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!

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.

In somewhat of an ambitious statement last Thursday, Joomla template and extension development firm Yootheme announced that they are almost ready to release 'CCK for Joomla' - an extension they're calling 'Zoo.'

As of now, Zoo seems to offer Joomla developers an easy interface for creating content types other than the standard 'article' type which is the basis of content currently in Joomla.  The concept is exciting - but I wouldn't be so quick as to liken Zoo to CCK; you see the Content Construction Kit for Drupal ('CCK') is a highly advanced extension which provides an infrastructure for complex content types which can interface with each other and be presented in a myriad of ways through dynamic GUI-created-and-controlled views and panels.  Then again, once Zoo is released I expect a hugely positive reaction from the Joomla community and that could speed up development of its feature set; depending on how easily people can extend it.  Yootheme have mentioned that a template engine will be included; it will be interesting to see how this stacks up to the Views/Panel modules for Drupal.

I've blogged before that there are a few different people working on custom content types for Joomla.  Building a CCK for Joomla is an excellent idea and I'm loving the attention its been getting since the introduction of Joomla 1.5, though I really want to see the idea translate into an extension that is built with sustanable scalability in mind.

Ultimately I feel this functionality should be included Joomla core - with extensions being provided by the community offering new types of fields which can be combined to create content types; an approach which exists in the Drupal community.  Over the past few years CCK has become an integral part of most Drupal websites and this has even spurred a donation effort to raise enough money to get it fine tuned enough to be included in an upcoming Drupal core. 

Reading through the commend thread on Yoo's announcement, it looks like they:

• will be releasing Zoo under GPL (nice!)
• have built it in a plugin system to afford scalability (double nice!)
• are keeping Joomla 1.6's ACL advancements in mind (triple nice?)

So I'm super excited to check Zoo out and will be posting a full review as soon as the extension is released (no release date posted yet.) 

Hopefully some of the other chaps working on a CCK for Joomla like bContent can link up with Yoo and come together behind one strong solution for the community @ large.

Years ago the only forum component specifically for Joomla was called Simpleboard.  It installed natively and worked pretty well with Joomla user information and other extensions like Community Builder (which extends user info with profiles etc...)  As its name implied, Simpleboard wasn't too difficult to deal with, until you wanted to custom theme it - back then Joomla developers likely kept bottles of asprin in close reach!

In the past couple of years Simpleboard got rebranded as Joomlaboard and then became Fireboard - which until recently was the best fully-integrated forum solution in Joomla.  Alternative approaches involve bridging your Joomla site to an install of other software - such as phpBB or SMF; which sounds great but often becomes a nightmare as its very difficult to accurately and consistently ensure that users are logged in and out of both software etc...

Well, I just did an install of Agora yesterday - its a new extension that basically ports the simple-but-powerful punBB Open Source forum software into Joomla.  The default style it comes with is hideous, though its code is pretty CSS-friendly; took me a few hours but I'm quite pleased with the look of my resulting forum install.  Of course, it seems reasonable that you should be able to jump over to punBB's resource site and apply mod's and styles to your Agora install - so you may not need to roll your own CSS.

I highly recommend this extension for anyone who needs to install a forum on their site - the full administration is front-end and it has its own user management interface so you'll be able to make ecrtain folks mdoerators of the forums you want to and so on!

If you've checked Agora out - please do drop a line in the comments below to let us all know how you like it; I'm curious to see how it interfaces with other extensions - and to be honest, am not sure if I've seen any modules for it to display forum information (like 'new posts') outside of the forum itself.

I've had my eye on Dioscouri for a little while - they're the Joomla services guys that released JUGA, or Joomla User Group Access - an extension which gives you control over registered user groups and the power to define content access per group & category/section.

Well, they've obviously given a lot of thought to this whole idea of ACL and I like the most recent little extension they've released; called Hider .  As you might imagine, it lets you simply hide certain areas of content from public site viewers.

Ultimately, this might get messy if you have a lot of content with embedded tags all over the place to display certain info to certain user types, but for simple uses I could really see it being handy.

For a long time I've wondered why commenting on articles hasn't been a stock feature in Joomla.  For the most part, I think probably 90% of websites today use the function as an essential way to allow publishers to communicate with their audience and gain valuable feedback from them.

