Community Builder (CB) is an open source extension to Joomla that provides extensive broadening of Joomla’s user management features. It is one of the most popular extensions in the Joomla world. The capabilities of CB include the following:

❑       Managed passwords and groups

❑       Avatar image for users

Picture galleries (especially those that display family photo albums) at times seem to be taking over the Web. Many jokes have been made about the huge volume of the transmission of baby pictures will eventually bring the Web to its knees. The desire to share digital pictures and the ability of geographically separated family members to share in the lives of their loved ones makes a compelling case for digital picture galleries.

Whether you want to display a professional photo portfolio or post snapshots of your daughter’s first steps, Joomla can provide the solution. Joomla can host picture galleries through a number of extensions. In fact, galleries are among the most popular types of plug-ins on the Joomla system. At last count, a Google search could locate at least 50 different picture gallery extensions for Joomla, both free and commercial.

The RSGallery2 extension is the most highly rated native gallery extension and is very rich in features. It provides professional gallery and image management, integrated access control with Joomla’s user registration system, and availability in almost two dozen languages.

Joomla includes two editors: TinyMCE and XStandard Lite. The default editor is TinyMCE, and it allows rich text content to be edited using on-screen fonts, styles (bold, italic, and so on), sizes, and so on. In this editor, an article will appear just as it does when it will be published to the site. XStandard Lite also offers WYSIWYG features, but also outputs XHTML- and strict HTML-compliant code for the article (which TinyMCE does not).

If no editor is selected as the default editor, all article editing will occur in plain text. Since Joomla is an HTML system, the plain text actually consists of the raw HTML code.

TinyMCE is an editor written in JavaScript that has been tested to work effectively on a variety of browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari), allows for XHTML 1.0 output, supports international language packs, and can even use various themes and plug-ins (including Flash). XStandard Lite, in contrast, is a compiled plug-in, which means that it is only available at present on Windows platforms. Aside from several feature advantages of XStandard, its binary execution gives it a great performance advantage over TinyMCE.

The CSS is a key component of the Joomla template system. Not only can multiple CSS files be used with every template but a custom CSS file can be specified with a granular level down to individual articles. Even more importantly to a Joomla practitioner are the features available within a CSS.

If you do a simple survey of most CSS files, you’ll find that their authors only use the most basic features available. CSS is bursting with attributes that can be used to polish the presentation of a Web site. The great news is that nearly all of the various attributes in the CSS specification are supported by all popular browsers.

In this section, you’ll learn about some of the features that can make your template display stand out from other sites. You’ll see how positioning can be used to locate text over an image. You’ll learn the best practices about locating image references in the CSS file itself, and how to specify a CSS file for a specific article or target platform (such as cell phone or PDA).

The main Joomla site (www.joomla.org) keeps a directory of extensions that work with Joomla, and also provides a feedback/rating system where users can describe their experiences with the various add-ons. You can directly access the extensions directory here: http://extensions.joomla.org

The Joomla Extension Directory (JED) catalogs more than 1,600 extensions (as of this writing) that have been registered on the system. Each extension is filed in one of 18 categories. The home page of the directory also displays the five most recently added extensions and lists the five top-rated. Each entry in the directory contains descriptive and usage information relating to the add-on.

As of this writing, Joomla has been moving extensions from the Joomla! Forge site to JoomlaCode (http://joomlacode.org). This process has been going on for quite some time and still remains incomplete. If you click on an extension download link in JED and get a “file not found” error, try searching the projects on JoomlaCode to see if the extension has been relocated there. If you still can’t find it, go to a search engine such as Google where you can typically locate a current version on the developer’s home page.