BestofJoomla::Best of Resources

Joomla 3.0

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 19:53:33 +0100

With Joomla 3.0 on the verge of being released, a colleague of mine stumbled across a video by Kyle Ledbetter, �Joomla 3.0 Frontend Editing.� Basically, the video is the potential of the new Joomla 3.0 with its frontend editing capabilities. Although it is a short clip, it does a great job showing the ease of editing a sophisticated website in the new layout. It allows for one to not know the intricacies for a website in order to edit or update it. Joomla 3.0�s frontend editing is not new to the open source Content Management System (CMS) world, as concrete5 has been allowing users to edit the site content directly from the page for years. The idea had be wondering, would this new feature be beneficial for our clients? It would certainly allow them to maintain their website on their own. This new feature is bound to set Joomla even further apart from other open source backbones. If you are interested in viewing the video for yourself, you can view Kyle�s clip here: http://vimeo.com/40882437

Speed your Joomla site up now!

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:09:05 +0100

Have you ever wanted to speed your site up and give it the speed your users are demanding? Look no further � �corePHP� has been helping thousands of sites increase the speed on their Joomla site. If you are on Joomla 1.5, 1.6, 1.7 or 2.5 we have jomCDN for you. What is jomCDN? Watch a quick video that goes over in great detail how to use jomCDN. �corePHP� would like to thank OSTraining for a great video. For more information visit: �corePHP� jomCDN Product Page OSTraining Walkthough Thank you for stopping by to learn how to speed up your Joomla site.

How to use JDate

Sat, 12 May 2012 10:16:39 +0100

Few days ago I decided to help Yves with a datetime bug in Matukio (dating back to its Seminar roots). Everything seemed to be straight forward. I've worked with JDate in the past and had some experience with timezones. So I took the challenge thinking that I'll spend 2h and everything would be fine. Well, as it often happens a 2h job turned to be a one and a half day job... (this could make a very good blog post about estimates, but I'll do that another time...) Let us examine the problem at hand. User A fills out a form, which has a field that stores a date. The best thing to do when you store the date in the db is to convert it to UTC. Why to UTC? Well this way you can have always a starting point and when you present the output to the user you can add different timezones depending on the users position. The trick here is to convert the date back to UTC. Fortunately JDate can help us with that. If you look at the JDate class in libraries/joomla/utilities/date.php you will see that the constructor actually expects 2 parameters -> the date and the timezone. So when you save a date you would generally want to do something like this: $date = new JDate($myDate, $myTimezone); Now the question is -> how do you properly calculate a timezone? Well, joomla helps us with that as well. You could write a small utility function that would look like this: /** * Returns the userTime zone if the user has set one, or the global config one * @return mixed */ public static function getTimeZone() { $userTz = JFactory::getUser()->getParam('timezone'); $timeZone = JFactory::getConfig()->getValue('offset'); if($userTz) { $timeZone = $userTz; } return new DateTimeZone($timeZone); } In the first line we try to get the user timezone, in the second we get the global config timezone. If the user has set a timezone in his configuration, then we pass the value of it to the DateTimeZone object. If the user on the other hand has not set a timezone, then we use the global one. Now that we have the correct time zone we can format the date to the MySQL format and store it in the database. $myTimezone = myHelperClass:getTimezone(); $date = new JDate($myDate, $myTimezone)->format('Y-m-d H:i:s', false, false); The first parameter to the format function is 'Y-m-d H:i:s' - this is the format we want our date to be saved in the db. The second parameter tells the function that we want to have the GMT/UTC time and the third parameter tells the format function that we don't want to translate the date. Now you can save a correct UTC date in your database. Once you have that you will obviously want to show the date to the user again. This is also fairly straight forward provided you don't make the same mistake as I did. When I was trying to show the date I stored in the DB I was thinking - hm, the second parameter that I pass to JDate is the timezone, so obviously I need to pass the timezone I want my date to be presented in. So I used my utility function and passed the timezone as a second parameter. After that I just used the format function to output the date, but to my astonishment instead of showing the correct date and time I expected my date was actually 2h off. I wanted to have a date in the Berlin timezone, which is +1 (and +1 for DST), but I somehow ended with a date that was -2... I couldn't understand what was going on. So eventually I ended up purchasing a book that deals with the Date and Time subject in depth: Date and Time programming - a very good book on the subject and a good read for every PHP developer. After few hours reading I learned a lot of things that I didn't know , but unfortunately I still couldn't understand why my date was -2h off... Eventually it struck me like a lightning! The second parameter was there to help JDate convert the date to UTC, I was not supposed to pass a timezone parameter if my date was in the UTC timezone. Here is what I had to do: $date = new JDate($myDate); $date->setTimezone($myTimezone); echo $date->format(...); Easy isn't it? There are also few things that could be useful to know: JHtml::_('date', $myDate) will output an UTC date in the user's timezone automatically -> so there is not need to calculate the timezone yourself. JHtml::_('calender', myDate ...) won't convert the date to the user's timezone so you have to make sure that you provide the date with the correct timezone If you use JForm calender time you can provide a filter: SERVER_UTC or USER_UTC that will handle the timezone calculations for you. I hope that this post will save you some time and that you learned something :) If you have any questions or remarks use the comment section below!

