Did you know you can use the default Joomla Newsflash module to show the teaser of a single, random article? I recently had a client who wanted to show a single random Joomla article in a module position. I scoured the Joomla Extensions looking for such a module. I found quite a few, some free and some commercial, but none of them did exactly what I wanted: randomly display the teaser and teaser thumbnail of 1 article from a category.

I gave up on the Joomla Extensions search and tried a Google search. Bingo! I found an old post on the Joomla forum from a user looking for the same thing as me. And like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I found that I already had what I was looking for right in the default installation of Joomla: The Newsflash module.

The Joomla Newsflash module can be configured to randomly display the teaser and image for a single article from a category. You can also configure it to show only text, to show a specified number of articles, to show or hide the Read More link, and to show or hide the article title. There’s no place like home to find the module you are looking for.