Embedding videos in Joomla content can be a little tricky sometimes; with a stock Joomla site you really just have one main content area to bung embed code into, but you usually have a wysiwyg editor installed so that code gets messed up in html translation mistakenly or otherwise doesn't display whilst editing your content etc...  Of course, to make the job easier, extensions have emerged as plugins that let you use special tags in your content (such as Allvideos), but well, who wants to remember how to properly reference a 3rd-party hosted clip right?

I've been excited about Kaltura for some time - its an Open-source video platform which works just like some of the major commercial ones (eg. Brightcove.) - only its cheaper (free?) and has some cool tools to let your community remix videos right in your website - using a huge assortment of samples; from your collection to anything hosted on Kaltura member sites.

Kaltura just released an extension for Joomla and it looks pretty amazing; with it, you can:

• upload/embed videos,
• embed flickr/myspace video/photo/audio media in your articles,
• manage media in a central control panel,
• customize the embed player on your site,
• edit and remix video to embed in your site and much more!

Now, Kaltura still doesn't solve the issue of embedding content from 3rd party hosts like youtube, vimeo, etc..; it seems to offer myspace video embeds (ahem, what?) and thats about it.. so you're still going to have to use somethign like the Allvideos plugin to easily embed them, but Kaltura can be a very easy way to upload and embed original video - you can upload video files or record directly from your webcam...

For some reason Joomla core has never natively been able to create custom forms - I'm not sure if this is due to it originally (pre-1.5 releases) allowing non-article content types to sit in the usual database tables that comprise your site, or something else... However, for years there have been multiple extensions floating around that could let you create forms out of basic elements, like text, email and file fields.

The most basic use of such extensions would be to get rid of Joomla's too-simple contact form system.  To do just that it seems that today there are a good 4 or 5 extensions sitting in the extensions directory that could help you out, though the more digging you do the more you'll find discrepancies between them.  Choosing the right form extension should be done with a balance of features to look for, such as:

• A highly active and focused extension developer,
• A multitude of fields already supported,
• A large user base,
• Development of the extension with long-term focus; if the extension has been created to allow the developer to just create 1 or 2 forms on his/her website, it may not be able to do more in the future (given that their initial need for it was satisfied).

Back in 2007 I mentioned the release of a new extension called Fabrik - after spending some time comparing notes between a bunch of form components just now I am back in love with it!  You see, Fabrik takes the approach of forms being essential things for application-building - meaning that with Fabrik, you can create forms to not only email somewhere but store in your database which in turn can be displayed as lists through your site - you you can, for example, use it to build things like a custom library listing of books.

Fabrik was around before last year's CCK-in-joomla copycating began and is interesting in not replacing Joomla's core article content-type but side-stepping it with a flexible system for handling custom content that supports custom theming and additional plug-in support (yes, you can make your own field types).

Already available fields for forms created with Fabrik include; user details, captcha (with recaptcha!), text areas/fields, file uploads, images, database joins and more (including text displays to annotate fields - for 'help' purpose)...

I highly recommend popping over to http://fabrikar.com and checking Fabrik out... Be sure to also pour through their forums to answer any queries you may have before installing/getting started.  If you think there's a simpler, more powerful, or otherwise better form extension out there drop a comment below!

There are so many reasons to making your site easily visible on Social Networking websites and platforms - they raise general visibility and offer access to communities which may not otherwise find the information you spend time publishing in your posts.

Of course, one of the most agile word-of-mouth Social platforms on the web is Twitter and you may have recently noticed a pretty cool widgety thing people are using on their blogs/sites to include a 'retweet' link and counter of how many times a post has been tweeted - its powered by a site called 'Tweetmeme' and installs pretty easily on any website - whether using static html or a CMS like Joomla.

When you take a peek at the tweetmeme page containing the necessary embed code it may not be too easy to tell how to use it with your Joomla site - and though there's a couple of plugins/extension floating around Joomla, it may not offer the flexibility you require for clean theming/templating.  However, there's an easy way to go about embedding this and all it takes is a small modification of the de facto embed code. 

