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Surprise popularity of Joomla 1.5 Component Simple Thickbox Gallery

After being frustrated having spent a long time looking for a simple gallery component on the Extensions.Joomla.org site to display my portfolio, I decided that I should write my own. To do so, I simplying incorporated the jQuery library, the Thickbox library and created a Joomla 1.5 component that required almost zero configurations.

Users simply installed the components, select the section or category they want displayed and Viola! the page was automatically created for them.

I used it for my own company site to display my portfolio and suddenly had an interesting thought. I might as well have it packaged nicely and submitted to the Joomla Extensions directory.

It took me two weeks and some minor changes here and there (mostly paperwork) to finally get it approved.

After a few days I went and had a look at my Google analytics account which I had installed for my company site a long time ago.

I was in for a surprise. Site traffic surged from a daily volume of less than 10 visitors a few months ago to as high as 400 daily visitors these past few days. It was totally crazy. Visitors were mostly from the US and Europe. So I guess my idea of coming up with solutions to solve potentially painful situations does seem to be a very sound.

Currently I have identified a painful situation that is being experienced in SMEs. I am working on coming up with a solution for them via the use of technology. Hopefully it will help them save time, effort and lead to increased effeciency in their work process.

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SWFupload and Joomla integration revisited

After trying 1 hour and getting no where integrating SWFupload fully into the Joomla Administration backend. I finally called it quits.

The problem is that while the SWFupload component shows up nicely in the front end any call by the component to the scripting backend always results in a login request page. This is despite attempting to follow official instructions on the Joomla Documentation Site.

Finally I created a fileuploader.php file that does not have foreign access restricted by the Joomla CMS permissions.

To prevent crackers from exploiting this file as a possible entry point to crack any Joomla systems installed with my soon to be launched Joomla 1.5 component, I have limited file upload type to just XML types only. Now it works fine.

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Problems integrating SWFupload with Joomla

I am currently working on integrating the SWFUpload library with Joomla 1.5. All seems to be working well except till the portion whereby the file is uploaded.

I get the response by the system to do a login and this response is returned to me via uploadSuccess(file, serverData) method in the SWFupload handlers.js file. The session is not maintained apparently when I do the post.

I am currently referencing http://docs.joomla.org/Creating_a_file_uploader_in_your_component for possible resolutions to this bug.

Now I am heading off to work as the Dancing Christmas tree. Hopefully I would solve it when I get back in the evening.

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Extending Joomla to use Jquery

Recently there seems to be a lot of libraries that are being created using Jquery.

Joomla has been traditionally used with the  mootools library. Instead of using this library, I have opted to instead use the Jquery library.

I created a component for myself and  loaded the jQuery library into one of the sub folders of this Joomla component. I further instructed Joomla to load the javascript file.

Keeping my fingers crossed I wrote this syntex in the template file

<script>

jQuery(document).ready(function(){alert(‘hello world’)});

</script>

And Eureka!! It worked. Now I will go on further extending Joomla to create a very user friendly component for my clients which have been facing lots of problems with the counter-intuitive Joomla Administration interface.