Joomla! 1.5 GPL Extensions for July 2008
Several great ways to empower your Joomla! 1.5 Web site
Written by Toni Marie
An interesting and much-needed addition to the Joomla! Extensions Directory in the month of June was the"Changing Collation" tool, by Phoca (owners of the excellent 1.5 native photo gallery extension). You could require a new database collation for a number of reasons, but the two most prevalent would be that you created your Joomla! database without knowing which to select, or you used the CPanel hosting one-click-install via Fantastico. Many Joomla! users and administrators are unaware, but the default database collation (language encoding) in a Fantastico installation is Latin, not UTF-8. This causes problems for certain content, languages, etc and is simply not recommended. But, a great number Joomla! installations are done with Fantastico and we must credit the ease of Fantastico installation with bringing the community new users. With Phoca's new tool, users who find themselves stuck with Latin (or otherwise undesirable) database collation can now fix themselves without costly and time-consuming repairs.
Speaking of interesting new galleries for 1.5, AlexRed put out a gallery in May that is generated into a very slick 3D Flash animation. Ozio Gallery will showcase your photos in a very stylish output. The demo is absolutely striking, and though there is a bit of a learning curve figuring out what it really can do, the journey is a very entertaining exploration in clicking navigation, zoom, captions, etc. If you do get a chance to check out the demo, be sure to click the little round arrow "rotate" button in the bottom right of each tile that will flip each thumbnail over and show you the description/caption/filename. This type of cutting edge output is ideal for showcasing photography or art, and that idea is made evident by its full integration with the user's Flickr account. Not only can images be displayed from a folder on the Joomla! site's server, but they can also be loaded directly from Flickr.
If you're a Twitter user, you'll appreciate the Tweets Module by Van Eldijk Studios . This module feeds the latest Twitter messages from a Twitter account you specify. It features a number of parameters to customize the output. This is the only twitter feed currently Joomla! 1.5 Native, and Twitter addicts will no doubt want to check it out.
ccNewsletter by Chill Creations is the newest GPL newsletter component to enter the JED. A fork of the venerable spsNewsletter, it has a leg up on a number of other newsletter components in that it offers Joomla! user table synchronization in a free component. ccNewsletter utilizes Joomla! 1.5's language capabilities, and has a Dutch translation currently in development.
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