2. Use an external service and then embed the flip book in an article. The advantage here is you don't need to install anything. Go to http://issuu.com and click on 'upload document,' choose the pdf from your computer and then click 'next.' Type in a title and description. Provide an email address. You will then get an email. When you click through, it will ask you to create a (free) account. Skip the step about finding people you know. Then click on 'my library' in the upper right hand corner. Select the document you want, and click 'share.' A pop up will appear, choose 'embed.' Click 'copy to clipboard.'
3. Create an article in Joomla! (or edit an existing article). Turn off the WYSIWYG editor (JCE has a 'show/hide' option above the editing toolbar), and paste the code from Issuu into the article. You will now see a mini flip book image in the article, click on it and you will see a full page flip book. (Note - The pdf should be high quality with very clear text, or it won't look very good.)
Many of the questions at the New England Joomla! Day on April 2nd were 'Should I upgrade my site from 1.5 to 1.6?' and 'If I'm building a new site, should I build it in 1.5 or 1.6?'
For most people, the answer to the upgrade question is simple. If you absolutely need something that is only available in 1.6 (namely nested categories and built in ACL), AND you can find all of your current extensions or substitutes in 1.6 versions, plus your template, then yes, upgrade. Otherwise, don't.
Joomla! 1.5 will be supported for another year. And Joomla! 1.7 is supposed to be out this summer. The idea is (although no one knows for sure yet), that it will be the same amount of work to upgrade from a 1.5 site to 1.7 or to 1.8, as from 1.5 to 1.6. Confused yet? Jen Kramer at 4Web has a blog post explaining the release schedule and why she thinks you should stick with 1.5 for now.
It's more complicated if you are building a new site from scratch. In that case, we believe that if the extensions are available and you can find or build a template, it's time to make the switch. But there are 7300 extensions in the JED, as of this writing, and only 1000 of them are 1.6 compatible. Some important extensions such as the JCE editor and K2 aren't there yet.
Slightly off topic - the extension developers are having kittens, generally, at the idea of 1.7 in July and 1.8 in January 2012. They are working to make their extensions 1.6 compatible, and then in a few months, they may need to retool them again for 1.7. And since 1.7 is still a work in progress, no one knows what extension tweaks will be needed, if any. We just know that 1.7 is considered a minor upgrade (hopefully with a direct upgrade path) and not a major migration like 1.5 to 1.6.
Tamar attended the New England Joomla! Day on Saturday in Brattleboro, VT; here are some of the highlights.
Beginner/Intermediate: Barrie North's gave his always excellent 'Black Belt Joomla!' presentation, where he gets into the nuts and bolts of Joomla! SEO and conversion. See his presentation. He has updated his talk with more information about social networking. Surpisingly, he recommends NOT bothering with social networking buttons your site ('Tweet' about this article, 'Like' on Facebook, etc.) unless your target audience is 18-39 year old men. Basically, very few people click on those buttons, even on major sites like CNN.com. He also recommends using a single uncategorized article for your home page, rather than the front page manager. The reasoning is that the main content on your home page should be fairly constant and carefully written. On a site with multiple editors, you don't want someone accidentally publishing their article on the front page and ruining your elegant and SEO optimized home page.
Mobile - Kyle Ledbetter spoke on mobile templates for Joomla! sites. His company provides iphone, ipad, and android mobile templates for Joomla! websites - more info at TapTheme.com, seems worth looking into as you explore mobile optimization.
Justin Herrin (slideshare presentation) compared the K2 and ZOO content construction kits (CCKs) which have become very popular in the Joomla! world. Both extensions still lack decent search. While you can include K2 or ZOO items in the standard Joomla! search results, there's no way to search by custom field, filter, etc. On the plus site, both extensions support importing from a csv or xml file, they both have unlimited nested categories, commenting systems, and tagging. Only ZOO allows items to be in more than one category, while K2 has its own ACL built in (relevant for Joomla! 1.5, maybe less so for 1.6). ZOO has a native Joomla! 1.6 version out, K2's 1.6 is still a work in progress. Flexicontent was not reviewed in the CCK session, because it has been removed from the JED due to security issue!
Laura Gordon (pdf of presentation) spoke on the directory extensions - SOBI2 and SobiPRO. The project is at a bit of an awkward stage. SOBI2 works with Joomla! 1.5, but not 1.6. SOBI2 looks terrible out of the box - you need your CSS talents to make it look decent. They've developed a new version called SobiPRO (better looking out of the box, with options to have multiple directories, and more new features), which works with Joomla! 1.6. The new version is in RC2, and still doesn't have a menu module, import, or many of the extras that SOBI has. So far, Laura's sites have been with SOBI2, you can see her work here at localchatbox.com. If you look there, you can see the tabbed display and also how they added in a contact form (that goes to the listing owner). There are a lot of cool code snippets floating around the SOBI2 forum; you don't need to be a programmer to find them and add them to your site.
Advanced: Kenneth Crowder, Joomla! security guru, spoke with Tamar about the jos database prefix. It is widely recommended that you change the standard prefix from jos_, to enhance site security. But there's one problem - some extensions out there have 'jos' hard coded in. If you change the prefix, those extensions won't work. And yes, those extensions aren't well written, and you may want to uninstall them in any case, but you certainly want to know what the problems are BEFORE you change from 'jos.' A simple way to find out if you have any extensions like this on your site - run a full backup with Akeeba and download the file to your desktop. Restore the site to your local server, and search the extension files for 'jos.'
