Joomla Blog

Didn't get what you hoped for this Valentine's Day? Roses are red; violets are blue; look at these goodies I found for you.

The biggest feature to hit Joomla 1.6 was the vast improvement with access control. However this greatness comes with responsibility and it can be a pain to test a development site or troubleshoot issues with a live site. Joomla Administrators would love to be able to login as a particular user, without knowing that user's password. Well ... it turns out that this is indeed possible.

JInstaller: :Install: Cannot find XML setup file

One of the most common ways to generate this error is by trying to install a compressed extension that needs to be extracted first. For instance, some extensions ship with two different versions inside one zip file. If this is the case, you must first extract that "outer" directory to get to the version of the extension you need. But, how do you know if you have one of these extensions or not?

Plugin:

A specific type of Joomla Extension that provides some functionality or behavior in the background of a Joomla website.

In the early days of Joomla, plugins were called mambots. Since version 1.5, the name was updated to plugin as their power and versatility increased. Joomla comes installed with several core plugins, such as Load Modules and Pagebreak, but many other third party plugins are available.

If you've ever polled your online audience or asked them to vote on something, you might be interested in Code Haiku's new extension, Mail In Vote, which offers a bit of a different way to get feedback from your followers and friends. Instead of relying on them to come to your site for a poll, you can now easily send a quick ballot to them directly through email.

Extensions for Joomla can range anywhere from a small plugin that sits inconspicuously in the background performing some small function to full blown applications. Social Pinboard for Joomla is definitely the latter. Apptha has created an extension that is in iteself an entire web build. In fact, your only template option when setting up Social Pinboard is the Social Pinboard template, making it much more of a web solution than only a Joomla extension.

Component:

A specific type of Joomla extension. Components are similar to small applications in that they do work for a website or add functionality.

Setup, configuration and modification of component behavior is usually managed through the Joomla Administrator. Some components, such as Banners and Contacts, are installed with the Joomla core installation, while others are third party software packages that you download and install yourself.

Extension:

A native or third party piece of software that extends the functionality of Joomla to enhance either the front end experience, the back end Administrator or both.

The term extension can mean a software package that has been developed for a specific task in a Joomla website, or it can also be a very generic term that encompasses the more specific types of extensions available for Joomla, such as components, modules, plugins and templates.

If you have ever browsed through the list of standard Joomla plugins, you might have stumbled on one called Authentication - GMail. Read on to discover what this is and two reasons why it could be useful for your Joomla site.