In the past couple of days we've been working on tooling-up the Design Guru website with some project details.  In doing so, I came across an age-old limitation of Joomla: it has a terrible in-house image handler.

Wow, that felt good to get off my chest ;)  Honestly though, its junk.  But hey, its not the end of the world now that Ryan at Cellar Door has built the most amazing superfantastic WYSIWYG editor around!

Until the stable release of Joomla 1.5 is unveiled to us, I highly recommend installing JCE - Ryan's mambot and component , along with some nifty plug-ins he's put together.  Here's the full picture: 

Firstly, like any editor with J!, you'll need to install the core mambot and make sure its published.  After that, there's an amazing component that lets you completely control how the editor looks to various site users depending on their access permissions: which is pretty cool if you want base registered folks to simply be able to italicize the odd word here and there but not, say, add imagery.

In the component config from the back end, you casn actually define the pixel dimensions of the editor so it doesn't break your template!  Moving on, there's also a language, plugin and layout manager!

Bringing it back to Joomla's junky image handler - well, nowthat you've loaded JCE, simply install a couple of plugins and your site is going to become a breeze to manage!  For starters, check out the image manager plugin (pictured).  This is actually a pretty powerful application that lets you upload images, resize them, create custom thumbnails and, get this, relate images (alongside the JCE utilities mambot ) to form ad-hoc galleries embedded into your content!  How cool is that??? :)  (you can see an example at designguru.org )

There are tons of nifty tricks that the image manager plugin can perform so get in there and play around.  Once you're familiar with it, you'll also want to get embedding flash and video media - for that our good man Ryan has hooked up a media plugin as well! 

He's got a couple of other cool plugins to download for free and I suggest finally loading the essential advanced link plugin - which will let you format highlighted text into a hyperlink that can do all sorts of tricks including: style definitions, javascript actions, email address and subject definitions (for automatic mailto:links) plus an AJAX-powered content linking system!!! (pictured) - which means that, without exploring your site for the link, you can add in hyperlinks to categories, sections, contacts as well as dynamic and static content items! :)

So pop over to http://www.cellardoor.za.ne and get cracking - this WYSIWYG editor will change your joomla life and get you excited about posting content to your site again - we love it here @ whyjoomla!

Comments (3) >>

josce image management
written by slipsy, September 30, 2006

Mmmmm INteresting but jce doesnt let you align the text with the image - you get an indented picture spacing when aligning left/right and no caption styling if I remember correctly...

Adding comments to images...
written by designguru, October 01, 2006

You're right slipsy - unfortunately JCE will allow you to enter a title for an image, but doesn't extend the basic HTML feature of simply displaying the title when a cursor hovers over it. I'd love to see a plugin to place titles underneath images with some formatting, however you can do this yourself by creating a CSS style to format images, say, left or right, then clicking on the HTML button in the editor and applying that style to a div, which houses the img tag plus a line-break and the image title...

JCE Editor: How To Learn it?? What are all those STYLES??
written by Terry King, November 28, 2006

Just started to use JCE. Where can I find a manual, or how-to-use-it tutorial?? And what are all those STYLES? What is 'readon'? Where is all this documented?? Thanks!! It looks great..

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