Joomla Tips, Tricks, and Insights Blog at A1Media.ca

View Image Fix for Firefox

inquiry@a1media.ca (Douglas Helmer) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:34:16 +0000

I use Mozilla Firefox browser every day, all day, for building websites. The latest version of Firefox included a very ill-advised "improvement" that renders all standalone gif, png, and jpg images centered in the browser window on a black background. The old rendering behavior was to simply display the image in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen on a white background. This old behaviour, although not at all fancy, it is ideal for transparent gif and png images.

Think of the hundreds of millions of gif and png images that are embedded as thumbnails on websites that require the user to click on the thumbnail to view it in the zoomed-in or full size view. Those hundreds of millions of images are now broken and most are unviewable. Technical and academic websites rely heavily on these click-to-view larger transparent gif and png images and now they are screwed.

The fix, unfortunately, isn't a simple toggle in the the Firefox options, nor a more advanced "about:config" setting ... the only way to fix it is to hack the user chrome css settings buried deep, deep down inside the Firefox user-specific application settings. Bah.

Thankfully, I found a simple Firefox add-on that you can install and doesn't even require a reboot to start working. It's called Old Default Image Style and you can get it via the Firefox Addons repository.

Get it. Love it.

In the meantime, until this so-called improvement is rolled back to the old behavior, or improved to deal with transparent images, I will be consulting a Voodoo priestess in order to put a hex on the Firefox UI developers who thought this change was a good idea. I'd like to pay the priestess for the "set hair on fire" hex, but I can only afford the less expensive "chronic toe fungus" hex. Ah well, we do what we can.

{jcomments on}

Joomla 1.7 Stable Released

inquiry@a1media.ca (Douglas Helmer) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Joomla 1.7 Stable has been released. Here are the highlights:

One-Click Updating

This is a long overdue feature, but I'm glad the developers took the extra time to make an updater that not only updates extensions, but also the Joomla core. What am I talking about? In the past, if you wanted to upgrade from, say, Joomla 1.5.22 to 1.5.23 you had to download the patch update, load it via FTP (or SSH or Cpanel) to your server, extract the file using unzip or gzip, then go into Joomla and check to see if the update worked. A rather tedious process.

Now you can simply search for Joomla core patches and updates in your Joomla admin panel, and if any are found, click the "install" button and you are done. Nice! This simple procedure also works with compatible third-party extensions.

For those of you reading this and trying to decide between Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla as your CMS of choice, Wordpress and Joomla allow both core file and extension / plugin updates via the one-click process. Drupal allows for module updates via the one-click process, but not core file updates which still must be uploaded to your server and extracted, etcetera, etcetera.

Wordpress still leads the way in one regard, however ... it does allow you to search for and install extensions via the admin control panel. Joomla still requires you to find extensions on their extension directory, download them, then install them via the Admin control panel. One day, with luck, Joomla will also have a search and install system built right into the Admin CP.

Six-Month Release Cycle

Rather than wait years for major updates, the Joomla team has committed to releasing on a six-month cycle. This is an obvious improvement because enhancements to the Joomla core will actually not be obsolete when the updates are released.

Improved Multi-Language Support

This is mainly an improvement in how the menus and language picker work. Good to see Joomla is still committed to this important feature.

Other Improvements

Ability to pick a unique user name for the super admin during installation (used to be forced to use "Admin")
Improved search menu options
Better example code to assist extension developers
New form validation features to protect against hackers
Submit article form improvements
Batch processing (copy & move) of articles is now available in the same way as it is for categories and menu items.

For further details on all of these improvements, be sure to visit the official announcement page.

Website Content Guide

inquiry@a1media.ca (Douglas Helmer) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:53:19 +0000

This page will help you create content for your website.

STEP 1:

Download the Word document version of the questions (see below for sample)

Website Content Ideas Generator (MS Word .doc format)

STEP 2:

Don't worry about the grammar! Start by jotting down simple, short answers to each question.

STEP 3:

Once your short answers are completed, simply write a few sentences that explain each short answer. Before you know it, you'll have lots of great content for your website.

Quick Tip: Search for Joomla 1.6 native extensions

inquiry@a1media.ca (Douglas Helmer) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 21:37:47 +0000

Jan. 24, 2011 - UPDATE: Joomla.org has updated and improved the Extensions Directory's advanced search utility. Now we can search extensions by their compatibility with the various Joomla versions. Check it out: New Joomla Extensions Advanced Search.

The info below is now obsolete.

