Using Joomla

Built-in Plug-ins

Joomla comes with a lot of plug-ins out of the box. Some of these plug-ins may not appear to be working even if they are enabled. This is especially true for the content type plug-ins where certain article and menu item parameters may have to be set a certain way for the plug-in to function. An example of this is the Content–Page Navigation plug-in, where you can chose whether or not to display page navigation in the article parameters and menu item parameters.

Authentication Plug-ins

These all do the same thing. They allow you to authenticate yourself using the Joomla jos_users table or from a third-party API.

Content–Page Navigation

This plug-in facilitates the Prev and Next functionality as a way to navigate between content items in the same category. This can be seen at the bottom of Figure 10-3.

Content–Rating

Provides a way for site visitors to rate the article they are viewing. This can be seen toward the top of Figure 10-3.

Figure 10-3. Content–Page Navigation and Content–Rating

Content–Email Cloaking

Spammers use spambots to crawl the Internet looking for email addresses. If you can view the source code on your current site and read your email address in plain text, so can spambots. Joomla uses the Email Cloaking plug-in to hide your email address using JavaScript. This way, the browser can read it, but nasty spambots can’t.

Let’s look at an example of email cloaking ...