Secret# 2: Language Overrides

And we’re back! Sorry for the delay on these posts. Things have been quite busy around the help desk. Here is your next secret. Did you ever notice some stubborn text on your Joomla! site that you wished you could change but never could figure out how? Let’s take a look at one such example below:

Welcome to this series of Joomla! Secrets where I talk about the lesser known functions of your Joomla! website. You may not know about some of these functions simply because they are turned off by default. Here is your first secret exposed!

Last fall WhyHunger was gearing up for its annual Hungerthon campaign. The organization needed a way to create a user friendly website with an easy to use CMS and integrated Ecommerce system. In looking at all the possible solutions out there nothing quite met these requirements. Magento was of course the obvious Ecommerce solution but its templating system was not condusive to the project.  Joomla! offered an easy to use CMS and also many different extensions for crowdfunding and displaying imagery but it lacked ecommerce functionality. Enter Magebridge, a robust fully featured API for connecting Joomla! and Magento.

Setting up a local Joomla! installation on your laptop or desktop is relatively simple. There are lots of reasons for why you might want to do this. For example, in my case I like to keep a local copy of my client’s website so that if they require an update or a custom change I can test those updates and changes on my local machine before implementing them live. This can save a lot of trouble and downtime on a live site since if something goes wrong at least the live site remains unaffected and you have time to fix the issue. If you are using WordPress and want to do the same thing with your WP site take a look at my article “How to Migrate WordPress to Your Local Server“.

Well here we are, a little bit behind schedule this month but still writing! As promised, in this article we will be talking about the Joomla! Page Suffix. If you read last month’s article you should now know a little something about CSS. In that article we talked about what CSS does and how we can write a custom module class suffix to determine the look and feel of a particular module. The Page Suffix is exactly like the module class suffix except it is a selector class in the Body element. Let’s take a look at the screen shot below to get a sense of how the Page Suffix differs from the module class suffix in terms of HTML heirarchy.

So, you finally have your site set up, people are happily visiting and engaging but now the enevitable question… how does the site perform on mobile devices? The answer if you look for yourself is not too bad but it could be better. Unfortuantely, your RJ Web Builder templates were put together right before the rush to responsive design so they are not going to repond differently depending on screen size (see my recent article on responsive design). However, your templates do have the ability to create a mobile version of your website. In this article we are going to talk about this section of your template manager and how you can create a mobile version of your site.