Video Transcript

Hi, I am Robert Vining, and this is a JoomlArt training video for Joomla 1.6 Plug-ins.

Plug-ins Overview

Joomla 1.6 comes with various types of plug-ins to extend the functionality and usability of your website. There's authentication, content, editors, system, user and search plug-ins. We'll talk about each of these in just a few minutes.

You can access the Plug-in Manager in the Extensions menu at the top. The panel comes with a search form and a filter by State, Plug-in Type and Access level. This toolbar allows you to edit, enable, or disable plug-ins and also check in.

Plug-ins Management

To enable a plug-in just select it and click the Enable button from the toolbar. You could also use the icons in the Enabled column for the same purpose. For instance we'll disable the plug-in we've just enabled. Let's edit a plug-in. To do that select it and click the Edit button from the toolbar. You can do the same by clicking on the plug-in name. For various reasons you can reorder plug-ins just like modules. The code will be parsed in the order you set. By clicking the Ordering column header, the panel display blue icons so you can reorder your plug-ins. Here's a quick example: we're going to change the order of the Editors -XTD plug-ins. See these buttons in the article edit screen? We can easily change their order. We're going to click the Move-up icon for button image plug-in and the page will be automatically refreshed and plug-ins reordered.

Plug-ins Showcase

Let's explore each of the plug-in types. We'll start with authentication plug-ins. The Authentication - Joomla plug-in provides authentication functionality for your Joomla website. This means that your registered users can log in to your website with a login form.

The Authentication - Gmail plug-in allows users to log in to your website with a Google account. By default this plug-in is disabled but if you choose to use it you must set the suffix to @gmail.com or @googlemail.com. Additionally you can set a user blacklist for security reasons.

The Authentication -LDAP plug-in allows your users to log in to your website with their Lightweight Directory Access Protocol account. The plug-in allows you to set your LDAP account and various connection settings. Please read http://wikipedia.org/wiki/LDAP for more information.

The content plug-ins apply mostly to content items. Let's have a look at each of them.

The Content - Joomla plug-in handles categories for core extensions.

The Content - Load Modules plug-in allows you to load module types or positions within your content items. The plug-in provides some options to determine the behavior of the module rendering: wrapped or no-wrapping. Here's a few examples editing an article and using loadmodule and loadposition.

The Content - Email Cloaking plug-in was developed to protect e-mail addresses used in your content against SPAM bots. You can set to use a Mail to link or disable link of the e-mail address.

The Content - Code Highlighter (GeSHI) plug-in allows you to use the GeSHI highlighting engine to display formatted code according to a specific coding language: PHP, CSS, JS, C++, etc.

The Content - Pagebreak plug-in allows you to create a Table of Contents for each of your multi-page content articles. The options allow you to show or hide the site title, article indexing, set a custom index heading, show or hide the Table of Contents and option to show or hide the Show all link.

The Content - Page Navigation plug-in enables the Next and Previous links for multi-page articles. You can set the position of these links above or below the article page content.

The Content - Vote plug-in allows your readers to rate articles. If you enabled the voting for an articles category or specific article, this plug-in will display the rate form under the article title.

Editor plug-ins makes it easy to edit content. You can use No editor, TinyMCE or any other third-party editors like JCE.

The Editor - TinyMCE plug-in provides several options such as editing functionality: simple, extended or advanced, set a skin, enable compression, clean code, language selection, default text direction and other options. The Advanced Parameters tab allows you to configure the layout of the editor and enable or disable some of the editing tools such as: tables, media, colors, font selection, etc. Generally all parameters provide usage hints on mouse hover so you can easily explore the capabilities of this editor.

The Editor - XTD plug-ins provide buttons to easily include article links or images, split articles into multiple pages and add a Read more.. link.

Search plug-ins enable searching for keywords within category titles, contacts, content articles newsfeeds and web links. System plug-ins provide various functionalities for your Joomla website. Some of them manage SEF links, cache, debug, system log, redirects and others manage language switch or user logged out redirects.

User plug-ins enable user synchronization for your website. Once enabled, they will automatically create a new user account and contact page.

A new feature in Joomla 1.6 is the User - Profile plug-in for each new member that logs in with a Google account which allows you to disable fields and set them as optional or required in the user registration page.

The User - Contact Creator plug-in will automatically create a new contact for each newly registered user. The options allows you to set a contact page using the [name], [username] or [userID] and then set a default contacts category and finally you can set to auto-publish the newly created contact. The User - Joomla plug-in will automatically create a new Joomla user on each log in with a Google or LDAP account. You have the option to enable or disable this automated process.

A new plug-in in Joomla 1.6 is the extensions feature which is to manage updates for core extensions.

That’s it for the overview of Joomla 1.6 Plug-ins video by JoomlArt. I’m Robert Vining. Thanks for watching!