Cory Webb's How to Joomla!

One of the greatest things about Joomla! is the ability to customize anything you want. It even enables you to change the template that you use for the administrator back end of your site, just as easily as you can change the template for the front end of your site. The default template for the Joomla! 1.5 administrator is the culmination of countless hours of design work by Andy Miller, and it provides a great interface for managing your site. However, the brilliant minds behind Joomla! recognized that there would be possible reasons for modifying the look of the administrator interface, so they used the same template system for the back end as they use for the front end. Read on to see how to change the administrator template.

There are a lot of things to consider when choosing a web host. Usually the first things we look at are price, storage, and bandwidth, but I would argue that storage and bandwidth are mostly irrelevant as criteria for choosing a host. Buying a hosting service because it offers a huge amount of storage and bandwidth is like buying a car because it has tires. Every web host offers tons of storage and tons of bandwidth for a reasonably low price, so that really takes those two things out of the equation. Price is important, but I would also argue that it should not be the most important factor either. Read on to get some tips for what to look for in a Joomla! host.

One of the most annoying things about Joomla! (in my opinion) is that the default images directory (or folder, whatever you want to call it) is yoursite.com/images/stories, and the default directory for the media manager is yoursite.com/images. That makes no sense to me. Read on to find out why this makes no sense, and how you can easily fix it.

I recently read an article over at blog.joomlatools.org that shared an ingenious method for creating a site map in Joomla! using your existing menus, menu modules, and the built-in Joomla! plugin that enables you to load a module position within a content item.

Super Secret Sitemap Trick - by Mathias Verraes

Thanks for the tip, Mathias!

There are actually several ways to go about embedding a YouTube video into an article in Joomla! 1.5, but I have built a plugin that makes it dead simple. You can download the plugin here.

Here's how it works:

• Step 1: Download the plugin.
• Step 2: Install it.
• Step 3: Enable (publish) it.
• Step 4: Go to YouTube.com and find a video that you want to embed.
• Step 5: Copy the URL for that video from your browser bar.
• Step 6: Paste the URL into your content item.
• Repeat steps 4-6 for as many videos as you wish to embed.

That's all there is to it. Really. It's that simple. The plugin handles all the embedding code for you. I am releasing the plugin under the GNU/GPL, so feel free to use it on as many sites as you wish.

Special thanks to Simon Tiplady for helping me with the regular expressions in this plugin.

Joomla! comes with a plugin/mambot called GeSHi that comes in quite handy if you have a site like HowToJoomla.net in which you share code snippets with your readers. I recently tried to use GeSHi on a Joomla! 1.5 site, and I found that it works differently in Joomla! 1.5 than it does in Joomla! 1.0. Read on to see how to use it in both.

Here is a neat little trick I picked up last Friday at the Joomla! 1.5 bootcamp in Austin led by Johan Janssens.

In Joomla! 1.5, if you simply want to display your component without any modules and without your template styles, all you have to do is add "?tmpl=component" or "&tmpl=component" to the end of the URL, depending on whether or not there are already other parameters on the end of the URL.

For example, if you just want to view the component on the home page of the new community.joomla.org site, you simply add "?tmpl=component" to the URL like this: http://community.joomla.org/?tmpl=component.

This trick is really useful for template designers because you can isolate the HTML used in a specific component, so you can determine how best to set up your CSS for styling that component.

Enjoy!

OK, I admit it. This isn't exactly a "How-To" article, but I wanted to draw everyone's attention to an upcoming event in Austin, TX that I will be attending. It is called "Joomla! 1.5 Bootcamp," and it will be held on Friday, July 18 from 8am to 4pm CST (GMT -6) at the Doubletree Hotel Austin. I want to strongly encourage anyone who can make it to come to this event. The keynote speaker/teacher for this event will be none other than Johan Janssens, one of the lead developers of Joomla! The event is being put on by Chris Justice (a.k.a. MegaJustice) from Sparksight.com.

Click "Read More" to see more information about the Bootcamp.

In October 2006, I wrote a how-to for displaying your page title within your Joomla! 1.0 template. Since the release of Joomla! 1.5, I have gotten many requests for an article explaining how to do this in Joomla! 1.5. Here is how you do it...

One thing I often need to do while developing a template is change certain parts of the template depending on which page I am on. For example, let's say I am developing a template for a site that runs Virtuemart, and I want to have 3 columns on every non-Virtuemart page, and 2 columns on every Virteumart page. A solution that I often like to use is to make the column "collapsable" when the value of "option" is "com_virtuemart". When "option" is equal to "com_virtuemart", that simply means that the Virtuemart component is loaded.