Had to Happen Some Time

Hey everybody, I've finally gotten around to writing on this thing! Everything's going real great so far, I've put up a few Joomla sites and I've finally been given a Flash project that I have been working on for the past week. I myself have a few Firefox add-on suggestions as well as some really cool Joomla! extensions.

Firebug (two recommendations now) - This is a really great add-on, it allows you to select specific elements of your page, while giving you a look at the html. It also shows you which CSS rules are influencing that specific element, it tells you which stylesheet it's coming from and what line the rule is on!

MeasureIt - This is a really nice ruler add-on that does a lot better job then the one in the web developer toolbar.

ColorZilla - This is a handy little eye dropper tool for your browser, just click on the page and it gives you the hex code for whatever colour it is. You can also double click the icon and it will bring up a colour picker very similar to photoshop.

I'm sure there's more but I use these every day and they come in real handy.

Alright now Joomla! extensions, I've been working on nothing but Joomla! sites this whole time so I've got quite a few.

JCE - This is a free wysiwyg editor to replace the default Joomla! editor. You not only get more text editing options, but it makes it a lot easier to create links and use photos on your Joomla! site.

Simple Image Gallery - This is a plugin produced by joomlaworks.gr. It's really simple to use all you do is put your images in a folder inside your templates images/stories folder. Then you create an article and enter {gallery}myfoldername{/gallery}. It creates thumbnails of all your images and displays the full sized ones in a lightbox.

(all the ones I'm going to tell you about in detail are free btw)

UCD (Ultimate Content Display) - This is also produced by joomlaworks, I came across it while working on my current project. I was having an issue displaying content because there's very little space for articles. The template is mostly made up of little module boxes. I couldn't get the control over the content I wanted so I installed this extension. Basically it lets you display and article in a module.

PluginInModule - This does exactly what is suggests. It enable you to run a plugin through one of your modules... It comes in handy for Simple Image Gallery.

All Videos Reloaded - This is a cool component, it gives you two different options, you can go to the extension manager and add videos that way as well as create play lists, or you can add videos right to an article by using the AVR button at the bottom of the editor. You get the same core options but going into the main component gives you a couple of other options.

This next one is not free but I recommend it if your ever doing a project where you need a simple light weight flash image gallery.

JPhoto like I said is a small flash gallery. It has several different styles you can apply to it and a few different display modes. Now I'll warn you the documentation isn't very good and it doesn't mention the file size limitation. There is a file size limit and you'll need to be aware of that even if the files are small enough they might take time to load (it is flash after all). You should be able to load pretty much any file you'd have to given that it's properly optimized.


Anyway I think that's enough for me, it was really nice seeing most of you last week at grad. I hope everyone is having a good time and good luck!