Our Joomla! Blog: Tips and Tricks
We've just added tutorials that explain how to integrate JXtended Comments, Ratings and Social-Bookmarking to RokDownloads and Virtuemart. Check them out on the following pages:
- Comments for RokDownloads
- Comments for Virtuemart
JXtended Comments forms the basis for supporting social interactions in Joomla 1.6. .
Finder is very easy to integrate with Google Analytics giving you useful information about what people are searching your Joomla Web site for.
Today was round 2 of our little Twitter experiment to see what would happen when we gave anyone and everyone the opportunity to ask Rob Schley, JXtended Developer, Development Working Group Coordinator and Open Source Matters Board Member, any question they could imagine. Be sure to follow JXtended and RobSchley on Twitter to catch the next opportunity to get your questions answered by a Joomla expert. Without further ado, onto the questions!
The standard Joomla site search is generally adequate for small sites, but does not scale well as the content of the site increases in volume. JXtended Finder has been produced to solve this problem. A common complaint is that the total number of matches is not made available. This means that for the same phrase, a competitor's site may show more matches than your Joomla site and this could influence their opinion of your credibility (and that's a big deal if you are selling something). Aside from that, most web-savvy users are familiar with how Google has set the standard for search results.
We started a little experiment on Twitter to see what would happen when we gave anyone and everyone the opportunity to ask Rob Schley, JXtended Developer, Development Working Group Coordinator and Open Source Matters Board Member, any question they could imagine. Be sure to follow JXtended and RobSchley on Twitter to catch the next opportunity to get your questions answered by a Joomla expert. Without further ado, onto the questions!
It is a well known fact that Joomla lacks the ability to assign content to multiple categories. JXtended Labels has been developed to fill this gap, and it does it in a very slick and easy-to-use way. So let's begin by following how I'm adding Labels to one of my sites, The Art of Joomla (which, by the way, is a pretty cool site if you want to learn about Joomla development).
JXtended Labels is a commercial extension (GPL licensed) for Joomla and costs around US$40. That includes updates and forum support for 12 months and unlimited installs.
Advertising and informational banners are an integral part of most web sites but sometimes, despite your best efforts at trying to trick the Joomla Module Manager, sometimes they just will not display where you want them to. A customer of ours had the same problem - no combination of module assignments on menu items seemed to get the right banner on the right page. Fortunately for him the problem had already been solved in Joomla 1.5 with a feature called Banner Tagging.
Have you ever wished that you could just save a few bits of HTML that you use all the time, or even save some boiler-plate text that you use every time you do your job advertisements ... well, Toowoomba Regional Council had just that problem. We looked at this problem and found that we could empower three of our extensions to provide a solution.
Mapping has been an integral part of the Magazine and Catalog since their inception. Both store the mapping location via latitude and longitude values. While these values are very efficient for plotting points, they are not the easiest the look up. The good people from MyDynamicSite asked us if it was possible to just put in an address. I must admit, I did stuggle trying to work out what the lat/long was for my house when I actually tried to find out what it was. So fortunately for us, Google's Map API has such a feature and with a little hunting we found the appropriate code snippet to drop in.