template

• Options

  YOnce the basic setup is done, yo need to tweak your Joomla installation to behave as you need. you will need individual configuration settings for your website elements (components, plugins, modules, content pages, templates): in the Joomla lingo we call them options. These options are applied to the whole website, for users, categories, modules, components. Since Joomla 1.6 this has became standard: you will always find an icon named Options in the backend pages, which are providing you the interface to set your preferences for the given component.

  For example in the Joomla 1.6+ in the template manager you have in the Options a way to switch on or off the support for the well known trick to append "?tp=1", which reveals you the available module positions for your templates.

  Now you can block attempts to visualize by others these module positions by visiting the address:

  http ://yourdomain.com/index.php?tp=1

  BTW: The "tp" stands for template position and the trick is one of core Joomla tricks.

• Pagination Links Overrides

  Before the Joomla 1.5, pagination override was a nearly impossible task. The control the display of items-per-page and the pagination links used with lists of information has become much easier.

• PHP code snippets to conditionally add things to your template

  The Joomla ItemID-related management of modules is a powerful tool, but sometimes you need to show/hide parts of your site on two special cases not covered by this tool: when you need to show/hide things regardless of the active ItemID - for example on all detail listings page of a given component, or when you need to deal with a component which have poor support of ItemIDs - as VirtueMart, which is notoriously misbehaving in this regard.

• Smart contact module

  How to build a smart Contact Us module?

  Smart in what way, you can ask... Simple: to let you know, in which page of the site the user filled it and send it to you! Why? you never get a criptyc message from your clients you wasn't able to find out what they are referring to?

• SoBiPro - the missing field prefix problem

  SoBi Pro is great... but misses some basic features, as adding a prefix to a field (might be as simple as willing to add the "dollar" signe as prefix, and not as suffix), and the templating is powerful - but criptyc even for an average Joomla developer. Recently I had to build a site wich had a special need - to display the last 4 digits of a person's Social Security Number, in the format ***-***-1234.

• Style your tooltips

  A tooltips is a piece of text that pops up when you hover the mouse over a region on a website. If you use the Joomla! back end, for example, tooltips are used to help explain the action of different parameters. The tooltips can add functionality and fun to your site, but just inserting them without styling them accordingly can have an unusable or "just" boring result. And you want to avoid both, I guess...

• Template

  Many people think of a template as their website, but that is an incorrect way of seeing templates. Templates are used for providing a layout and design within which all of the pieces of your Joomla site come together.

• The return of classic Joomla blog view

  Did you already seen that since the advent of Joomla 1.6 the blog view has been changed? Let me refresh your memory! In Joomla 1.0 and 1.5 the Leading Articles - the articles on the top of Blog view - where shown on full by default, and for the rest of articles only the Article Intro part was shown. With Joomla 1.6 this has been changed, for all articles in a Blog view is shown only the introtext. You didn't even noticed that, right? Me either, until one of my clients has specifically requested the feature.

• TinyMCE editor background color fix

  In an earlier tip (Help! My editor background is colored!) showed the most foolproof way to fix the common problem, when the template CSS settings are causing the WYSIWYG editors to have colored background, making edits hard to perform. Apparently there are couple of situations when the tip does not help - and there are many of you using still the default TinyMCE editor (and not switched already to the best Joomla content editor - JCE).

• Using the Page Class Suffix in Template Code

  The Page Class Suffix is a parameter in Joomla! content Menu Items. It is set in the Menu Item: [Edit] screen under the "Parameters (Advanced)" section. This will cause Joomla! to either add a new CSS class or modify the existing CSS class for elements in this specific Menu Item layout.

• White death screen on category blog page

  I was sure that ths is an error wich newer come back to me - was a relatively common one in early 2010-s, since dissappeared from my radar. Today one of my former students approached me with his problem. He took over a site running the latest Joomla, and when tried to change the blog list views to category blog views, as the siteowner requested, the respective pages ended up with a white PHP fatal error death screen.

• Why my Joomla site is this slow?

  Joomla generally is running at an acceptable speed -  users aren't seeing differences between an average Joomla site and another CMS'es. But what if they do? What can cause the (sometime unbearable) slowness of some Joomla sites?

• XML Parsing Error at. Error

  After moving a site to a new server I found this error in the backend - at least one error per page, but casually even more.

  XML Parsing Error at. Error

  No error number, no line number... What a heck!