The Joomlashack Blog

Using Docman to Handle Documents in Joomla

Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge

Published: 23 April 2010 23 April 2010

Place an Image Inside a Joomla Module

Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge

Published: 22 April 2010 22 April 2010

Changing the Joomla Homepage to a Different Component

Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge

Published: 19 April 2010 19 April 2010

Adding Downloadable Products to Virtuemart

Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge

Published: 19 April 2010 19 April 2010

UTF-8 in Joomla

Written by James Karakaua James Karakaua

Published: 18 April 2010 18 April 2010

Have you ever browsed to a website only to find that half the content is unreadable? Or that certain characters are being displayed in strange and mysterious ways? Or perhaps you wanted to enter a foreign or unusual character but found that the result was a garbled mess.

The chances are you have been subject to poorly managed character encodings. Joomla! extensions are no exception to these occurrences, but with a little bit of effort and some help from the Joomla! framework, we can avoid these problems with relative ease.

Read more: UTF-8 in Joomla

Place Joomla Images and Videos in a Pop-up

Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge

Published: 08 April 2010 08 April 2010

This tutorial was requested by a Joomla training student in our forum. They wanted to make images and videos on their site more interesting by showing them in a pop-up.

Our advice was to try Rokbox from Rockettheme. This extension can place images, videos, audio files, flash files or even entire websites inside a pop-up. This plugin is also available for WordPress.

We're going to show you several ways to use Rokbox on your site:

Installing Rokbox

1. Rokbox can be downloaded from the downloads section of Rockettheme.com.
2. Download both the "Content" and the "System" plugins. If you're using Joomla 1.5, download the top two files. They will be named:
   
   • Rokbox Content Plugin
   • Rokbox System Plugin
3. In your Joomla site, go to Administrator >> Extensions >> Install / Uninstall and upload both.
4. Go to Administrator >> Extensions >> Plugin Manager and enable both.

Testing Rokbox

The normal way of using Rokbox will only work inside articles. Try using this simple example as a test:

{rokbox}images/save.png{/rokbox}

That should place Joomla's save button inside a pop-up for you and also generate a thumbnail for you to click on.

If that doesn't work, you may have a problem with generating thumbnails automatically. You can then try one of these two options:

• Use a text link: {rokbox title=|click here|}images/save.png{/rokbox}
• Use your own image: {rokbox thumb=images/save.png}images/save.png{/rokbox}

Using Rokbox in Articles

There are lots of examples on the Rockettheme demo site: Rocketwerx.com. These are very simple examples to get you started:

• Remote images: {rokbox}https://www.ostraining.com/logo.png{/rokbox}
• Audio files: {rokbox}images/audio/example.mp3{/rokbox}
• Flash files: {rokbox}images/flash/example.swf{/rokbox}
• Youtube videos: {rokbox}https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BY40QvWQKE{/rokbox}
• Another website: {rokbox}https://www.google.com{/rokbox}

Using Rokbox Outside of Articles

You can use Rokbox in your other extensions. The only thing you need to do is modify your links so that they contain rel="rokbox".

For example < a href="https://google.com" > becomes < a href="https://google.com" rel="rokbox" >  (I've added a space after each < and before each > so you can see the code)

We've used this technique inside many different extensions.

Configuring Rokbox

There are three places where you can configure options for Rokbox:

1) Inside Extensions >> Plugin Manager >> Content - RokBox

Here you can change the settings for the thumbnails that Rokbox generates automatically:

2) Inside Extensions >> Plugin Manager >> System - RokBox

Here you can select from several different themes for Rokbox. The default is "Light" which provides a white background, but there are others:

If you enable "Legacy Parameters", you'll also get a much wider range of options. Full documentation on those is available on the Rocketwerx site.

3) For Individual Pop-Ups

We saw some examples earlier. Here are some ways you can modify individual pop-ups:

• Set files sizes: {rokbox size=|400 100|} ... this will show an image, flash or video file as 400px wide and 100 high.
• Set website sizes: {rokbox size=|65% 80%|} ... this will show a website as 65% of it's normal width and 80% of it's height.
• Custom thumbnail: {rokbox thumb=|images/example.jpg|} ... so you don't have to use the one automatically generated by Rokbox.
• Custom title: {rokbox title=|This is a cool image|} ... this is what people will click on to see the pop-up, or if there's a thumbnail, this is what they will see if they hover their mouse over the thumbnail.

Slicing up the Status Quo of Joomla Extension Design

Written by TJ Baker TJ Baker

Published: 05 April 2010 05 April 2010

One of the greatest things about Joomla is it's extendability. If you need a forum, a shop solution, a module to display weather, etc., you can bet there's probably a solution available. With over 4,600 extensions listed in the Joomla Extensions Directory at the time of this writing, Joomla users are presented with a myriad of options to extend the base functionality of their Joomla powered site.

While having such choice is an awesome thing for the Joomla end user or site developer, it can at times present some 'formatting' issues. Often times the end user might find themselves out of luck, going back and forth between a template provider and extension developer for support, with each pointing the finger at the other as the cause of a formatting issue.

Perhaps it's time to start slicing up the status quo and approach extension 'design' from a new direction.

Read more: Slicing up the Status Quo of Joomla Extension Design

How to Automatically Add Joomla Links to Keywords

Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge

Published: 24 March 2010 24 March 2010

This tutorial is the answer to two questions we've been asked repeatedly:

1. How can I automatically link keywords to the appropriate websites?
2. How can I use internal links for links on my site?

Essentially they're looking to change a link from https://www.cnn.com to https://www.ostraining.com/link/cnn/. The link still goes to the CNN website, but it first goes to a url on the webmaster's own site.