All you have to do is:

• copy the following code(s),
• replace 'http://mysite.com' with your own root URL and:
• replace 'twitterhandle' with your twitter handle (if you want reweets to automagically incude @yourtwitterhandle - you can opt to delete that line from the code otherwise.

For individual article template files (eg 'templates > your_template  > html > com_content > article > default.php'):

<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
tweetmeme_url = 'http://mysite.com<?php echo $this->article->readmore_link; ?>';
tweetmeme_source = 'twitterhandle';
</script>

For article list pages - like section or category template files (eg 'templates > your_template  > html > com_content > category > blog_item.php'):

<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
tweetmeme_url = 'http://mysite.com<?php echo $this->item->readmore_link; ?>';
tweetmeme_source = 'twitterhandle';
</script>

The trick then is to take this code and include it in the appropriate version of your theme's template files - Of course, you can see I've wrapped the code in a div called 'tweetmeme' so you can then add in some css for that div wherever you want in your template to style the tweetmeme widget.  You can learn more about Joomla templates and the files which they can comprise of in the official documentation wiki.

Basically what we've done here is include some php to tell the embed code the specific URL for each post - so the widget works cleanly on individual article pages as well as displays showing multiple articles at once.

*You can see the widget in action here on this site above - just below the title of each post. Try it out and retweet this post to see how it works!

Incase you ever need to remove a user on a Joomla 1.5x site with Super Administrator status and are wondering why the site keeps spitting a message at you saying that you can't disable or delete them fear not, there's a simple work-around: simply edit them changing their group assignment to 'Registered' (only) and save the user - then you can disable or delete them.

I've advocated the benefits of keeping control of one's own data for some time - with the proliferance of 3rd party/hosted services on the web in the past few years though, I've had to rethink why it is important to not use them to host content or parts of your website.

One of the coolest innovations I've seen in the past couple of years on the web, which has me favouring hosted solutions rather than local ones, are 3rd party comment system providers.  Its now possible to have a service like Disqus or IntenseDebate power the entire commenting function for a site via a javascript call to their service!

This is really groovy for many reasons - including:

• Not having to worry about upgrading the version of your Joomla-local commenting extension,
• You can optionally include commenting wherever you want on your site,
• Because its the business of these service providers to make their system as kick-ass as possible, you know that you'll get all the newest features/functionality when it comes out,
• They're free.

Recently, the good folks @ Rockettheme released a great extension which brings the simple power of using either Disqus or IntenseDebate (which is owned by Automatik - the Wordpress people) to Joomla and I recommend installing it on your Joomla site today.

We were about to switch over to using Rokcomment with IntenseDebate here on whyjoomla.com this week (as we've already done @ plantseedling.com) but are holding out to see what a new version of iJoomlacomment will look like when akismet is working properly and recaptcha has been implemented...

Honestly, if you're rolling out a new site which doesn't have old comments then its a no-brainer; grab Rokcomment and breathe easy knowing that you'll likely never have to login to your site to delete spammy comments and that your site users will find it a breeze to post their thoughts on your articles.

Its kind of long, and a little boring, but if you have time and are interested in finding out what people want Joomla to become, check out the wrap-up notes developers attending the 2009 Joomla Developers Conference in NYC recently shared:

For those new to these extensions, Community Builder is one of the oldest (and possibly most used) Joomla extensions.  It has a plugin system and lets you quickly develop user profiles for logged in members; with custom fields and member lists.  Because its Open Source and how long its been around, there are a ton of plugins to give you google maps of your members, on-going/live (facebook wall-type) listings of member activity on their profiles and more.

Jom Social isn't Open Source.  Its a commercial release from the Malaysian web development firm Azrul Studio.  They're well known for simple blogging and commenting extensions and have recently released Jom Social - which pretty much gives you the same functionality as Community Builder for $100+ but doesn't require must setup/configuration once installed.