Joomla's Extensions directory lists over 30 plugins and components that can afford you commenting ability in J1.5 - that's a ton to suss through, so I thought I'd take a look for you and offer a few recommendations:

First up, its a package called JoomlaComment .  Its a component-module set which has been around for some time and has not been made native to 1.5... so you might want to check out their forums to see how well it performs in Legacy Mode and whether there are any down-sides when using it with other newer components native to 1.5.

Overall, I like this extensions because its themable, has BBcode, offers thumbs up/down on comments and generally has lots of features.  Plus, its free/GPL - worth using if you have time to tinker, change CSS to match your site etc...

As the web becomes more widgetized many people are looking towards externally powered scripts to add functionality to their site.  A new commenting widget that's been getting much love from the blogging world is Disqus.  I like the idea of using an external service to provide comments on a site - Disqus is under market pressure to innovate and constantly upgrade the functionality of their product, which means that you should be getting the best comment system out of them for little effort - no more watching out for upgrades and then worrying about maintenance.  Of course, there's also an issue of scalability to consider - if you ever decide to move away from Joomla as a web platform, Disqus comments should allow you to get up and running on the new site with your comments hassle-free.

Thirdly, we have Azrul's JomComment .  This package has been around for some time and since it was first released I've loved seeing their company grow - to since release another couple of pretty sound little apps to use on your Joomla site. JomComment cleanly integrates natively in J1.5 with smooth AJAXy effects - eg. when someone posts a comment and instant-approval is set to 'on', the comment posting box will fade out and the comment will replace it - fading into the list of comments under an article immediately with no need to reload a page.

Given that JomComment is J1.5-native, you have piece of mind in knowing that it will play fairly nicely with the new Joomla MVC architecture and let you template your comment interface with simple override files - no need to edit the actual component to make your comments aesthetically jive to your site's theme.  However, that freedom comes at a price - JomComment is commercially available for around $30US.

If you're cool with relinquishing control of your data and having a 3rd party company handle/store your site's comments, I highly recommend trying out disqus - though, if you want to keep it all local and are a fan of simple interfaces then my vote's with JomComment.

I've just looked at 1/10 of the options out there - what do you all use?  Any other recommendations?

Disclosure: We're actually using JomComment here on whyjoomla - so you'll be able to test it simply by posting a comment below.

Something caught my eye on JoomlaFeed today - a new extension called Joomla Credits has come out that automatically creates a list of plugins, modules and components installed on a site and allows you to publish them on the front end.

I really like the idea of sharing with the public which extensions actually come together to make a site - in fact its something we've done on WhyJoomla? since the blog launched, but the component is still a little raw to fit the need... basically, it lists whatever's installed; so if you've installed something on your site and don't use it on the front end, people will still know you have it installed - which may be mis-leading when considering an extension list lets people know what makes your site come together... 

...So,  though Joomla Credits get credit for a good effort, I wouldn't use it publicly on sites; my suggestion is for site developers to use it as a quick reference point to keep track of what's installed - link to it on the front end but make the link admin-viewable only.  Honestly, it doesn't take more than a couple of minutes to type up a public page with hyperlinks to each module on J!ED anyway :) - hey, you could even use Joomla Credits to quickly grab the necessary info th bung into the page!

Steve Reichgut from Axtaweb talks briefly about some aspects of working with the Joomla community at large to ensure your extension reaches a maximum audience whilst encouraging feedback and community interaction.  He also talks about why using the new 1.5 API makes things easier for developers.

This video was shot @ the Bay Area Joomla User Group - hosted by Google. 

Something I've always felt limited by with Content Management Systems - Joomla included, is having to create navigation through menu systems... you know, sometime a 'page' is something more than just a bunch of media about one topic - often i find myself wanting to add some depth to content pages with additional navigation that's embedded into the content.

A little while back I discovered a nifty extension called Tabs and Slides (from the goodfellows over @ Joomla Works) - its a plugin which affords you this groovy functionality and lets you style the embedded links with CSS, which is always smart. :) 

Check out what it does:

{tab=first link}the first chunk of stuff

{tab=second link}notice you can call the tabs/menu links whatever you want!

{tab=third and final link}nice eh? :) 

{/tabs} 

Lovely stuff eh?  Note: this plugin also lets you keep your SEO a little tidier as crawlers like Google will see all the content on this page; so you don't have to worry about people hitting up your site and arriving at a non-primary page and then having to back-track through conventional navigation.... Also, with this method you can also introduce menus - adding copy above the menu itself like 'choose a type of chicken from the selections below.'