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Joomla! 1.5 JavaScript jQuery
Enhance your Joomla! sites with the power of jQuery
extensions, plugins, and more
Jose Argudo Blanco
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
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Joomla! 1.5 JavaScript jQuery
Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written
permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in
critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy
of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is
sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt
Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages
caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the
companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals.
However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: July 2010
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-849512-04-6
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Asher Wishkerman ([email protected])
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Credits
Author Editorial Team Leader
Jose Argudo Blanco Akshara Aware
Reviewers Project Team Leader
Eric Brown Lata Basantani
Tahsin Hasan
Project Coordinator
Srimoyee Ghoshal
Acquisition Editor
Darshana Shinde
Proofreader
Aaron Nash
Development Editor
Rakesh Shejwal
Graphics
Geetanjali Sawant
Technical Editor
Hithesh Uchil
Production Coordinator
Aparna Bhagat
Copy Editors
Janki Mathuria
Lakshmi Menon Cover Work
Aparna Bhagat
Indexer
Hemangini Bari
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About the Author
Jose Argudo Blanco is a web developer from Valencia, Spain. After completing
his studies, he started working for a web design company. Then, six years later, he
decided to freelance.
Now that some years have passed as a freelancer, he thinks it's the best decision he
has ever taken because it let him work with the tools that he likes, such as Joomla!,
CodeIgniter, CakePHP, jQuery, and other well-known open source technologies.
His desire to learn and share his knowledge has led to him being a regular reviewer
of books from Packt Publishing, including Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics, Openx Ad Server,
Drupal E-commerce, Joomla! With Flash, Joomla! 1.5 SEO, and Magento Theme Design.
Recently, he published his own book, CodeIgniter 1.7, which you can also find on
Packt's site. And since then he has been working on this Joomla! book, putting all
his effort into it.
To Silvia, my brother, my family, Packt's team, and, of course,
to you, the reader. I hope this book is useful to you.
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About the Reviewers
Eric Brown, born and raised in California, joined the US Navy at 17 and became a
Preventive Medicine Technician. Upon exiting military service, he left the medical
field behind and moved to Nebraska and entered college to study art and design,
which resulted in a Bachelor's of Science in Graphic Design from Wayne State
College in Nebraska. Eric has since branched out by teaching himself (or learning
from others) various aspects of HTML, CSS, and PHP as well as a variety of other
code languages and web marketing strategies and tools. He currently owns his own
design and development business located in Curtis, Nebraska, where he lives with
his wife and pets.
Over the years Eric has worked for a local design and development firm in Nebraska
on such projects as the Golden Spike Tower website, aimed at tourist traffic centered
on the Union Pacific's Bailey Yard, and with a premier pet industry design and
development firm as a project manager. He has also written for such prestigious
publications as Trafficology (a purchased print publication on web marketing read
by over 80,000 worldwide), CMSWire.com (a leader in content management news),
Revenews (a highly rated site on various aspects of marketing), and Gadgetell
(a well-known gadget news site).
Eric has been involved in other books as well, providing editing, image touch-up,
and custom hand-drawn maps for Tagging Along (a Neville Family retrospective)
as well as editing, layout, cover art, and image touch-up for My Life and Community
(autobiography of Ken Huebner).
I would like to thank any and all who have helped to bring my
career to this point, but most of all I would like to thank my wife
Jaime and two children Ariel and Autumn for all their patience
and understanding as my career and business underwent their
developmental stages.
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Tahsin Hasan is the 16th Zend PHP 5 certified programmer from Bangladesh. He
is a tech enthusiast and has more than five years of web development experience. He
has proficiency in LAMP environment. Tahsin Hasan is deft in both client-side and
server-side programming techniques. He has worked with several PHP frameworks,
such as CodeIgniter, Symphony, and CakePHP. He has contributed several libraries
to the CodeIgniter community. He has also worked on several jQuery plugins. He
has professional experience on software development lifecycle.
Tahsin Hasan always contributes to technical discussions on cutting edge
technologies on his blog (http://newdailyblog.blogspot.com). You can
reach him at [email protected].
I would like to thank my parents and my siblings for their
encouragement while reviewing this book. And I would like to
give special thanks to Srimoyee Ghoshal, Project Coordinator at
Packt Publishing.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Let's Start Making a Better Site—Images 7
How Joomla! handles images by default 9
Inserting images into articles 9
Placing images in modules 11
Placing images in the template 12
Adding a jQuery-powered image slideshow module 13
Some other modules to try 16
Image pop ups 16
Some other modules to try 21
Putting images together—image galleries 21
Some other extensions to try 25
Tips and tricks 26
Summary 26
Chapter 2: Site Content—Our Next Step 27
Basic concepts on Joomla! content 28
How Joomla! shows our articles to site visitors 29
Enhance your site content using JavaScript 31
Organizing our content into tabs 31
Some other modules to try 35
Article slideshows 35
Some other extensions worth checking 38
Site search 38
Introducing AJAX search 40
Some other extensions to try 47
Tips and tricks 47
Summary 49
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Table of Contents
Chapter 3: Embedding Rich Media Features with Joomla! Plugins 51
Concept of plugin—what is a Joomla! plugin and how does it work? 52
Code highlighter plugin 54
Some other extensions to try 59
captbunzo's Flickr Album plugin 59
Some other plugins to try 63
SC jQuery 63
Some other plugins to try 68
Tips and tricks 68
Summary 69
Chapter 4: One Last Look at Joomla! jQuery Modules 71
Limitations of Joomla! menu modules 71
Creating a drop-down menu with CSS alone 75
jQuery-powered Joomla! menu modules 78
Adapting the menu to suit our template 82
Some more extensions to try 86
Creative ways of placing login modules in our site 86
Some other extensions to try 93
Tips and tricks 93
Summary 93
Chapter 5: Refactoring Our Site 95
Warning 96
Removing unnecessary jQuery loads 97
Code highlight 100
pPGallery plugin 101
Shadowbox 102
AJAX Header Rotator 104
Content Slider module 105
What happens with jQuery UI 105
c7DialogMOD 107
jQuery tabs module 110
Removing MooTools 112
Tips and tricks 113
Summary 116
Chapter 6: Getting Our Hands on Coding JavaScript 117
Adding movement to our site's header—Parallax effect 118
Preparing the HTML necessary for our example 119
Adding jQuery Parallax library 122
Tips and tricks 126
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jQuery library jScrollPane 126
Adding mouse scrolling 131
Adding useful tooltips 131
Tips and tricks 136
Summary 137
Chapter 7: Creating Our Own Modules 139
Learning the basics of Joomla! module creation 140
Creating a "Send us a question" module 143
Making a better form using JavaScript 154
Send the form using jQuery AJAX 154
Tips and tricks 160
Validating form fields using jQuery—why validate? 160
Warning 163
What could you check? 164
What to do next? Packing and installing the module 164
Summary 166
Chapter 8: Building Complete Solutions, Modules,
and Components 167
Working with the news rotator module 168
Creating the component base 170
XML installer file 173
Why are so many files necessary? 175
Building our first model 176
How Joomla! helps us work with the database 178
Inserting data 179
Updating data 183
Deleting records 184
Reading data 184
loadResult 184
loadObject 186
loadObjectList 187
Modifying our installer to create our table 189
Coding a basic admin zone 191
Inserting, editing, and deleting records in our admin zone 197
Showing our data in our module 213
Adding jQuery to our module—refreshing data using JavaScript 216
Summary 218
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