There's been discussion in the Joomla forums about this topic before and I think people are most concerned about the lock-in factor of using commercial software plus the question of how integrated JomSocial is to Joomla itself.

Before I jump into a comprehensive review next week, I wanted to ask for your thoughts on Community Builder vs Jom Social. (Post comments! :) )

(This post is in reply to one that Dries Buytaert wrote on OStatic.com)

I agree with Dries that Open Source CMS' are putting more power into the hands of people who may not know or want to learn code, and that as their learning curves get less steep we will see more people jumping into creating and growing their websites themselves; depending on the type of website they want to have.

We've of course seen the *huge* acceptance of wordpress for simple content publishing (read: 'blogging') amongst all sorts of people ranging from tech pros to near-luddites.  As people use more websites that have richer feature sets everyday they'll no doubt want to see the functionality of those sites in their own; for a while yet, though it may not require custom coding, I think the role of 'web master' or 'web developer' or whatever-you-want-to-call-them will be around for quite some time.

That role will continue to exist but may change to focus on conceptualizing the end result and making it happen with the right combination (and configuration) of 3rd party modules/extensions; whether through just hand-holding/teaching people wanting to develop their own sites or actually putting the pieces together themselves.

I'm really excited for Mark Boulton's redesign of Drupal 7; right now a major hindrance to non-technical people using Drupal is its stratified admin interface, which often leads to developers custom-creating UX per-project to suit each client's administrative needs.

To help people jump-start their web projects we've taken a hard look at another Open Source CMS called Joomla for example, and come up with a packaged solution called Seedling (http://www.plantseedling.com).

Seedling's distribution of Joomla is cool because it comes pre-configured and loaded with a suite of extensions and easily changeable theme; so people can develop their web projects a lot quicker and with more power under the hood.  Plus, it comes with optional email/ticket support - so new adopters of Joomla can get help when they need it.

Until core installs of Open Source CMS' are a lot more user friendly I think solutions like Seedling will really help bridge the gap for those folks who want to learn via DIY and/or can't afford the services of web developers.

Out-of-the-box, Joomla 1.5 has pretty silly error handling pages - for times when a user hits your site to find a page no longer in existence ('404 Not Found') etc...  A simple work-around I've previously posted about is to create a custom error page as static HTML.

Now, if you like to have your error messages presented to site viewers with the same look and feel as your website, a custom page outside of Joomla might be frustrating - everytime you change the layout of your site you'll likely want to edit that page and so on.

There's another approach; some semantic URL extensions can actually redirect those errors to particular content within Joomla.  I recommend using JoomSEF - its a weird extension because of the partially-free (ie. non-GPL) license they've released it under, but you can download and install it for free and then make one edit to its code to remove a footer message created with the free version.

With JoomSEF, you can choose a custom 404 message by typing it directly into a field through the extension's admin side or by choosing a menu item already linking to a message page you've created.  Plus, you can keep track of 404 messages to help streamline your site's navigation!

JoomSEF will make managing your site's error pages easy, and it makes it much easier to navigate your site by URL because you have more control over the format of URL writing rules than with Joomla's stock SEF URLs option!

Seedling's distribution of Joomla is fully supported.

Our distribution of Joomla comes pre-configured with a suite of excellent extensions and a custom theme; its a complete website in a box and comes with peace of mind; we now offer 2 support options! 

Basic Support: $49

• Full Seedling package download
• Community support forum access
• No Help-desk access
• No emergency support

Buy it / download now »

Our basic package is best suited for individuals or organisations who are familiar with Joomla and/or don't mind solely relying on our community forums for support.

Professional Support: $349 (1 year)

• Full Seedling package download
• Community support forum access
• 1 year of help-desk access with email and web support tickets
• Emergency support tickets between office hours

Buy it / download now »

Implement Joomla with confidence; our professional package includes help-desk support tickets so you can get top-notch support from our staff for an entire year.