Joomla!® 24-Hour Trainer

JOOMLA!'S MEDIA MANAGER

Joomla's Media Manager is where all images and documents for your website are stored. Not only does this include images, but also any PDF files, Microsoft Office documents like Word or PowerPoint, and other kinds of documents.

Before you can put an image on your website, it must be put into a web-ready format. Simply downloading a photo from your zillion-megapixel camera and uploading it to Joomla simply won't do!

A complete discussion of image preparation for the Web is beyond the scope of this book, but here are a few pointers to get you started:

• Three image formats are supported for web display: JPG, GIF, and PNG. Generally speaking, JPG is better for photographs, whereas GIF is better for drawings and cartoons. PNG is an open-source image format, and it's similar to GIF.
• When you download a photo from your digital camera, it's very large, typically thousands of pixels across. (Pixels are the unit of measure used for the web. There are 72 pixels to an inch.) Your website, however, is likely only 960 pixels across. Therefore, you need to resize your photos before you upload them to your Joomla site. You can do this with the software that came with your digital camera, or you can use Adobe Photoshop, GIMP (an open-source image-editing tool), or any one of a number of other image-editing packages.
• When sizing your images for inclusion in an article, don't let either dimension (width or height) exceed 300 pixels. Likewise, you shouldn't let either dimension ...