I’ve got another post up over at Group 3 Solutions, this one discussing Joomla video plugins. First plugin up for discussion is EasierTube. The post gives some background on the problem of using video in Joomla posts and provides an overview of EasierTube’s features and issues. Enjoy!

Great little tutorial over at phpRiot on how to set up an intelligent custom 404 error page in PHP. However, if you’re using a stock Joomla 1.5 install with mod_rewrite enabled (e.g. SEO-friendly URLs) then you can just forget about doing this with an Apache directive. Joomla has control (though looking at the .htaccess file I’m not sure why), so you’ll need an altogether different great little tutorial. Lo and behold, the Joomla documentation comes to the resuce!

Check out how to build a custom 404 error handler into your Joomla template here.

Handy Flash banner ad clickTAG tutorial for anyone who doesn’t do this often enough to remember the technique off the top of their heads. This sort of thing is for use in ad syndication services like Google AdWords. Also, some good stuff at the Adobe site.

Each ad network uses different case sensitivity rules for the clickTAG variable (groan), so check into your network’s requirements. Google AdWords has a help page on clickTAG coding here.

I’ve got another post up over at Group 3 Solutions. We’ve turned our attention away from WordPress Plugins over to Joomla Plugins this time around. First up is Joomla Tabs & Slides. The post gives some background on tabs as a concept and then shows how to easily implement them in Joomla using this plugin. Enjoy!

Great article over at Vandelay Design for anyone interested in hacking WordPress categories. Really helpful.

Been tinkering around with custom Joomla 1.5 component development. Here are some helpful getting started links with “Hello world” -level tutorials:

1. vojtechovsky.net
2. softmarket.ro
3. packtpub.com

HR’s Industrial Strength Portal has a great round-up of settings/conditions you can check inside Joomla 1.5 templates in order to dynamically adjust your layout. Outstanding! =)

Out of the box, Joomla 1.5 is a powerhouse of functionality. But as with any stock system, there are a few things that may need to be tweeked in order to get the result you want or expect. Take Joomla menu controls for instance. They’re fine and functional, and 90% of the time no additional work is necessary. But a common practice with menus is to output them as unordered lists (ul) and then style them with CSS instructions. So, say you want to have your menu display on a horizontal line, with pipe separators between each menu item. Easy enough to define a style for this by specifying a right- or left-side border for list items in the menu. But since that rule would apply to all the list items (including first and last), you’ll have an extra pipe (at the end or the beginning). With manually constructed menus you can simply add a special class to the last (or first) list item that will style it differently (to remove the unwanted pipe). But with Joomla menus, each list item is the same, so there’s no ability to tag one with a special class. What to do?

That’s where Joomla 1.5’s new drop-dead simple module override functionality comes into play. Jisse Reitsma explains it very well over at his tutorial on Joomla module overrides at Open Source Network. In his tutorial, he explains how to alter the menu module to automatically tag the first and last list item with “first” and “last” classes. The short version is that Joomla 1.5 allows you to define a module override by simply making a folder named the same as the module you are modifying, copying the output template of the module into this new folder, and adjusting as necessary. So in essence, you’re copying a part of the module into a new location (see tutorial for specifics), modifying it, and Joomla automatically uses your modified version instead of the stock version. This prevents your mod from getting overwritten by Joomla upgrades. Brilliant!

I’ve already got this technique working on a couple of my own installations, and plan to add this mod to every theme from now on. That is, unless the Joomla devs go ahead and just build it into into the core at some point. Hint hint.

Well, I must confess that this WordPress plugin for Joomla would rock if it works as described. Comments on the page are hit and miss, so looks like I’ll have to try it out for myself to get a better idea. Groan. =)

Great article about Twitter from Snapps’ Rob Novak, a high-profile Lotus consultant/developer and good friend to my colleague Carol Dobies. Over at his Lotus Rock Star blog, he makes the case for Twitter, and likens it to a cocktail party. Money quote:

Just something to consider if you’re squarely in the “why would I care” camp…Twitter and other social media are like going to a cocktail party, like one I went to Thursday at the Mentor Summit in Vegas. I expect to talk to lots of people, care about what some of them have to say, filter a lot of personal stuff that doesn’t affect me while looking interested (how rude!), and come away – if not inebriated – with a few nuggets of great information, some great new contacts, and an idea or two out of the social interaction we have in a group that size. This dynamic – and EVERY networking event you’ve ever attended – is very similar to consistent use of social media in a targeted fashion.