Routing: Joomla
Use this guide when Newsroom publishes posts to a Joomla website. Joomla and WordPress are mutually exclusive: a broadcaster can only have one of the two active as its website connection at a time. See Roles and permissions for who has access.
What you configure here
When connecting Joomla, you fill in:
- Host — the address of the Joomla website; Newsroom must actually be able to reach this address.
- API token and the token position (as an
X-Joomla-Tokenheader or as a Bearer token) — this is how Newsroom talks to the Joomla REST API. - YouTube embed position (required) — determines where a linked YouTube video ends up in the article: at the top, right after the “read more” point, or at the bottom of the article.
When you save, Newsroom immediately tests the connection by requesting articles from Joomla with the token you entered. If this fails, you cannot save the connection — you never end up with a “half-working” connection.
A broadcaster can only have one active Joomla connection.
Roles and permissions
This page — like the rest of Settings > Routing, for all platforms — is only reachable for users with the Settings role (the same role used for most other Settings pages, e.g. AI settings and Plan/usage), not a separate Joomla-specific role. Without this role, opening the entire Routing page already shows an error instead of an overview of connected platforms.
Creating an API token in Joomla itself
The token you enter in Newsroom is not created in Newsroom — it’s created in the customer’s own Joomla admin backend. This happens outside Newsroom and is a one-time step per Joomla user:
Generate the token for the chosen user
Go to Users > Manage, open the user you want to use for the connection, and open the Joomla API Token tab. Click Save — Joomla generates the token once and displays it directly on screen.
Copy the token immediately
The token is only visible once after creation, and only to that specific user (other Super Users can’t see it either). Store it securely right away and enter it in the Joomla connection in Newsroom.
Each Joomla user can only have one active token at a time. If the token needs to be replaced (for example after a password change or staff change), an administrator with user management rights can revoke or reset the existing token in Joomla itself.
Images reach Joomla via a linked FTP/SFTP server. Link an FTP server first if you want images to be sent along.
Image settings
Separate from the FTP connection itself, you configure:
- Image format — webp is preferred; if no webp variant of the image is available, Newsroom automatically falls back to jpg.
- Upload path — the folder on the Joomla server where images end up
(default
/images). - Image position — whether the image is placed only in the intro text, only in the full article, or in both Joomla fields.
- YouTube embed position — the same setting you already chose when creating the connection (see Workflow below); you can simply change it again here, in the same screen as image format/path/position.
Image position “Full article” or “Both” clashes with YouTube embed position “right after the read-more point”. If a post has a “read more” point and a linked YouTube video, and the YouTube embed position is set to “right after the read-more point”, Newsroom automatically removes the image from that post’s full-article section — only the video shows up there, not the image. With image position “Intro text only” this has no effect; with “Both”, the image in the intro text still shows as normal, only the full-article copy disappears. Without a read-more point or without a linked video, the image stays in place everywhere.
Audio does not go through this Joomla connection — If you also want to deliver audio (e.g. a spoken version of the post) via FTP, that’s handled through the separate FTP Audio platform in Settings > Routing, not through Joomla’s FTP settings. FTP Audio reuses the same underlying FTP connection technique as Joomla images, but is its own, separately configurable connection.
Category mapping
The category mapping determines which Newsroom category corresponds to which Joomla category (the same kind of mapping as with WordPress, see Routing: WordPress).
Joomla doesn’t support multiple categories per article. If you select multiple categories for a post (multi-category), Joomla always uses only the first one selected — the rest are ignored for Joomla.
Set the matching Joomla category for every category you use in Newsroom.
Overriding the author name (alias)
Joomla shows an author name for every article (created_by_alias). Newsroom
fills it with the first value it finds, in this order:
- Source author of the post itself — a field you can fill in per post in the content editor (not Joomla-specific, works for every platform).
- If that’s empty: the alias the publishing Newsroom user has set under Users > Settings — also a general profile field, not a Joomla setting.
- If that’s also empty: the user’s regular name.
So this is not a setting you’ll find on the Joomla connection itself — there is no “author alias” field in Settings > Routing > Joomla. It comes from two general fields (source author per post, alias per user) that are only sent along for Joomla. WordPress uses neither field — there, author assignment is handled via the explicit user mapping in the WordPress connection itself. See Routing: WordPress for that mechanism.
Workflow
First create an API token in Joomla itself
See the steps above — this happens in Joomla, not in Newsroom.
Open Settings > Routing and select Joomla
Fill in the host, API token, and token position.
Choose the YouTube embed position
This setting is required, even if you don’t (yet) publish videos.
Connect an FTP/SFTP server for images
Enter the FTP details and click test. Only once the test succeeds can you save the connection — this prevents saving a connection that still won’t deliver images.
Set image format, upload path, and image position
These determine how and where the image appears in Joomla. This same screen also lets you adjust the YouTube embed position from the previous step.
Link categories
Category linking defines which Newsroom category corresponds to which Joomla category.
Publication per post is mandatory — Once Joomla is connected, the Joomla toggle in a post’s publication step is always on and cannot be turned off. See Publishing to your channels for that step.