Additional notes: The Lincoln Center site is in Joomla! Joomla! 1.5.23 coming soon... Joomla! 1.6 allows you to have different administrator templates for different back end users.
There are a few ways to easily embed video into any article on your Joomla! site. One of the most popular plugins is AllVideos.
You can either have the video (or audio) uploaded to your own site, or hosted at a range of services including YouTube, Veoh, and Vimeo. YouTube is the most popular, but has a 15 minute time limit per clip. If you need to post a longer video and don't want to slice it up, try Veoh.
If the video is on your own site, you should put it in a folder just for videos - images/stories/video is a good option. If the files are more than a few megabytes or you plan to have high traffic, consider using hosted video instead.
So now you have a video either on your site in a folder, or uploaded to YouTube or another service.
To configure the Allvideos plugin, go to Extensions, Plugins, AllVideos on the back end. You can change the default video folder location, default size of the playback, and other parameters. The same applies for audio. Make sure the plugin is enabled.
Now go to the article where you want to insert the video. Make sure you don't have any special formatting on, you want this to be text only. Use the cheat sheet to find the proper format. For a flv file hostd on your own site in the images/stories/video folder, for example, you would type {flv}videoname{/flv}. Notice that you don't type in the file extension, just the name. For a YouTube video, {youtube}GLBWgtYkYIk{/youtube}. Where does the combination of letters in the middle come from? Each YouTube video has an ID that shows in their URL. You need to copy that part of the URL (and only that part).
Save your article, go to the front end and refresh the article (or create a link to it, if it's a new article on the site). You should see the video ready to play.
If, instead, you see the brackets and the code that you entered - a) check that the plugin is enabled b) check that no formatting has been applied to the text that you entered.
There is also an extension called AllVideos Reloaded, an offshoot of the original AllVideos. AllVideos Reloaded installs both a component and a plugin, and includes a button that you can have at the bottom of your WYSIWYG editor, to easily insert videos. If you think the whole brackets saga will confuse your site authors, consider AllVideos reloaded as an alternative, it gives a little more hand holding for actually inserting the code into the text of your article. AllVideos Reloaded will also work within a custom module.
The article manager, the module manager, and the plugin manager all allow you to filter by a word. The article manager also allows you to filter by the section, category, author, and whether an article is published, unpublished or archived. So you're looking for the article about pumpkins. You go to the filter box on the left, type in 'pump' (without the quotes) and you will see all articles with that word, or that part of the word, in the title. Much faster than looking through dozens or hundreds (or thousands) of articles. Or you want to see all the articles in your products category - use the drop down at the top right to choose the category. Another tip - if you first apply the category filter, when you create a new article, it will automatically be put in that category, unless you change it. Same applies for sections.
On most sites, unless they are primarily blogs or news, you don't want to show the name of the author and the date last modified. Especially since some content, 'About Us,' for example, is likely to stay the same for some time, and you don't want it to say 2008 in 2011. When you first install Joomla!, the author and the date show up at the top of every article.
You've installed modules before. But did you realize you can make your own? Go to extensions, module manage, and click 'new.' One of the options is for a 'custom html.' When you create a new custom html module, you see an editing box on the bottom, the same as you see when you are editing an article. You can enter text and/or images and display the module anywhere on the site. A small business owner, for example, might want the business address and hours in a prominent place on every page - a custom module might be the ticket. You might want a bright red 'Contact Us' button leading to a contact form, insert an image in the custom module and make it a link to your form contact page.
There are four main options right now for search on a Joomla! website.
1. The first is Joomla!'s core search component. It has limitations - only 20 characters of a search phrase can be used, and there are no options for drill downs, spelling corrections, etc. So what do you do if you need better search?
2. A Joomla! extension - JXtended Finder $50 includes upgrades and support for one year, can be installed on unlimited sites.
3. Google Site Search - with or without Adsense results. Google Site Search can be integrated by using a Joomla! extension such as googleSearch component and module (free).
4. Enterprise Search Integration - you install an enterprise search engine (separate from your Joomla! site) and then use a Joomla! extension to use that search engine on your site. The free IBM OmniFind Yahoo! edition search engine can be integrated using the TNR ESearch Component. Plans are in the works for a new extension that will use the Solr search engine. This is an option mainly for large enterprise Joomla! sites - and it's the best way to get fine tuned control over how search results are generated and displayed.
We will be posting a new Joomla! tip every week! (Or even more often.)
Today's tip: If you use the standard Joomla! site search, you should enable search logging. Go to the back end, components, search. On the top right hand side, click on 'parameters.' Choose 'Gather Search Statistics' and click save. Now you can see what people are searching for on your site. Simple, but useful. People may be searching for synonyms of the words you are using on your site, or related items you hadn't considered. Now's your chance to edit your articles and make sure the right words are there for your users to find.
Tamar Schanfeld of TNR Global led an all day Intermediate Joomla! Workshop on August 5th in Hadley. Topics included backups, security, search engine optimization, social networking, blogs, and more. For those Joomla! junkies who were not able to attend - TNR will be posting a Joomla! tip of the day on our TNR Joomla! Blog.
Participant feedback was very positive! "lots of info - very pleased" "exceeded expectations" "a very patient instructor"
Interested in taking a Joomla! workshop? Email
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and we'll notify you of upcoming Joomla! classes and events. TNR Global also provides online training and small group training for businesses. Contact us today!
