Flash and Joomla News by Eyezberg

Enhanced Joomla! administration

Joomla! administration interface is "power in simplicity". It's very clean and usable. But it can be improved still be a few extensions, and some interesting functionality can be added if requiered.

The advantage of Joomlas modularity and extensibility is that you can also tweak the admin interface to add new components and modules, accessible from the interface there. Presentation of some of these I personally find very usefull and would recommend you check out.

The admin "Home" screen consists, just like the frontend, of various module positions. This makes it very easy to change, add functionality and adapt to suit your needs. All you need to do is install the new module, and configure it for display in the correct location. Screenshot of the module positions:

The most usefull ones are cpanel, header, and icons.

header position

As you may have noticed, header is quite small in terms of real estate. You'll find the "users online" indicator and "recieved messages" there by default.  

Here's a screenshot with some added icons:

Proud to say, these are my own creations! The tutorial to create your own is available, let me know what you come up with!

We have, added here:

• All Content, which links to the "all content items" screen" (yes, I know, you wouldn't have guessed..),
  
• Preview with Positions (frontend with module positions placement highlighted in the template)
• Preview, which provides quick access to frontend view from any page, even if the mainmenu is disabled (content editing screens). I use this for example by setting an item to "special" access, then I can check it on the live site without anyone knowing. Using this one all the time, as I was fed up with the Site/Preview/In new window submenu.. glad to find it now in the 1.5 SVN

cpanel position

Now this position provides some really usefull space, it does look a bit weird with a lot of tabs, but can hold very usefull items.
Remember: you can get rid of the ones you do not used by simply clicking the state from published (green check) to unpublished (red x)! 

Defaults here are:

• Logged (online users by nickname)
• Components (never using this..)
• Popular (good for the ego, and wondering why these items are and others not.. my most popular is 404, strangely..???)
• Latest Items, which I used to use all the time: start a new article, which remains unpublished because not finished. Do other stuff, then want to continue editing: just click Home / Latest, and it's right there, and you're back in edit  mode in one click! Luv it!
• Menu stats: still wondering what this is usefull for.. if you know..
  

Brand new, very cool: hackwar's ToDo module!

Let's you create  private or public items (for collab between admins, reminders etc..)

The world famous "Rated Multilingual"

This one contains the list of your items by rating. Gotta be carefull with the parameters, because it has no pagination (glad for any help on this!!!), so if you have many (rated) items, this list could get veeeeery long! 

The must-have "Unpublished items" module

This one now is my first item in cpanel, as I often start an item, then get pictures ready, upload these, and come back to edit: one click! Also nice for multi-contributor sites, as you'll get all unpublished articles here at one glance!

Notice: I have no ACL (access rights) in the code, so anyone with backend access sees this list.. handle with care! 

Finally, something I probably won't publish officially as it's not very flexible, though it can be configured via parameters.
You can find it on the forums attached to some of my posts, but you'll have to look for it yourself. Introducing:

The linky module!

The purpose of this was a proof of concept for something to include for different user levels (new Joomla! usrs, intermediate, advanced), or for different link topics like security, development etc.. Just  to give you ideas really (and maybe to the dev's).

Last important position: the quicklink icons!

icons position

Now for this position, I really only know one way to change anthing which is really usefull: the component + module replacement for core default called  Custom Quickicons. I use it myself and really like it.

Install the component and module, configure the component by adding/removing/re-ordering the links and selecting the icons, then unpublish the default module and publish the new one! Result (notice 2nd and 3rd icons..):

As you can see, I unpublished the ones I seldom use, and added 2 of my own for quick access to the most important sections of the site.

There's another component around the rename the menu links of the main menu which I haven't used, and maybe some others I don't know about, but i hope these examples will inspire you to create something and share it with the rest of us!

Find most extensions here. | Tutorial. 

Modules: small blocks that can displayed in various spots around (and in!) your main content.. how to use them?

There are two main ways to create modules, two main ways to use your modules, and many ways to change a page look with their settings.

Joomla! Menus... collections of links to various parts of your site, or even to other sites.

The most important menu is the mainmenu. This comes with a default install and can not be deleted. Each menu you find in the Menu Manager has an associated module in the Module Manager. Each new menu you create also creates a new module. Each menu you delete also deletes the module. So first thing to remember is the tight link between a menu and its module.

Consequence: when you configure and manage your menu (links), you will have to adjust settings in (at least) two different places: the menu item, and the module for this menu. Ex.: you create a new item with a menu image. If you don't set the Show Menu Images parameter to yes in the module settings, the image won't be visible!

Joomla modules: what is so nice about them? My personal hit list:

1. They are very flexible in usage! Thanks to the module positions, by changing one simple setting you can completely change the look of a page!
2. They can be copied! Just select one (checkbox) in the Module Manager, and click the "copy" button to create an extra copy!
3. They can be loaded into content items via a simple call to the included "mosloadposition" mambot!
4. They can be created right from Joomla admin, simply by clicking the "New" button in the Module Manager screen, and pasting your code into the textarea! Or inserting the link to an RSS feed.
   
5. They can display any (small) content you want: images, video, text, DHTML, Flash...
   
6. The loadModules call supports a parameter for different output styles (table, div..)