Joomla!

How to crop a picture

This tutorial uses Irfanview which is a lightweight graphics program that makes life much easier when it comes to general graphics tasks and image viewing.

To crop a picture means that you "Cut out" a part of the picture and throw away the rest. The advantage of this is that you can create new images by removing the unwanted portions of any image.

In Irfanview you draw a box around the area you want to keep by clicking and draging the mouse over the required area.

You then go to the Edit menu and select "Crop selection". The area inside the selected area is kept and the rest disapprears.

You can undo your actions by pressing the Ctrl + Z keys on your keyboard.

There is a useful feature called Auto Crop Borders which will cut away the solid backgound around your image. This is more clearly seen and understood by viewing the video above.

There are many different ways to crop a picture but the way we described here is a very quick and easy way to do it. Find a way that suites you best.

Irfanview can work on MAC using an emulator such as WineBottler or Darwine. For Linux users you can use Wine or any other windows emulator.

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How to remove the Articles heading in a joomla article

Some of you may come across this problem when viewing the articles on your joomla 2.5 website.

The page loads and even though you have set the article title to not show, you see the word "Articles" showing as a H1 heading. There are two main ways to fix this issue quickly.

The reason this Articles heading is showing is that you have created an article that is not linked to by a menu item.

The first way to resolve this is to create a menu item link that links to this article. If you do not want to have the link in your main menu then you can create a new menu which will be hidden. You can hide the new menu by publishing the associated menu module to a menu position that you make up.

The second method is to use Language Overrides.

The Language Overrides function is a built in Joomla! tool that helps you change any particular language text to text of your choice.

Thhis is how you fix the articles problem:

1. Log in to your Joomla! administrator control panel ( usually: your website url followed by /administrator )

2. Click on “Extensions" in the top menu then select "Language Manager”

3. Click on the “Overrides” tab.

4. Click on “New”. A new screen opens up.

5. In this new screen, write the following in the “Language Constant” field: JGLOBAL_ARTICLES

6. Leave the text field empty, and save the override.

When you have done this, the “Articles” title heading will be stripped from every article in your website.

If you have a multilanguage site then there is extra you must perform for the other languages. Lets say for example your site is in English and Swedish, then you need to also click on the "Svenska (SE) - Site" on the dropdown menu on the right hand side of the screen at step 3 above. Complete steps 4, 5 and 6 using the “Language Constant” field: JGLOBAL_ARTICLES

Save and smile because you are done.

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Editing Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal websites using your mobile telephone

Good news for those who have been wondering how to edit a Joomla , Wordpress , Drupal etc, website using your mobile phone. Your prayers have been listened to.

The problem has, until now, been that the mobile browsers did not effectively handle the contenteditable function that triggers the caret (keyboard) to appear so that one can type in the content within your sites content editor (JCE , tiny etc).

This ,luckily for all site owners, changed recently with the release of Firefox Beta for mobile and Joooid version 1.4.

So far I have only tested both on an Android Samsung Galaxy S2 device and they worked well. Apparently iPhones with iOS5 should already be able to have functioning browser content editors but I have not personally tested this yet or seen any valuable reviews on the topic.

I personally found the Firefox beta experience to be better than the Joooid experience since Firefox feels just like the regular web experience we are used to. Joooid has a rudimentary editor and requires you to have web services enabled from within your Joomla installation but it works to change content.

It might take a while before the standard Android webkit browser or other browsers have this functionality built in but at least we are moving in the right direction. For those of you who don't as yet meet the hardware requirements to install the new Firefox Beta for mobile you can still use PowerMail for Joomla to email new content to your website but editing articles will have to remain out of your reach for now.

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