Joomlage.com Joomla 1.6 Tutorials at YouTube

Tue, 31 May 2011 07:20:41 +0100

New to Joomla 1.6 and need a quick start guide on how to Install templates,create categories, articles, Menus, Menu modules etc. Look no further. Check out our YouTube Channel for a list of great simple Tutorials to get you familiar with Joomla 1.6 administration. More Tutorials coming soon.

Learn quick solutions to common Joomla! problems using Packt's new book

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 02:22:25 +0100

Packt is pleased to announce Joomla! 1.5 Cookbook, a new book that contains over 60 quick and direct recipes to help readers to overcome common Joomla! queries. Written by Tom Canavan, this book includes the brand new portions of Joomla! 1.6 along with recipes covering a range of site management and core Joomla! activities. �Joomla! is one of the world�s most high-profile open source, award-winning content management system written in PHP that uses the MySQL database system store information. It enables developers to build professional websites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla! one of the most popular CMSes available. Joomla 1.5 Cookbook will help users to find straight and swift ways through their common problems, which can be easily avoided with a few tips and tricks. This book starts off with solutions to the most familiar queries that users might face during the installation and setup for Joomla! 1.5, and then goes on to guide users through Joomla! templates, modules and security. Using this book, developers will learn to install Joomla! and set up their database on two different but common types of hosting. Additionally, this book will enable developers to manage links, users and media, and install, assign and create modules and components. Furthermore, this book will teach developers to perform easy and medium difficulty tasks that are designed to eliminate the issues that they may experience. Packed with the easiest solutions to various pitfalls that might fall in the way of Joomla! sites, this book is ideal for Joomla! site owners, who want to get particular things working or improved, and want to get rid of their problems quickly. The book is out now and available from Packt. To read more about it, please visit: www.packtpub.com/joomla-1-5-cookbook-to-overcome-common-joomla-queries/book

The Basics of Joomla! Module Creation and Creating a "Send us a question" Module

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 02:30:18 +0100

To date, Joomla! has been well known as a great content management system (CMS). There are many sites using it throughout the world, some of them having great features that impress their visitors. Most of the time, these appealing and powerful features work thanks to JavaScript. In this article by Jose Argudo Blanco, author of the book Joomla! 1.5 JavaScript jQuery, we will: 1) Learn the basics of Joomla! module creation. 2) Create a Send us a question module Building a basic Joomla! module is not that difficult. In fact it's quite easy. Just stay with me, and we will divide the task into some easy-to-follow steps. Please click on the book image for the rest on the Article.

Introducing YJSimpleGrid Framework

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:50:18 +0100

YouJoomla is very pleased to announce that YJSimpleGrid Joomla Template framework is in stable state and our first free GPL Joomla! template natively running on YJSG is just around the corner. We are also happy to say that all our future commercial and free Joomla! templates will be developed using YJSG Joomla Template framework which will make everything much easier and bring many new options to our and yours joomla templates. YJSG will be released under GNU/GPL2 copyleft license for PHP and Youjoomla Commercial license for CSS, JS and Image files including PSD's.

7 tips to help you convert your Joomla 1.5 template to Joomla 1.6

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 08:46:27 +0100

It is definitely time for template developers to start the process of converting their existing Joomla templates over to 1.6. This article will not go into the basic details, since that has been covered by the Joomlapraise article earlier, but rather a few extra things which you may find useful.

Joomla 1.5 to 1.6 Template Upgrade Tutorial (Part 1)

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:31:21 +0100

With the 4th beta of Joomla 1.6 just released, many folks are probably wanting to know what it will take to get their Joomla 1.5 template working in Joomla 1.6. As a test, we've migrated our Genesis (free) template to 1.6 and made a few notes. These are by no means official or finalized, but these steps should help most people with simple Joomla templates. Fancy schmancy templates from some clubs will need more help.

Mobile Friendly Joomla Websites (Part 1)

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:35:20 +0100

The mobile web has been a big topic of conversation for people over the last year. Everyone wants their Joomla site optimized for the iPhone, Android and other mobile devices and operating systems. New smartphones are being released every few hours, it seems, and people are quickly finding the need to build mobile friendly websites. Unfortunately, building a mobile website using Joomla has been difficult, at best. So we've decided to make it simpler.