If you have ever set up a Joomla website you will be familiar with the Joomla module manager. This allows you to create, publish and assign modules to a module position and to Joomla menu items. The purpose of this article is to look a little bit 'under the hood' and explain how module management actually works. That is, how does Joomla know which modules to display on which pages, and where to put them?

We also look at the question of whether it is possible to extend the logic of Joomla module display, to include complex conditional logic, for example if you only want to display a module to particular user groups, or only want to display a module on the checkout page of your shopping cart extension, or only want to display a module to a user if it is their birthday.

We are happy to release version 2.0 of our image generator component. This is a free, GPL licensed extension for Joomla which allows you to dynamically resize and compress your site images. It includes a plugin framework, with plugins to add a watermark, and to apply dynamic resizing to all your article images.

For the first time it is now compatible with Joomla 3.0 as well as Joomla 2.5. There is also a legacy version available for Joomla 1.5.

Download Now

Mod Featured Items Pro

Product Details

£16.00

Download

This month's featured extension is the module for Joomla! 1.5, 2.5 and 3.0, Featured Items Pro.

This module displays a short excerpt from articles in a selected category or section, or from a specified list of articles, with link and optional thumbnail image. The items can be displayed in a variety of layouts, including lists, tab panes, accordion,  article rotator, highlighter, or thumbnails only.

The module supports articles both from the Joomla core content component and from the K2 content component.

View an example

We are happy to announce the release of a new version 4 of our GooglebaseXML component for Joomla 2.5 and Virtuemart 2.0.x. This component generates a product feed for your Virtuemart store which can be submitted to Google shopping through the Google Merchant Centre.

The component is designed to allow you to match Google's product feed specification exactly, so that Google should accept your feed without problems. The latest version is designed to make it even easier to generate multiple feeds, making it straightforward to submit feeds to Google  even for very large sized online stores.

Buy the Component

Joomla 3.1 is now available.

It is our plan to support Joomla 3 with all our extensions that currently support Joomla 2.5. We are currently in the process of updating them.

Our latest release for Joomla 3 is our NewsTab module, our module which allows you to display extracts from your articles as a series of tabs, in a format popular with news sites.

Our current extensions which support Joomla 3 are now:-

• Featured Items Module
• Featured Items Pro Module
• Featured Items Carousel Module
• Featured Items Slideshow Module
• NewsTab Module
• Amazon Web Services Content Plugin
• Panel Slider Module
• Joomla Color Picker developer tool
• Cobalt Featured Items Module
• Image Generator Component
• Master User Plugin

We plan to release further 3 compatible extensions shortly.

One of the features that we liked from the old versions of Virtuemart 1.1x was the product snapshot plugin. This was a Joomla content plugin that allowed you to embed Virtuemart product information directly into a Joomla article.

Inspired by this we decided to recreate the plugin for Virtuemart version 2 and Joomla 2.5. We are now releasing our VM2 Product Snapshot Plugin in two versions: a basic free version, and a commercial version with lots of extra features.

Both versions allow you to optionally embed a product thumbnail, plus description, price and add to cart button. The commercial version comes with a variety of extra layouts, the ability to display additional images for the product, and a more sophisticated add to cart button.

Download the free version

Buy the commercial version

We are happy to release our new extension for Joomla 2.5 and Virtuemart 2, catchily called VM2 HTML5 Slideshow. This module is designed to show images for your Virtuemart products in an attractive HTML5 slideshow.

The module is search engine friendly, because the caption content and the links are rendered on the page as ordinary html. The module features a variety of image transition effects. The image effects are rendered entirely through HTML5 (no Flash).

The module has a large number of customizable features, including whether or not to display the thumbnails, the orientation of the thumbnails (horizontal or vertical), the type of scroller used (click or mouseover), plus whether to auto-start the show on page load.

Buy Now

The module can be used in a variety of ways:-

• The module can show images from a single product only - useful on the product details page for showing product additional images;
• Or the module can show a selection of products from chosen categories - useful on the product category page to highlight products;
• Or the module can be used to display featured products on non-Virtuemart pages;

We have a new update for our GooglebaseXML component for Joomla and Virtuemart. This extension creates a product feed for your Virtuemart products which can be submitted to Google merchant centre.

The latest release of Virtuemart is 2.0.10, which was released last week. We have a new release, version 3.0.7, of our component, designed to work with this Virtuemart release.

How to Update

Our latest extension is the module Cobalt Featured Items. This module for Joomla 2.5 is designed to work exclusively with Cobalt, the content construction kit by MintJoomla. It displays selected Cobalt fields in a variety of layouts, including default list, horizontal list, thumbnails, accordion, tab pane, rotator, and highlighter.

The layouts available are the same as for our Featured Items Pro module for Joomla, and you can see a demo of the layouts here. The module can create extracts from the article text, and thumbnails from the image and gallery fields, also from images embedded in html text, which are automatically resized as required.

Find Out More

We have a new release of our Featured Product Grid Module for Virtuemart. For the first time this module is compatible with Virtuemart 2 and Joomla 2.5.

This module extension for Joomla and Virtuemart is an alternative to the Virtuemart featured products module. It can be used to show featured products, top ten products, recent products, or random products from some or all categories.

The module is particularly useful when you want to display additional images for your products, as these are shown in a slideshow.

The products can be filtered by selected categories, and can now products according to the current category when a category browse page or a product flypage is being viewed.

Buy Now