Joomla Bites!
Here are a few uncategorized bite-sized hints and hacks to help you manage your Joomla site.
Article Manager Access Control Level
Joomla 1.7 has a powerful Access Control Level (ACL) system that can allow you to grant access privileges to specific users. It is also fairly difficult to get your head round at first.
In this example we're going to set up a group for "newspeople". They'll be able to log into the admin area and create articles for their news section but they won't be able to access any other articles.
Removing the ID number from Joomla 1.5 Articles
On search engine friendly Joomla 1.5 sites the URL of articles that are not directly linked to menu items includes an ID number. eg. www.hyde-design.co.uk/test/4-example. Here's how to disable them.
Change textarea size in Joomla 1.6
The textarea size in the Article Manager of Joomla 1.6 is annoyingly small, especially for people used to Joomla 1.5. However you can change the height of this by clicking on the diagonal lined area at the bottom right hand corner but the size will reset after each session has ended. Here's how you can hardcode a height of your choice...
Use PHP to only display modules on specific browser
Despite all your careful template coding sometimes a particular browser doesn't play safe with a particular extension. Conditional stylesheets can be a useful solution to load CSS for a particular version of IE but if you want HTML to be conditionally loaded you may run into problems with browsers other than IE.
Adding CSS classes via WYSIWYG
CSS classes can be added and applied via Joomla's default WYSIWYG Editor (TinyMCE). But it will only work if you state the classes in the template's editor.css file. If the CSS file is called anything else it won't be loaded into TinyMC.
How to insert flash into Joomla
Inserting Flash files into Joomla articles is extremely easy via the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor.
However by default this function is disabled. To enable it go to Extensions > Plug in Manager > Editor - Tiny MCE, then select "Extended " from the "Functionality" drop down menu.
Changing Joomla's default Greetings
To change any of Joomla's default greetings or warnings, locate the .INI file at language > en-GB > en-GB.com_user.ini
All english language warnings and greetings are stored here.
Replacing Joomla's Meta-Generator tag
If you use the “view page source” function on your browser you will notice that by default Joomla 1.5 is namechecked under a generator tag. Anybody can use the “view page source” and therefore anybody can tell that your site is a Joomla one.
Redirecting old Pages with htaccess
One important function of the .htaccess file that most people overlook is the use of redirected URLs. If you are updating an old HTML based site in a Joomla format then any links that were recognised by Google are likely to become dead links (unless of course you are using exactly the same links, including the “.html” suffix). To avoid this add the following line to the bottom of the .htaccess file.
Hidden Search Module
Adding /index.php?option=com_search after the URL of a Joomla website will automatically display the search module, even it it has not been used within the site.
View all Module Positions
For a quick way to view the module positions on a live site, add ?tp=1 after the URL of a Joomla 1.5 site.