Cory Webb's How to Joomla!

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.

Today I created a blank template for Joomla! 1.5. My main purpose for creating the template was to give myself a basis for creating future templates, since it contains the basic necessary files for creating a template. This template loads the component and the "debug" module position. There are no CSS styles in the template.css file, but the file is referenced in the index.php file. The template is released under the GPL, so feel free to use it however you want in accordance with the GPL.

Click here to download the template.

Chris Davenport, the documentation team leader for Joomla!, just announced the release of the Joomla! Installation Manual. Thank you to Andy Wallace for developing this manual. Great work!

• Read the manual online, or
• download the PDF version.

We've all done it. There's nothing to be ashamed of. Have you ever installed Joomla!, only to realize that you've forgotten your administrator password? When that happens, there is nothing you can do but re-install Joomla, right? Wrong. Here is a website with a great explanation of how to reset your super administrator password, even if you can't log in to the administrator control panel.

Don't thank me. Thank them.

The word "favicon" is short for "favorites icon", and it is the 16x16-pixel icon that is associated with your website and appears in the browser address bar and favorites menu (and in Firefox and Internet Explorer 7, it also appears on the browser tab). For this website, I am using the default Joomla! favicon because this site is a site about Joomla! The image below shows what your browser's address bar should look like when visiting this site.

All Joomla! installations come with that favicon installed, and a common mistake by many webmasters is to ignore the favicon, thereby keeping the default Joomla! icon for their site. Unless your site is about Joomla, you should not be using the default favicon. A good habit to get into when developing sites with Joomla! is to change the favaicon and use something more fitting for your site, like your logo. This article will explain how to create a favicon and then how to replace the default icon with your icon.