FLASH

After doing a few Joomla websites for clients, I found myself pulling double duty is a Joomla Instructor. Training for Joomla is pretty straight forward if the client has some experience with a content management system (CMS), but most of my clients are new to CMSs so writing a tutorial written for a beginner was I had to do.

Joomla - Adding and Editing Articles for Beginners: WYSIWYG

A beginner needs to know the basics of the WYSWIG environment more than anything else. WYSIWYG means What You See Is What You Get. This tutorial uses TinyMCE, the default WYSIWYG editor. I cover the basics you need to start writing articles and adding your own images. In future tutorials I'll show you how to organize your articles, make menu items and install an extension.

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Enjoy,

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This is a good one to use if you're building your website from scratch. This is not a good one to use with a Content Management System (CMS) like Joomla or Wordpress. I know Joomla has its own core htaccess file as well as third party extensions like JoomSEF. I would imagine Wordpress has similar options.

That being said, if you're building a PHP site, this is a great way to hide the fact that this a PHP site and possibly causing hackers to overlook your site. There's no SEO advantage to having a .html extension over a .php extension. The biggest drawback I can see to using this part of the script is if you commonly pass variable through your URLs (ie. filename.php?id=420&action=token). If that is the situation you are in, then you can simply strip that part out of the script.

One of the original tricks from the early days of web design is still around and going strong. Though there are many more ways to do it than there used to be, and some are more elegant than the example provided here, I will show you how to use a modified script that was spit out of Dreamweaver in an SEO friendly way.

Dreamweaver tends to place the javascript in the head and adds an 'onload' function to the body tag. For some people that might be OK, but I like to have my main tags free of clutter because I build my sites in a modular way. By taking the javascript out of the head and calling it externally, we make the page more user friendly for bots and humans (at least the human who codes the page). When you place the rollover images, you will need to insert two javascript functions in each link; onmouseover & onmouseout. Lets take a look at the pieces.

NOTE: spaces have been added around the '<' and '>' characters to have them display properly.
REMEMBER TO DELETE THESE SPACES.

The JavaScript

Copy and paste this into a new file and name it 'rollover.js' and place it in a spot where you would normally put a script that is going to be used several times. Personally, I have an 'includes' directory that contains a 'js' directory that holds all of my common JavaScripts. You'll use the path again when you call the script externally in a page head (within the < head > tags)

function MM_swapImgRestore() { //v3.0
var i,x,a=document.MM_sr; for(i=0;a&&i }
function MM_preloadImages() { //v3.0
var d=document; if(d.images){ if(!d.MM_p) d.MM_p=new Array();
var i,j=d.MM_p.length,a=MM_preloadImages.arguments; for(i=0; i if (a[i].indexOf("#")!=0){ d.MM_p[j]=new Image; d.MM_p[j++].src=a[i];}}
}

function MM_findObj(n, d) { //v4.01
var p,i,x; if(!d) d=document; if((p=n.indexOf("?"))>0&&parent.frames.length) {
d=parent.frames[n.substring(p+1)].document; n=n.substring(0,p);}
if(!(x=d[n])&&d.all) x=d.all[n]; for (i=0;!x&&i for(i=0;!x&&d.layers&&i if(!x && d.getElementById) x=d.getElementById(n); return x;
}

function MM_swapImage() { //v3.0
var i,j=0,x,a=MM_swapImage.arguments; document.MM_sr=new Array; for(i=0;i<(a.length-2);i+=3)
if ((x=MM_findObj(a[i]))!=null){document.MM_sr[j++]=x; if(!x.oSrc) x.oSrc=x.src; x.src=a[i+2];}
}