Posted by: gbluma
on Feb 2, 2009
Joomla has made module development a piece of cake. If you want a section of your module to display a poll or banner it's really easy. Likewise Joomla has made it easy to edit the content in those modules with module parameters.
... But one thing you haven't been able to do is edit those parameters in a WYSIWYG textarea... until now...
Posted by: twmeier
on Jan 28, 2009
When a user is editing a content item, module, menu item etc., Joomla "locks" this item to other users. This insures that changes can not be made by different users at the same time. Below is a picture of what another user would see in the backend if he were to try to also edit the setting of the "Who's Online" module.
Posted by: twmeier
on Jan 21, 2009
Joomla 1.5 has a great pop up class which will dim the webpage and popup a smaller page over top of it. In order to use this feature, you must include the following in your code, or you could also place it inside your template between the tags.
JHTML::_('behavior.modal');
Then put in a link with the information you want similar to the one below:
If you want to popup a page from your own website without all the menus and modules, then all you need to do is change the index.php in the URL to index2.php or adding &tmp=component to the end of the URL (if you do not have a ? in your URL use ?tmp=component).
Posted by: gbluma
on Jan 20, 2009
The HTTPS Redirect Plugin redirects a visitor to the same page under HTTPS.
When a user requests a url over HTTP (e.g. http://example.com/secure/stuff/ ) Joomla will handle the redirection to the appropriate HTTPS page (e.g. https://example.com/secure/stuff/ )
Posted by: twmeier
on Jan 13, 2009
There are times when you may need to upload an images, pdf or any other type of file to your site. Luckily, Joomla has a built in tool for uploading your files. This tool is called the Media Manager.
Posted by: twmeier
on Jan 6, 2009
There are times when you may not want the ability to edit a Virtuemart product from the front end. This may be due to a poorly designed template that just doesn't work well with this feature.
To remove the edit button from the product detail page, you will need to open the following file:
/administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html/shop.product_details.php
Posted by: twmeier
on Dec 31, 2008
In order to use Joomla's built in SEF Urls feature, you must first enable it. To do so, go to the backend of the site (/administrator) and go to the "Site" tab and select "Global Configuration."
On that page you will see the following:
Set the "Search Engine Friendly URLs" to Yes and the "Use Apache mod_rewrite" to Yes.
You will next need to rename the htaccess.txt file in your root directory to .htaccess as seen below:
That is all there is too it. Joomla will now automatically change all your standard dynamic URLs in your content items to more friendly URLs.
Posted by: twmeier
on Dec 23, 2008
Editing content in Joomla is extremely easy. You can edit content from the front end of the website, or you can edit content from the backend of the website.
To edit content from the front end of the website you must first be logged in. It is important to note that you must be logged into the front end of the site in order to edit from the front end.
Posted by: gbluma
on Dec 18, 2008
In my previous article Write an Advanced Joomla 1.5 Authentication Plugin I went over how to integrate Joomla with an alternate login system (i.e. legacy code from a previous project)
This is good, but we don't need to stop here. We can improve the authentication plugin by attaching session data from our legacy system and essentially merge our legacy session with our joomla session.
For example if we have a database table for session data with the following fields:
Posted by: twmeier
on Dec 16, 2008
As mentioned in my last blog, Joomla uses dynamic URLs. These URLs contain characters for passing information to the current web page. These URLs can be long and complicated and may not be indexed by many of the major search engines. The following URL is an example of a dynamic URL:
http://www.lab11.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=32
