I had a VERY stressful website job and was way over budget. The thing that was giving me the most heartburn was a form I had to build with 80 fields! That’s right: 80 fields! I have built some large forms by hand writing php code, but it’s very time consuming. And when you add a database to the form, even more time consuming. Continue reading →

Joomap is a Joomla component that automatically creates a sitemap of your joomla site. This wonderful, free component is easily configurable. For example, you can exclude specific menu items from the sitemap, and you can configure the sitemap layout. In addition, you can edit the Joomap .css file to change the look of the Joomap unordered lists.

Joomla is the Swiss Army Knife of Content Management Systems because of it’s Components, Mods, and Plugins. The default Joomla text editor is TinyMCE, a web based Javascript/HTML WYSIWYG editor control released as open source. It’s a nice little editor, but it not very user friendly, especially for html novices. And lets face it, many of the people using Joomla are HTML novices. That’s why they use Joomla: So they can easily update their website without calling a web site designer.

The JCE Text Editor, by Ryan Demmer is a wonderful upgrade to the TinyMCE editor.

The following is a list of just a few of the great features in JCE:

• Image Upload and Insertion: JCE’s image upload and insertion is a vast improvement over the default Joomla image manager. With this feature, web site novices can easily upload and insert images into their article and documents and even do right or left image floats just be selecting left or right alignment.
• File Upload and Insertion: Like the Image Upload and Insertion, this feature allows you to easily upload and link to non-html documents such as .doc, .pdf, and .xls. Again, this feature makes is so novice users can easily upload and link to non-html documents.
• Insert/Edit Link: Normally, to link to a joomla article, you have to copy the url from the page you have to link to and then open an article, create a link, and paste the URL into the link dialog screen. With JCE’s Insert/Edit link feature, you can select text or an image, click the Insert/Edit Link tool, and then select from a list of Sections, Categories, Articles, Static Content, Contacts, Menu Items, or URLs. Again, even a website novice can now easily add links.

The license fee for this module is $20 per year, AND you can install it on multiple domains. This is an incredible deal. Plus, Ryan’s support is EXCELLENT. JCE requires very specific server configuration (pretty common for LAMP servers), and I had some problems installing it the first time, mostly because of errors on my part. But I posted my problem on the JCE forum and Ryan answered promptly (I’m in the U S and Ryan’s in South Africa). Even with his email assistance, I couldn’t get JCE to work correctly. Finally, Ryan logged into my web server and fixed the issue in minutes. Now that’s service!

My only complaint about JCE is this: WHY IS THIS COMPONENT NOT INCLUDED IN THE DEFAULT JOOMLA INSTALLATION?