I thought I would create this tutorial to help any of my client's with mantaining a blog on their website.  There are a lot of Joomla! extensions out there specifically to make it easier to blog in Joomla!, however, it's really quite easy and here's my Blogging in Joomla Tutorial.

Login to your account via yoursite.com/administrator.

Setting up your blog as a menu item in Joomla!.

If your blog is not already set up as part of your web design, here is a simple tutorial on how to set it up all by yourself!

Your blog will be made in articles, so you will need to have a dedicated section & category for your blog.  Set up your section through the top menu in your control panel, click or hover over "Content." Select "Section Manager." You will see a menu on the top right like this one:

Select "New" and create a section "Blog" for example.  You only need to enter "Blog" in the "Title" field and click "Save."  The default settings are fine in most cases.

Also, you will need to add a category for your blog.  From the "Content" menu in the top menu, select "Category Manager."  You will see a similar manager as the section manager.  Select "New" again and add somethin in the "Title" field like "BlogPosts." No other settings need to be defined, you can just click "Save."

Now that you have the category for your blog set up, you can make a menu item, or link, in a relevant menu, such as "About Me."

You will need to have a menu item set up for people to access your blog. There are two different ways to do this.  You can set it up where it will have a list of your blog posts by title, or where it will show a set amount of blog posts (the entire content of the blog, this is more like blogger.com style or how wordpress is set up).

I'll show you both ways.

Setting up your blog as a list of blog posts

(Wordpress or Blogger style)

To set up a blog in blog post format, go to the menu where you would like to add your blog as a menu item. On my site it's in the menu with all the other "me" related stuff.  After clicking on the menu you want the blog link in, you will see all your other menu items. In the top right hand corner click "New" for a new menu item.

You will see the different types of menu items to choose from.

Choose Category Blog Layout.  You then will need to select the category from the drop down menu to the right. For example: Blog/BlogPosts

Enter a title for the menu item like "My Blog."

View your website in a different browser tab (CTRL+T or command+T). You should now see the link "My Blog" which will take you to a page with your recent posts fully displayed on it.

Setting Up Your Blog Menu Item to Show a List of All your Blog Posts

Follow the same steps you would to start with a new menu item, but instead of selecting "Category Blog Layout" select "Category List Layout." (My Tutorials are set up in this manner, so that you can select the specific Tutorial you want to read).

Select the same category as the one you created for your blog posts, enter a "Title" for your menu item. You may also want to change the "#Links" field to say "ALL" to show all the posts you made. Click "Save."

View your website to see the changes. You should see a link that will take you to a page with a list of your blog posts.

TIP: You may want to post a test blog post to see that they are showing up correctly.

Posting Articles to Your Joomla! Blog

Once you have the "section" and "category" for your blog posts to be organized in, you can start posting blogs.

Click on the 'Content' menu again, and select "Article Manager."  From the top right menu, select "New" to make a new blog post.

Enter your title, blog content in the text area, and make sure published is set to "Yes." Change the section to whatever you set up (i.e. Blog), and category to whatever your menu item links to (i.e. BlogPosts) and click "Save."

Your blog posts should be appearing on the page where your menu item links to, and in the format you specified when setting up your menu item.

TIP:  If you're going to blog, you may as well enter metadata as you go.  You can do this easily by clicking on the "Metadata Information" tab in your Article editor. Here you can enter "meta description" where you can describe your blog entry in a sentence, and meta keywords, where you can enter relevant keywords to your blog.  This helps others to find your blog, and helps search engines recognize your site's content accurately.