Something that has irked me for some time now is the fact that the JED (Joomla Extension Directory) doesn't have a dedicated category, or a filter, that shows extensions based on their Joomla version compatibility. That is, you can't simply click a button in the JED and see all the Joomla v1.0 native extensions, or the v1.5 native extensions, or the v1.6 native extensions.

This wasn't a huge deal before when you could make older J1.0 extensions work in J1.5 by enabling the legacy mode. But now, with J1.6, our most favourite-ist J1.5 plugins aren't going to work at all.

With this fact in mind, one wants the ability to find all the v1.6 compatible plugins quickly, rather than have to visually scan through the dozens of categories looking for the blue-coloured "1.6 Native" icons. Personally, I have been typing the text "1.6 Native" into the JED search, but that only brings up 45 of the 1.6 native extensions. There had to be, I thought, a better way! Enter jen4web to the rescue.

Jen4web is a user on the Joomla.org forums who posted this crafty little URL for finding Joomla 1.6 native extensions:

http://extensions.joomla.org/search?q=&t[]=2075 (now obsolete, see intro info above)

Use that URL and you'll find, at the time of this writing, 108 Joomla 1.6 native extensions.

Thank you, Jen! :)

Joomla 1.6 RELEASED!

inquiry@a1media.ca (Douglas Helmer) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 19:48:27 +0000

Joomla 1.6 was released yesterday, somewhat earlier than expected, which is an odd thing to say since we waited so very long for it. Although the filename for the download is "Joomla_1.6.0-Stable-Full_Package.zip," it's not stable by a long shot.

I will be testing this first release over the coming days and weeks with a variety of v1.6-compatible third-party extensions to see how everything functions together. When, and only when, I'm comfortable with how everything works together, and I'm confident that there aren't any security issues, will I begin using v1.6 for client websites. It could easily be several more months, and several patches in, before I'm happy with everything.

And yet, despite those cautious sentiments, I am super excited about v1.6's completely revamped user permissions system, aka the "ACL", because as I have said in earlier blog postings, the ACL enchancements will provide many exciting new opportunities to not only improve and streamline our clients' internal operations, but also their interactions with their customers.

{jcomments on}

Bad News Dep't: No migration script in Joomla 1.6

inquiry@a1media.ca (Douglas Helmer) — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 21:24:04 +0000

I just learned recently, like a lot of other Joomla site builders seem to be learning lately, that there will not be an official migration script built into Joomla v1.6. Needless to say, many people who base their web development business on Joomla are not happy.

Joomla Tip: Compress your CSS and JS!

inquiry@a1media.ca (Douglas Helmer) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:17:21 +0000

Today's Joomla tip is to compress your CSS and JS for quicker page load speeds.

Joomla websites, especially ones built with third-party templates, can have multiple CSS style sheets and scripts. Each of these style sheets and scripts takes a bit of time to download to a user's browser and if there's enough of them, they can slow your initial page load speeds to a crawl.

Joomla 1.6 RC1 Released

inquiry@a1media.ca (Douglas Helmer) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:28:26 +0000

Joomla v1.6 Release Candidate 1 was released today. You can download it here.

I have installed it and done a quick look around. The visual layout of the article permissions interface appears to be completely revamped since the earlier betas. Rather than the endless dropdown lists, there's now a combination of a user group explorer-like tree where you can highlight user groups, and to the right of that are the various access and editing permission dropdowns. Here are some screenshots showing the differences:

The old article permissions layout from the earlier J1.6 betas:

Here's the new layout in J1.6 Release Candidate 1 (click to view larger):

Not sure what prompted the change as the original layout seemed fairly usable, but I do like the newer version, too.

{jcomments on}

Joomla 1.6 beta 7: Tour of the ACP

inquiry@a1media.ca (Douglas Helmer) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:12:26 +0000

Last time I looked at Joomla 1.6 it was still in Alpha, now it's all the way to Beta 7, so time to see what's new in the administrative control panel or ACP.

Here's what I'm covering in this post:

Appearance
Interface (e.g., buttons, wording)
ACL
Template Manager
Redirects
Extension Manager: Update, Manage, Discover, Warnings
Help
Forms

Joomla v1.5.18 security release

inquiry@a1media.ca (Douglas Helmer) — Sat, 29 May 2010 16:35:25 +0000

The folks at Joomla have released a security update that eliminates a problem where a back-end user can inject javascript in various administrator screens. It also solves a problem introduced in version v1.5.16 that could cause "unexpected" behaviour in a Joomla site after an unsuccessful plugin installation explained here at the JoomlaTools website.