Why Would People Want to Automatically Link Keywords to Pages?

This is what Wikipedia, the New York Times, Techcrunch and many other websites do in order to keep visitors browsing around their site. It also has substantial SEO benefits. To find out more, see Session 25 of our SEO class: Understanding Internal Linking.

Why Would People Want Internal URLs for Links?

1. Statistics. They want to be able to count how many time a link has been clicked on.
2. SEO. Some webmasters are worried about leaking their Google Page Rank to other sites. I am not a big believer in this technique, but I know several people who consider this to be important.
3. Affiliates. People running affiliate programs want to protect their affiliate links:
   
   
   • They think internal urls are more likely to be clicked than a url that looks like this: https://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2660093-10423359
   • Some people deliberately avoid clicking on affiliate links
   • There are even rumored to be some computer-based viruses that are capable of inserting the spammer's affiliate ID into links to popular affiliate programs when people are browsing.

How to Create Internal URLs for Outbound Links

1. Go to Administrator >> Components >> Weblinks
2. Click "Categories" and then "New". Create a category for the kind of link you'd like to add. In this case, it will be "Media"
3. Click "Links" and then "New". Add entries for the websites you'd like people to visit:



4. If you're using Search Engine Friendly URLs, the URLs created will look like this: /weblinks/media/keyword/. If you're not, the URLs will be in this format: /index.php?view=weblink&catid=2:media&id=keyword&option=com_weblinks&Itemid=48

Automatically Add Links to Keywords

We're going to use a small plugin called the "Weblinks Content Plugin":

1. Download the plugin from https://joomlacode.org/gf/project/weblinks/
2. Go to Extensions >> Plugin Manager and enable the plugin.

That's it. Now every time you mention an entry in your Weblinks component it will be automatically linked. For example, these are our three recommendations for Joomla hosting companies: Rochen, Bluehost, Hostgator or even the example we gave earlier: BBC.

As people click on these links, you can see how many times they've clicked by going to Components >> Weblinks and looking at the "Hits" column:

Free video lessons from Joomlashack University

Written by Tom Elliott Tom Elliott

Published: 18 March 2010 18 March 2010

Joomlashack University is a Joomla video tutorial motherload. And now two of our video lessons are free on our YouTube channel!

With more than eight hours of professionally produced instructional videos, Joomlashack University provides a wide range of online lessons and courses to teach you Joomla inside out.

To give you a sense of the quality and depth of our more than eight hours of video lessons available in our online training course, we've uploaded two that you can now view for free below.

Read more: Free video lessons from Joomlashack University

K2 - the Missing Documentation (Part 2)

Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge

Published: 16 March 2010 16 March 2010

The hottest new extension in Joomla is K2.

Why? Normal Joomla articles provide you with a Title and Body. K2 gives you the flexibility to add much more information. Last week in Part 1 we covered the main administrator parts of K2:

• Installing K2
• The K2 dashboard
• K2 categories
• K2 fields and field groups
• K2 items

If you haven't done so already, I highly recommend that you go back and read Part 1 first. This week we're going to focus on the frontend of K2.

K2 Frontend

After Part 1, we should have a several categories, fields and items already inside K2. There are two items that we haven't covered yet, and they really affect the frontend of the site: users and tags.

K2 Users

Each user can have their own profile through K2. That information will appear at the bottom of each article they write, together with details of the other articles they've written. This is Chris, the author of the Canon EOS Rebel article:

• Administrators: People who are Managers, Administrator or Super Administrators can upload their information by going to Components >> K2 >> Users
• Front-end users: When you uploaded the original K2 package, it included a module called "K2 Login". Go to Extensions >> Module Manager and publish that module to allow front-end users to manage their profile.

One downside is that you can't create user fields currently, without writing a custom plugin. There is only:

• Name
• Email
• Gender
• Avatar
• Website
• Description

That stands in contrast to a really powerful feature of K2's user system:

K2 User Groups

K2 allows you to have different authors for different categories of your site. If you'd like to have a "Digital Reporter" who submits only review of cameras, you can go to Components >> K2 >> User Groups >> New and create that group from the screen below:

So you could create several different levels of users. To give just three simple examples:

• Contributors: They can add items in particular categories.
• Copy Editors: They can edit and publish items in particular categories.
• Senior Editors: They can add, edit, publish and control items in all categories.

If you use the "K2 Login" module, people can submit articles from the front-end without needing to write from the admin.

K2 Tags

K2 also has the option to add keyword tags to items. These are common in blogs and also is in catalogs so people can easily find related products. On your items, it will look like this:

These tags can be added easily: when you're submitting an item:

K2 Menu Links

Let's start seeing how our items look. Go to Menus >> Main Menu >> New and click K2. You'll see a screen like this:

• Item: Link to just one single K2 item.
• Categories: Link to items form one or more categories at the same time.
• Tag: You can add keywords to the bottom of each item.
• User Page (blog): You can have a list of all the items written by one author
• Latest items: This one explains itself :)

We've been looking at https://demo.getk2.org as an example. If you look there you'll see examples of those different kinds of layouts:

• "Product" = Item
• "Blog Entry" = Item
• "Category Layout"and "Product Categories" = Categories
• "Latest items" = Latest Items

An Overview of K2 - the Missing Documentation (Part 2)

Hopefully we've given you a taster of K2 and how you can use it to create articles with far more information and features.

We've taken you through all the basic aspects of K2. There's enough material for many more tutorials, including how to add video, photos, photo galleries, attachments and much more, but hopefully these two tutorials have been enough for you to catch the K2 bug!