To date, Joomla! has been well known as a great content management system (CMS). There are many sites using it throughout the world, some of them having great features that impress their visitors. Most of the time, these appealing and powerful features work thanks to JavaScript. In this book, we are going to see how to enhance our site with these features, using another powerful open source tool—the jQuery JavaScript library.
Do you want to have a full-featured site? And more importantly, do you want to know how to develop jQuery-powered extensions? Just keep reading!
Chapter 1, Let's Start Making a Better Site Images, shows how Joomla! works with images by default. It then moves on to explain some image slideshows, pop ups, and image galleries—all using some interesting Joomla! extensions, which are jQuery-powered.
Chapter 2, Site Content Our Next Step, as its name suggests, is all about the content of our site and the different ways in which we can organize it. Not only does it show the basic ways, but also the use of tabs and article slideshows. It also includes a bit of site search, even AJAX site search.
Chapter 3, Embedding Rich Media Features with Joomla! Plugins, shows some interesting plugins, such as the code highlighter and Flickr plugins. We will also see the SC jQuery plugin—a plugin that will be of help in the future chapters of the book.
Chapter 4, One Last Look at Joomla! jQuery Modules, is where we will stop and see some interesting modules before proceeding to more complex chapters. For example, we will build drop-down menus, first with CSS and then with a Joomla! module. We will also see how to interestingly place the login module.
Chapter 5, Refactoring Our Site, is the last chapter before we start coding ourselves. Here we will stop and see how to make fewer jQuery library loads, and also some tips and warnings—it may not be the easiest chapter, but is an important one.
Chapter 6, Getting Our Hands on Coding JavaScript, shows us how to, instead of using Joomla! extensions, make use of some jQuery plugins to add some interesting effects to our template. This will involve some coding, but the results will be quite nice, including a Parallax effect, tooltips, and the always useful jScrollPane plugin.
Chapter 7, Creating Our Own Modules, shows us that it's much better to create our own modules so that our hard work of development can be easily used in any Joomla! site. In this chapter, we will see how to create our own modules with a small example: a quick, AJAX-powered contact form.
Chapter 8, Building Complete Solutions, Modules, and Components, will help us dive further and start working on a component. By the end of the chapter, we will not only have a working component backend, but also a module on the frontend to show our data—of course, with some interesting jQuery effects.
Chapter 9, Going Further with Our Component Development, continues work on our previous component to give it a frontend. However, we will also add some interesting features to the backend, such as textarea autogrow, equal size columns, pagination with JavaScript, and many more.
Chapter 10, Problems and Usability, is a chapter centered on solving some problems, and gives some interesting tips that we can apply to all the work we have seen throughout the book. It will cover topics such as JavaScript being unavailable and a failed AJAX request.