Brian Teeman

Recently whilst visiting a client they were moaning about the lack of true content preview in joomla.

There are plenty of tricks you can employ to preview content in hidden categories etc but its still not the same as previewing the content exactly where it will appear.

The same is also true when adding a new component or plugin to a live site. Will it work properly in the site configuration, what will it look like, will it needed styling to match the site etc and all in an environment where the casual site visitor will not see it.

Back in April I published news about a Joomla administrator application for the iPhone.

With these trying times, $9.99 may be a lot for an iPhone user to invest on an iPhone App.  This is why Covert Apps has just released a free, ad supported lite version, or "low fat" in Brit speak, of J Admin Mobile!

Even though I am known to many as Mr Gadget man I don't own an iphone. I've just never seen the point!

My windows based mobile has done everything I wanted it to do, and I already own an mp3 player and digital camera.

But today perhaps this has all changed. As someone who is regularly out on the road I rely on my portable joomla training suite to keep me intouch with the world and more importantly in control of my clients web sites.

Now Joomla! administration has finally found its way to the iPhone with J Admin Mobile (JAM!)(iTunes link).  JAM! will allow you to manage many of the core Joomla! 1.5 features right from your iPhone!

Last week I blogged about creating a large form with complex validation rules using bfForms.

But what do you do if you want to add an existing html form to your joomla site?

Perhaps you have a form created in dreamweaver, or you have purchased a form from an on-line library, or even have a form created in microsoft word that you want to add to your site.

I've hinted about this new uberextension before but now its here and available for download.

“climb every (Joomla!) mountain with K2”

I don't know why but in the last few weeks I have seen a growing number of extension developers write code like this.

if (!is_dir($dstdir)) {
mkdir($dstdir);
chmod($dstdir, 0777);
}

It is hard enough educating users not to do this without extension developers doing it for them.

There is no need ever to chmod 777 anything!!

Joomla is great but I bet everyone has their own set of extensions that they always install on a site, I know I do.

This will either mean that you have to spend extra time installing them before you can get started on the real work or that you have built your own custom joomla install.

I've built several of them myself in the past and they must have saved me tens of hours.

It's relatively easy to do it but is in itself time consuming and of course you have to ensure that you keep all of the constituent parts up to date.

It's an interesting question that I've been pondering over the last few weeks.

What is a joomla extension?

When does an extension become an application?

Like most community groups they have events and activities on a regular basis so probably the first extension I've installed on their site has been JCal Pro, the most complete calendar solution for any Joomla web site.

At some point in a web developers life you will no doubt be asked to build a web site using the organisations standard font or some wierd and wonderful font a photoshop designer has set their heart on.

Despite much talk in the standards bodies to permit the embedding of fonts in a web page this is not yet a viable option and we are left to either convince the client they can only use web standard fonts or to create the text using an image.