Despite being categorized in 'hacks,' this post is more about how to step outside the Joomla bubble and objectively re-think 'content.'

Ultimately, designguru's been working with Drupal quite a bit in the past few months and we love it for this cool thing called the CCK - its a means for making custom content... so you could effectively change the make-up of all blog posts on Drupal site and add in fields for, say, your mood when posting to your blog... of course, the ability to customize content types is super-liberating because you can really add personality to your site and creatively liberate it from stock-CMS prudishness....

Bring it back to Joomla with an example; I have say; I DESPISE pretty all options for event listings... I would *love* to just use 'content' - you know, post a regular article with a date field for the event, one more for its expiry and then create some type of list view to display all events - sorted by chronology...  With Drupal, this is simple... Joomla poses another problem because as-is, all content is comprised of the same 'intro' and 'main' fields, with standard publishing info and so on.  You'll need to use modules such as the brilliant 'display news module' to create a view, but then are limited to either embedding the module to an article and linking to that article through nav or simply positioning your module somewhere in a template-defined position. 

I've realized that it may seem complicated to tease application-functionality out Joomla, but its not necessarily impossible.  Things like dynamic event listings or displaying particular topical news in different areas of a site etc... can be achieved fairly simply if you really reflect on the relationship between these things:

1. content organization (section>category)
2. your navigation (in lieu of the difference between menus and dynamic list displays)
3.  the information you need from content.

On the last point; its easy to waft on when you can edit content in a wysiwyg editor that feels like MS Word, but there's a lot of power in Joomla's innate blog displays; try to keep the display of content on your site as dynamic as possible and consider things like the rising above the organisation of your content, to think about different types of content.

This may have seemed really wafty and un-directed... if anyone's still reading this blog, please do offer your thoughts on how Joomla handles content and how you've approached its limitations creatively... 

Okay, so this isn't really a complex hack - but its something pretty much every Joomla webmaster can use; a way to limit the length of hyperlinks!... 

All you have to do is include a javascript in your template that will cut the link down in length and then set whatever functional variables you want by editing the script.

NOTE: only *linked* urls will be shortened in length w/this script. 

If you're the only person publishing content to your site, chances are you avoid the problems of long URLs - in most cases, you don't have to actually display a URL unless its the root domain.

However, there may come a point where you are quoting a line of code or text from else-where that runs on without any spaces (yikes!).  At this point in time, CSS doesn't really help you break those long lines with artistic prowess - but it can definately make sure that your template doesn't break.

This fix will add to Joomla's content.html.php file and make sure that any content on your site that runs on is dealt with by including scroll bars where necessary...