Bit.ly, Addthis or Sharethis, TweetMeme, Google Buzz, Feedburner and last but not least, JomSocial.

By now you can see why I am so impressed by it. EasyBlog isn't just some other blogging extension. It works! And it is actually easy to use. I am loving it already and I haven't even finished making my first post yet. So far I have not hit any bugs at all and that is highly unusual for me.

So why are you still here? Go check it out or if you have already made up your mind to buy it go directly to the buy now page!

Enjoy! :)

Ryan Rhode
TY2U.com Designs