This is a great new feature in this project that makes it as simple as clicking on a button to get your active template ready for this extension to work properly. So, now it is incredibly easy for you to try the extension with your templates. You can try this and a lot of other new changes in the latest release, http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/frediting/frs/.

You’ll get an idea of the changes from the last release by looking at the ChangeLog in the archive.

Once you install the component and the two plugins, all you’ve to do is go to the admin section of the component and click on “Apply Changes”. You can also revert changes by clicking on “Revert Changes”.

When you click on “Apply Changes”, the following changes take place:

1. Your template’s index.php is backed up as ‘index.php.backup’ and it is then modified based on the changes implied in README.txt.

2. Your template’s ‘html/modules.php’ is updated with the module chrome. If it already exists, it is backed up as ‘modules.php.backup’. One important point here, if you’ve tried a previous version of my project, make sure you remove the ‘modChrome_editor’ from your modules.php before you try this version.

3. Your template’s ‘html/com_content/article/form.php’ is backed up if it already exists as ‘form.php.backup’. It is then completely overwritten with this extension’s own layout.

Since the changes are applied only to the current default template, if you change the default template, you’ll have to apply changes again for that particular template.

The devil is always in the details. So, here are a few important details:

1. Implementation of Article Editing: Currently, I’m using JavaScript to hide the default article edit icons. That means, the edit icons will always appear next to the article titles no matter where you place them in your template’s layout files. For this, I’m going to include an admin option to specify the selector for the edit icons. Otherwise, if your template is using some random class for the element holding edit icons, there is a possibility of a pair of edit icons appearing.

   To justify this, since I’m developing this as an extension, if I wanted to hack the layout files it would be too complex since I’ll need to modify the layout files for frontpage, article, category and section. Also, if I don’t hide the default article edit icons, the layout breaks sometimes when you toggle editing as well as the tooltips don’t work as they’re written in mootools 1.1 whereas I’m using mootools 1.2.

   This implementation is solely for this as an extension. If this gets decided to be added to the core, I can simply make the changes to the core layout files.

2. Mootools 1.2 vs. 1.1: The entire JavaScript of this project has been written using mootools 1.2 ( which is the version that’ll be used in Joomla! 1.6 ). Unfortunately, mootools 1.2 is considerably different than 1.1 and much of the javascript written in 1.1 doesn’t work properly under 1.2. Consequently, if your template is using mootools 1.1, chances are it may not work properly.

3. A Joomla! 1.6 version: Over the next few days, I’m going to try and create a version using core hacks for 1.6.