The Joomla Blog

The mission of this blog is to make using joomla simple.
  • Community Builder upgrade available

    Last week the team behind Joomla's most popular social network-building software, Community Builder, released a new version (1.2.3) which fixes a bunch of bugs, includes a couple of functional updates and makes way for a new generation of the extension suite - starting with '2.0' to be released soon.

    The new release supposedly installs to replace the old one you may have on your site, so upgrading should be fairly simple. Also noteworthy; the release is rumored to work on the new Joomla 1.6 beta 5 release as well.

    You can read more info over on the Joomlapolis forums.

    We'll be popping a copy onto a fresh install of Joomla 1.6 and posting a review video later this week.



  • Kaltura for Joomla now available.

    kcw.jpgEmbedding videos in Joomla content can be a little tricky sometimes; with a stock Joomla site you really just have one main content area to bung embed code into, but you usually have a wysiwyg editor installed so that code gets messed up in html translation mistakenly or otherwise doesn't display whilst editing your content etc...  Of course, to make the job easier, extensions have emerged as plugins that let you use special tags in your content (such as Allvideos), but well, who wants to remember how to properly reference a 3rd-party hosted clip right?

    I've been excited about Kaltura for some time - its an Open-source video platform which works just like some of the major commercial ones (eg. Brightcove.) - only its cheaper (free?) and has some cool tools to let your community remix videos right in your website - using a huge assortment of samples; from your collection to anything hosted on Kaltura member sites.

    Kaltura just released an extension for Joomla and it looks pretty amazing; with it, you can:

    • upload/embed videos,
    • embed flickr/myspace video/photo/audio media in your articles,
    • manage media in a central control panel,
    • customize the embed player on your site,
    • edit and remix video to embed in your site and much more!

    Now, Kaltura still doesn't solve the issue of embedding content from 3rd party hosts like youtube, vimeo, etc..; it seems to offer myspace video embeds (ahem, what?) and thats about it.. so you're still going to have to use somethign like the Allvideos plugin to easily embed them, but Kaltura can be a very easy way to upload and embed original video - you can upload video files or record directly from your webcam...



  • Building custom forms - whats the best extension?

    logo_1.pngFor some reason Joomla core has never natively been able to create custom forms - I'm not sure if this is due to it originally (pre-1.5 releases) allowing non-article content types to sit in the usual database tables that comprise your site, or something else... However, for years there have been multiple extensions floating around that could let you create forms out of basic elements, like text, email and file fields.

    The most basic use of such extensions would be to get rid of Joomla's too-simple contact form system.  To do just that it seems that today there are a good 4 or 5 extensions sitting in the extensions directory that could help you out, though the more digging you do the more you'll find discrepancies between them.  Choosing the right form extension should be done with a balance of features to look for, such as:

    • A highly active and focused extension developer,
    • A multitude of fields already supported,
    • A large user base,
    • Development of the extension with long-term focus; if the extension has been created to allow the developer to just create 1 or 2 forms on his/her website, it may not be able to do more in the future (given that their initial need for it was satisfied).

    Back in 2007 I mentioned the release of a new extension called Fabrik - after spending some time comparing notes between a bunch of form components just now I am back in love with it!  You see, Fabrik takes the approach of forms being essential things for application-building - meaning that with Fabrik, you can create forms to not only email somewhere but store in your database which in turn can be displayed as lists through your site - you you can, for example, use it to build things like a custom library listing of books.

    Fabrik was around before last year's CCK-in-joomla copycating began and is interesting in not replacing Joomla's core article content-type but side-stepping it with a flexible system for handling custom content that supports custom theming and additional plug-in support (yes, you can make your own field types).

    Already available fields for forms created with Fabrik include; user details, captcha (with recaptcha!), text areas/fields, file uploads, images, database joins and more (including text displays to annotate fields - for 'help' purpose)...

    I highly recommend popping over to http://fabrikar.com and checking Fabrik out... Be sure to also pour through their forums to answer any queries you may have before installing/getting started.  If you think there's a simpler, more powerful, or otherwise better form extension out there drop a comment below!



  • Adding Tweetmeme to your Joomla site

    There are so many reasons to making your site easily visible on Social Networking websites and platforms - they raise general visibility and offer access to communities which may not otherwise find the information you spend time publishing in your posts.

    Of course, one of the most agile word-of-mouth Social platforms on the web is Twitter and you may have recently noticed a pretty cool widgety thing people are using on their blogs/sites to include a 'retweet' link and counter of how many times a post has been tweeted - its powered by a site called 'Tweetmeme' and installs pretty easily on any website - whether using static html or a CMS like Joomla.

    When you take a peek at the tweetmeme page containing the necessary embed code it may not be too easy to tell how to use it with your Joomla site - and though there's a couple of plugins/extension floating around Joomla, it may not offer the flexibility you require for clean theming/templating.  However, there's an easy way to go about embedding this and all it takes is a small modification of the de facto embed code. 

    All you have to do is:

    • copy the following code(s),
    • replace 'http://mysite.com' with your own root URL and:
    • replace 'twitterhandle' with your twitter handle (if you want reweets to automagically incude @yourtwitterhandle - you can opt to delete that line from the code otherwise.

    For individual article template files (eg 'templates > your_template  > html > com_content > article > default.php'):

    <script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
tweetmeme_url = 'http://mysite.com<?php echo $this->article->readmore_link; ?>';
tweetmeme_source = 'twitterhandle';
</script>

    For article list pages - like section or category template files (eg 'templates > your_template  > html > com_content > category > blog_item.php'):

    <script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
tweetmeme_url = 'http://mysite.com<?php echo $this->item->readmore_link; ?>';
tweetmeme_source = 'twitterhandle';
</script>

    The trick then is to take this code and include it in the appropriate version of your theme's template files - Of course, you can see I've wrapped the code in a div called 'tweetmeme' so you can then add in some css for that div wherever you want in your template to style the tweetmeme widget.  You can learn more about Joomla templates and the files which they can comprise of in the official documentation wiki.

    Basically what we've done here is include some php to tell the embed code the specific URL for each post - so the widget works cleanly on individual article pages as well as displays showing multiple articles at once.

    *You can see the widget in action here on this site above - just below the title of each post. Try it out and retweet this post to see how it works!



  • Deleting Super Administrators

    Incase you ever need to remove a user on a Joomla 1.5x site with Super Administrator status and are wondering why the site keeps spitting a message at you saying that you can't disable or delete them fear not, there's a simple work-around: simply edit them changing their group assignment to 'Registered' (only) and save the user - then you can disable or delete them.