The Joomlashack Blog
How to Integrate OSDownloads with Dropbox
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 17 October 2018 17 October 2018
A few of our customers asked how to set OSDownloads for a remote files repository with Dropbox.
Dropbox offers fairly generous disk space. Letting your site users download files hosted with Dropbox will also save you bandwidth.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure OSDownloads Free to offer a file hosted with Dropbox for downloads.
For the purpose of this lesson, downloads will be available only to your site registered and logged in members.
CSS Grid #13: The auto-fill and auto-fit Keywords in CSS Grid
- Written by Jorge Montoya Jorge Montoya
- Published: 16 October 2018 16 October 2018
Welcome to the 13th tutorial in our series on the CSS Grid.
We are presenting this series to help Joomla developers learn about CSS Grid. The introduction of CSS Grid will be one of the major changes in upcoming Joomla 4.
As you already learned, it is possible to create repeating track patterns with help of the repeat notation.
However, using this method gives you a fixed number of tracks, independently of the content inside each one of them.
The auto-fill and auto-fit keywords will allow you to place as many tracks of the specified size as possible, depending on the size of the viewport. This tutorial will explain the usage of these keywords.
Let’s start!
Read more: CSS Grid #13: The auto-fill and auto-fit Keywords in CSS Grid
CSS Grid #12: The minmax() Function
- Written by Jorge Montoya Jorge Montoya
- Published: 08 October 2018 08 October 2018
Welcome to the 12th tutorial in our series on the CSS Grid.
We are presenting this series to help Joomla developers learn about CSS Grid. The introduction of CSS Grid will be one of the major changes in upcoming Joomla 4.
Accordng to the CSS Grid Specification, minmax()
Defines a size range greater than or equal to min and less than or equal to max.
In other words, the minmax() function provides a method to specify the minimum and maximum sizes of a grid track. Thus, the minimax() takes two values as parameters.
This tutorial will explain the use of this CSS function.
Shack Forms Now Has Extra Privacy Options
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 04 October 2018 04 October 2018
Shack Forms is one of the two or three most popular Joomla forms extensions. But we're always trying to make Shack Forms better.
Several customers asked us to allow more control over the user data collected by Shack Forms so they can comply with Europe's new GDPR laws (click here to read about Joomla and the GDPR).
Starting from Shack Forms 4.0.10, you will now see extra privacy features.
Fixing the Joomla White Screen of Death
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 03 October 2018 03 October 2018
Sometimes you may change some code on your site or even install an extension, and then you refresh your website and all you see is a blank white screen.
In this tutorial, we're going to show you how to recover from the White Screen of Death (WSOD).
We'll show you how to find the error that's causing your WSOD, and we'll show you how to fix it.
Introducing the Marker Images in Shack Locations
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 28 September 2018 28 September 2018
Shack Locations is the best way to create map-based directory in Joomla.
In this guide, I'm going to explain how you can customize the markers used on your Shack Locations maps.
Your can use the same marker image for every location, or can also be customized individually
In this blog post, I will show you the four types of markers in Shack Locations. This will help you make informed decisions and avoid mistakes as you work with them.
Getting to Hello World With Your First Joomla Plugin
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 28 September 2018 28 September 2018
Are you ready to learn how to build Joomla plugins?
These powerful extensions act on Joomla's trigger events to perform almost any task that you can imagine. Plugins are responsible for a huge variety of tasks on your site from logins, to search, to article features and 1,001 other things.
Inside Joomlashack University, you'll find detailed classes on every aspect of Joomla development. In these 3 videos, we'll show you how to set up your Joomla plugin environment and create a "Hello World" plugin.
Read more: Getting to Hello World With Your First Joomla Plugin
25 Best Joomla Extensions in 2018
- Written by Nick Savov Nick Savov
- Published: 27 September 2018 27 September 2018
Joomla extensions can significantly improve your Joomla website. They can enhance your Joomla site front end and improve the experience of your site visitors.
They can enhance your Joomla administrator panel and help you administer your site more efficiently. It's hard to imagine a website without Joomla extensions.
In this blog post, you will find our list of 25 best Joomla extensions in 2018. These are extensions that we would recommend for almost any Joomla site and which we use ourselves.
Shack Spreadsheets Is Now Live at Joomlashack
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 26 September 2018 26 September 2018
We are happy to announce that Shack Spreadsheets is now available for Joomlashack members.
Shack Spreadsheets enables you to upload spreadsheets to your Joomla articles. This extension will automatically display your spreadsheet data in a clean HTML table.
This really is the quickest and easiest way to take information from a spreadsheet and add it to your Joomla site!
Shack Spreadsheets, previously named PixParse Sheets, is the third of several extensions we'll be launching as part of our acquisition deal with PixPro Labs.
This is the 26th extension available to our Joomlashack members!
Fresh Install - Template Messed Up?
- Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
- Published: 25 September 2018 25 September 2018
One of the most asked questions we get in our support ticket system, is why a particular template is 'messed up, broken, not right, etc etc' upon first installation.
The following is taken from a tutorial on how to set up the Onyx template with Joomla 3, however, there are some concepts that might help a user of any Joomlashack template understand why a template does not look like the demo right out of the box.
This information is not designed to help you set up any particular template besides Onyx (for that please see the template documentation in the demo of the template you are seeking help with) but it is important as a user of Joomla to grasp some concepts that will make life a little easier as you learn how to use this sometimes confusing system.
Default Template installed
This is how our Onyx template with demo content looks, within the style variations.
So you've installed Joomla successfully, and now you want to us a profession template. First you need to install your template. For help with installing that template, see the tutorial 'How do I install a Joomlashack Template'
Joomlashack Template installed
This is how Onyx template looks without the demo content.
You've successfuly installed your template and set it as the 'default', and gone to view your wonderful new template... and WHOA! It looks like something went terribly wrong!
...it's not all that bad - you just need to do some simple template setup now. Keep reading and it will all look good in a time.
First Things First - know your available module positions!
Before you can put things where they belong (or where you want them), or move things from where they don't belong, you need to know what module positions are available with your particular template. Each template demo contains a 'Module Map'. The module map will outline your available module positions. This is the Module Map for Onyx, to view the module map for your particular template, see the Demos.
Where is my menu?
You'll notice in the default template (Protostar), that menu module is published nicely to the 'position-1' position. When you change the default template to the Onyx template (in this example), you need to change that menu module to the 'menu' postion.Know your available module styles
Just as you need to know what module positions are avaialbe if you want to put things where you want them - you also need to know the styles that are available for your particular template. And just as each demo contains a Module Map ... guess what?.... they also contain info on what styles are at your disposal!
The above image shows the 'Module Class Suffixes' and corresponding formatting for the Onyx template (for your template's available suffixes, see the demo).
Add the suffix.
The module itself will gain styles based on the Module Class Suffix, which is added in the module's parameters as seen in the screenshot below:
Remember, if you need help further assistance after viewing this information and the documentation for your template, please submit a ticket (only available for customers).
Thanks for using Joomlashack's template, and Have Fun!