Chapter 9 [ 317 ] You will need to populate the elds with applicable information, and then click on the "Save and Publish Article" icon at the top-right of the screen. This will actually create a new article and pre-populate it with some of the previously entered information. This is now simply a Joomla! Article, so you can revisit it at any stage if you wish to enter in further information. Make sure that you select the section "Audio" and the Category "Podcast" to help with article organization, and that the article is also published. Then click on Save at the top of the page. Now our rst podcast has been congured, we can do two things: Create a Menu link to this from a Menu. Publish the Podcast Module to display our new feed. Now we're going to go publish our Podcast Module. Navigate to Extensions|Module Manager and click on the Podcast module to edit it. There are a number of parameters you can set, but for now let's enable the module, publish it on the right-hand side column, and adjust the module ordering so it shows at the top of the right-hand side column. Click on Apply to save your changes and take a look at the frontend of the site. There you will see the new Podcast module, and if you click on the icon, you will be taken to an RSS page. (The address is similar to the following address: http://localhost/JMultimedia/index.php?option=com_podcast&view =feed&format=raw .) • • This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 318 ] Here you will be able to view your podcasts. You may want to go back into your module and adjust some of its parameters to dene the look you require. Here is my new module after a few adjustments: When new podcasts are added to the Podcast Suite, they will be shown automatically, and any users subscribed to these feeds will be notied of the new podcasts that are available. I have rushed through this pretty quickly in order to show you the basic process, but there are other features available in the Joomla! Podcast Suite. In the administration, click on Menu|Main Menu. Create a new menu link to Articles|Article Layout, and select the Joomla! Audio Article that was just created for your rst podcast. Create a link called Podcast Number 1, and make it a submenu of the main audio link. Once you have saved this new menu item, visit the frontend of your site to view the results: This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 9 [ 319 ] You will now see that the Joomla! Article contains a nice Flash MP3 player where our podcast tag resides. So not only does the Podcast Suite allow you to publish podcast feeds, but you can play the audio and display it within your site articles. If you would like to create a link to all of your podcasts, simply create a menu link to a Category Blog Layout. Each time you add a new podcast article to your site, and locate it within the correct section and category, it will automatically be available to your site visitors. Adding social profiling features Social networking is the big thing. It's all about networking and groups, the integration of information from different sources, and opportunity for cross-publicizing it. This section will help you add a few of the most popular social networking features into Joomla!. Easy Twitter Status Easy Twitter Status is one of the easiest (and non-commercial) twitter message extensions available. It contains the following features: Twitter username Tweet display limit Which timeline to show Show avatar Avatar size Enable default style or use your own customized style Show follow link In order to use this extension, you will require a Twitter account at http://www.twitter.com. The rest is easy, let's add it now: 1. Search the Joomla! Extensions area for "Easy Twitter Status" at http://extensions.joomla.org. 2. Visit the extension developer's website and download the extension to your computer. • • • • • • • This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 320 ] 3. Upload the extensions to Joomla! using the Extension|Install / Uninstall feature. 4. Navigate to the Extensions|Module Manager area and click on the Twitter module to edit it. You will see the module preferences available. As with all modules, you can hover over the parameter title to obtain a tooltip description that will help explain the elds. In my demonstration, I have also made a change to the module title, published it on the left column, and under the Menu Assignment area we want to make this module available on just the Home menu link: This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 9 [ 321 ] Now that we have published the module on the left-hand side, it could make our left column quite long as compared to the other content published on the front page. Let's go into our "RokBox" and "QTube" modules and only make them assigned to the menu links related to our video examples: The Easy Twitter module should now only show on our Home Page menu item and pull in our latest Twitter messages. Styling for this can be adjusted with CSS, and may also be affected by the current styling within your template.css le: This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 322 ] Twitter Follow Me The Twitter Follow Me module displays a choice of simple eye-catching graphics displayed within your Joomla! page and links to your Twitter account. Users who wish to follow your Twitters can easily reach them by clicking on the provided link. Follow these steps to install this module: 1. Search the Joomla! Extensions area for "Follow Me" at http://extensions.joomla.org . 2. Visit the extension developer's website and download the extension to your computer. 3. Upload the extensions to Joomla! using the Extension|Install / Uninstall feature. 4. Navigate to the Extensions|Module Manager area and click on the Follow Me module to edit it. The module contains a number of self explanatory parameters. I have selected the following: This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 9 [ 323 ] For this module to sit well within our current template, I have selected to display it in the bottom-left of the site page, and have adjusted the module's title so it is not displayed. This Twitter Follow Me module can actually be placed within any available module position as it utilizes another display method compared to usual modules. Here is a screenshot of how it looks in my project: For those who want to provide an easy link to their Twitter accounts, this is a ve minute eye-catching solution. There are many other extensions that enable you to communicate with external social networking resources such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and so forth. I suggest playing with a few to see if they provide the functionality you require for your projects. Adding RSS features With RSS being the perfect medium to display and provide site information, it is important to offer some RSS feeds from our site project. There are a number of RSS extensions available to display Joomla! RSS feeds. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 324 ] The creation of RSS feeds for Joomla! has been covered in Chapters 5 and 6, so here is a summary to create one using the built-in Joomla! RSS creation feature. Joomla! has the ability to generate its own RSS feeds. These are created automatically when we create a new menu item to either the front page feature, or a menu link to a section or category. To create a new feed, navigate to Menu|Main Menu in the administration and create a new menu item. Under the "Select Menu Item Type" screen, select "Articles" and then select "Category Blog Layout". The Category Blog Layout option will create a new menu link to articles that reside within our selected category. Give the new menu link a title of something like "Latest News", and on the right-hand side of the page, select the section and category News / Latest. This will create a new blog layout for all of our articles that reside within the News / Latest category. There is one more thing we need to check on this new menu item. When you create a link to either a section or category in Joomla!, one of the available menu options will be Show a Feed Link. This is found under the Parameters (Advanced) options on the right side of the page: This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 9 [ 325 ] Click on Apply to save your new menu item and view the frontend of the site. A new Main Menu option should now be available and when clicked upon, it should take you to a blog layout of your articles: If you look in your browser URL address bar, you should now see that an RSS feed has been recognized on this page and an icon displaying it is shown: This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 326 ] When clicked on, this will offer the user the ability to subscribe to two feed types. The respective RSS feeds will show, allowing the user to subscribe to them: If you like you can take this feed URL, and create either text hyperlinks around your site to promote it, make a nice icon to publish on your site pages, or use an extension module to recognize feeds created from your site and automatically show a nice feed icon when it nds them. Either way, when we add new articles into this section and category, our new content will be displayed on our RSS feed and anyone subscribed will be able to easily view your new website content. RSS feeds can only be generated on the front page layout, to a section, or to a category. They can include video, audio, images, and other multimedia content and provide this directly to your subscribers, rather than them having to come to your site to obtain it. Adding map features There are a number of great mapping features for Joomla!, most of them utilizing the Google Maps application which has become one of the most powerful mapping tools available on the Web. Googlemaps Plugin Googlemaps Plugin for Joomla! displays one or more Google Maps within your articles. It is a perfect method for dropping mapping features easily into your site. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 . Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 322 ] Twitter Follow Me The Twitter Follow Me module displays a choice of simple eye-catching graphics displayed within your Joomla! page and links. tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 320 ] 3. Upload the extensions to Joomla! using the Extension|Install / Uninstall feature. 4. Navigate. display Joomla! RSS feeds. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Joomla! Multimedia Project [ 324 ] The