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Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia

Book Review by C.Stinson Joomla-Webmasters.com

This book is a comprehensive guide to everything you need to know about Multimedia and Joomla! CMS. Written in clean, understandable English, this book is a great resource for users at all levels, from beginners to advanced.

After the reader digs past the detailed introductions of industry terminology, Allan creates a cohesive flow, from learning settings already built into Joomla's Media Manager to installing and setting up third party Joomla! extensions. Also detailed in the starting pages are well-illustrated explanations of settings and modes for file transfers using both FTP applications and within Joomla’s file management extensions.

In chapter three, we take a journey into typography and Joomla! The reader learns the effects of well-planned typesetting and "web safe" fonts for web pages. Allan quickly gets us up to speed with fontography and ties it into our Joomla! template's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)—with documentation of use and examples of code, detailing the use of alternate methods for using custom fonts and specific Joomla! extensions for performing font management.

Next, we dive deeper into everything you would ever want to know about images, formats, and image manipulation—along with everything you need to know about audio and video. The reader learns what's needed and what's new, as well as, browser compatibilities and other known browser issues. These chapters continue the flow with nicely illustrated examples, bubbles, HTML code samples, applications and how-tos; as well as, popular galleries and slideshows extensions for Joomla!—all highlighted. All aspects of audio encoding, including usage and podcasting, is explained in this part of the book. Streaming, embedding, and RSS feeds are presented clearly along with examples and extensions specific to Joomla!. Allan's reviews of all the relevant extensions are a huge time saver for those looking for more than core Joomla! functionality.

The social media and external sources sections leave nothing uncovered. Allan gets us up-to-speed with all the latest technologies and exciting Joomla! extensions available for management from Joomla! The template and multimedia sections are extremely detailed and illustrated with examples of the popular Joomla! template clubs like Yootheme and Rockettheme cores, to name a few. Mobile web isn't left out, either! Allan details for us everything we need to know to get Joomla! "mobile friendly.”

The final chapters of this great resource walk us through our own Multimedia Joomla! project. Allan puts all the elements together as we build maps and video within articles: setting up a local development server, detailing the ins and outs of configurations, the options for Apache, phpMyAdmin, and mySQL . The book also touches on a few topics for both Mac and PC users.

If you are new to Joomla! and want to make websites that really move your audience, this is the book you must own. Definitely get this if you are an advanced Joomla! user and are looking to save time. You will eliminate the need to performi your own audits on many popular multimedia Joomla! extensions and you will keep current with the various multimedia file types and extensions.

Buy Direct and Save
Packt Publishing, Feb. 2010

Developing Sites With AJAX: Design Challenges and Common Issues

Almost every movie has a scene in which a character pull the protagonist aside and says, “There’s something you should know about [insert another character's name here].” Most of the time, we find out some dark secret about a supposed friend of the protagonist or that the main ally is actually an evil overlord. This is that moment, and I am here to tell you a few things about our friend in the Web 2.0 world: AJAX.

We seem to have AJAX licked. The Web technology is ubiquitous, and libraries and frameworks make it dead easy for us to create highly interactive Web applications and to spice up our static pages and blogs.

Guess Who's Been Working on Version 1.6?

If you have the impression that more people are helping out with version 1.6, then you are correct. I just did a quick look through the CHANGELOG file for the past month and I found 22 names of contributors. Here they are:

Amy Stephen, Andrea Tarr, Andrew Eddie, Angie Radtke, Arlen Walker, Christophe Demko, Christopher Garvis, Dejan Acman, Elin Waring, Hannes Papenberg, James Kennard, Jean-Marie Simonet, Jeff Channell, Jeff Fendley, Jonnathan S. Lima, Louis Landry, Mark Dexter, Nabyl Sadki, Omar Ramos, Robert Deutz, Ron Severdia, and Sam Moffatt.

My apologies if I missed someone. We have been trying to lower the barriers and encourage more people to join in the fun, and it seems to be working. If you would like to help out, there is plenty to do. Please join us on the Joomla CMS Development list to find out where you can best help out. Thanks!