How to Create a Module in Joomla

Robbie Ferguson: One of the things about Joomla is now Davy was mentioning that he has got a Joomla web site and having problem adding the widget for the latest episode in Category5. The reason for that Dave is because that editor, remember the WYSIWYG editor or it’s called tiny MCE when I brought up the Joomla content there it has got that light weird looking editor. That is designed to code things itself so if you paste some code in to that or paste code into the HTML source it’s going stripped out some of the code because it wants to maintain the code itself. So if you try to copy our latest episode widget directly into the site it’s going to break basically. So step one is that we have going to under our website Category5.TV and we are going to kind of learning two things here because we are going to be learning how to create a module in Joomla and we’re also going to be learning how to basically add this to your website or website widget. So go to support us, link to us, and website widgets. This is a Category5.TV and right there just grab that code. This is the code that is trying to paste directly into the Joomla window. What the latest episode widget does it, it actually adds the current episode of the show to your own website and you’ll see your SML server tells you a description of the show. The cool thing about that is after tonight’s episode for example once your assess feeds go live first thing tomorrow morning your website is automatically updated at the same time along with every thing else. So you don’t have to maintain anything and it never directs people away from your website because it actually launches in a pop-up window. So it keeps people in your site it just gives free content to your website viewers. Carrie Webb: Well, that is good. Robbie Ferguson: It’s very cool and the responses has been good too so once we’ve copied that code and keep in mind that the width is 200 and the height is 150 so when you’re placing this on your Joomla site you want to make sure that it is going to fit within your sight. So from you Joomla administrator first thing we want to do is go into site and global configuration because as I was saying you want to make sure that this is not going to use the WYSIWYG editor or that tiny MCE. So right down on the bottom on the first page and I'm just being cautious here because I don’t know what information is going to come up here that might cause as to be longer a little bit. So you will see down at the bottom is default-WYSIWYG editor. Turn that off, no WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG is what you see is what you get. It’s like a text editor with the editing functions which like word processors. That is what that means. So then save those changes and you want to be able to set that back at the end as well but this is just a temporary thing because we need to paste that in without having tiny MCE pulling and stripping the code out of that. So now we want to click on modules and then site modules. We are going just really simply create a new module. Let’s go new and then this is going to allow us to create our latest episode module subtitle, Latest Episode of Category5. Carrie Webb: And that is a widget? Robbie Ferguson: Well, we are going to paste our widget into this module. If you want to show the title you can. If you want to hide it just do just a player that’s fine too and leave this at the left position were you may position that anywhere within your website and just a hint for you if you will use Joomla. If you want to know your content positions on the website, just put it at the end of your browser URL, just type “?TP=1” and that’s going to actually show you in Joomla all of your website positions. So I’m going to leave it at left and it’s going to drop it down here. It’s not showing that but I can put it at user one and user two etcetera. I’ve got a very highly customize template. So if we wanted it to be published yes, if you want it to be available to the public that’s fine. So now once we go down here you’ll noticed that all of that fancy stuff like bold and italics and everything is gone because we turned off the WYSIWYGs. So now I paste in our IFrame source code for the widget and that’s all there is to it. It can tell if you want it to assign it to different parts of your website or if you just want it to be everywhere and then we can hit save. So now if I go back to our website I’m going to get rid of my module positions. Carrie Webb: So Robbie when a module kind of be like a text box and word processing and then you cut and paste things into that text box. Robbie Ferguson: How Joomla works is it it’s a modular system. So you can place things all over the website based on positions. So you can create a new module like this and place it wherever you want on that website in one of those module positions. So everything that you see in our site, everything like if you look down the left hand side this is the left module position. So our poll is one module. My viewer login system is one module. The search engine is one module. So I can maintain each one of those modules independently. It is very, very sleek. You can see David that all there was to it so we’ve added that widget directly to our website as a module on Category5.TV. So now just make sure it will go back and turn back on your WYSIWYG editor because then you won’t see code when you go to do it again. Carrie Webb: It’s pretty straightforward. Robbie Ferguson: Pretty straightforward indeed, nice and simple. Carrie Webb: Actually Robbie, Davy is in the chat room and says thanks very much. Robbie Ferguson: Hi, Davy. You’re welcome. Carrie Webb: Very helpful. Robbie Ferguson: Thank you for spending the word about the Category5. Just quickly Davy, I just mention that Im using Joomla 1.0.x so that’s what I’m demonstrated on. If you’re using 1.5.x like a 1.5 version of Joomla you will be able to find the same stuff. It’s just not positioned exactly where I showed you but that is just a quick note.