Technologist
Here we go again… In an effort to make posting to my blog easier, and therefore more consistent, we are applying yet another makeover.
Going to be more of a “tumblr” style of layout and will facilitate short single topic posts in areas that currently interest me.
I’m sorry to say that I no longer have any interest in PHP or any publishing platforms other than WordPress. Sorry Joomla folks, but I simply cannot allocate any time to addressing you genuine needs for plugins I published years ago.
As a result of a request from a reader of this blog, I have prepared a new Joomla extension which I have christened “jMarkdown” to partner with jTextile. Why would I do this? Well I remain absolutely convinced that even the best of the WYSIWYG editors for blogs and CMS are basically useless when it comes to editing text or restyling content. Wherever possible I use “Textile markup”:http://textism.com/tools/textile/ for content intended for publication via the HTML. This is a matter of personal preference, many others use “Markdown”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/. Elsewhere in this blog you’ll find jTextile, a Joomla 1.5 extension which supports the textile syntax
Anyway, jMarkdown allows you to prepare articles for Joomla 1.0 using the “Markdown”:http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ syntax. jMarkdown, when activated, will convert the text into html for display purposes.
You can download jMarkdown “here”:http://s3.amazonaws.com/files.4results.biz/jMarkdown.zip. This is a prerelease version and does not include any documentation. Just install the extension and activate the plugin in your Joomla 1.5 site.
As usual feel free to comment or ask questions here.
Just a quick post here to say that I have released a VirtueMart shipping module for Joomla 1.5.
Suffice to say that it provides a flexible mechanism for calculating shipping with separate scales for “Domestic” and “International” orders.
The idea for this module, plus core source code, was derived from an existing module “flex” by Micah Shawn which is contained in the current VirtueMart distribution.
You can download the module from HERE. Installation instructions are in the included README file.
During the process of migrating a large Joomla site from 1.0 to 1.5 I ran into a problem. As usual with any sites with user editable content, I had steered away from using a WYSIWYG editor (I’ve yet to find one that actually works!) and have used Textile to format the content.
However, some serious Googling did not reveal a plugin for Joomla 1.5 to render the content. The original “mos Textile” mambot has disappeared and “rok Textile” does not work on 1.5
So I have lashed together a Joomla 1.5 plugin which will render textile markup correctly (including SmartyPants extensions).
Extension details:
If there is any interest from out there, I’ll extend and support the plugin. Feel free to post comments or questions in this blog.