If you use Joomla to build websites for your clients, you're probably like me. You've spent a long time on each project explaining to your clients how to manage their websites. Joomla is made to be super easy to use but you cannot assume everyone will pick it up the first time they use it. Writing a website manual can be time consuming! Let's be honest; It's boring!

I've came across a great service called Joomanuals that helps you to build a custom manual for your client in less than 5 minutes. It's more like a wizard, you supply it with the basic info like your client's (website name, logo, administrative information ...) and select the chapters you want to discuss. At the moment you can show your client how to:

• Login into admin panel.
• Edit existing articles.
• Add articles, with brief intro about contents structuring in Joomla (Sections and Categories)
• Work with Text Editor, you choose between JCE or TinyMCE.
• Add custom modules.
• Working with menus.

Additional items that are really useful like :

• Exporting website's database with phpMyAdmin.
• Creating backups using Joomlapack.
• Working with VirtueMart.

I've came across this issue a lot on forums and help groups "My drop down menu is hidden by Flash/Banner/Other-Element" First a few principles should be cleared to understand how to get it fixed.

• The Flash movie must have the wmode set to opaque. This will prevent the Flash movie from playing in the topmost layer and allow you to adjust the layering of the movie within other layers of the HTML document.
• The menu container have to be positioned with CSS using (relative)
• The Flash movie container must have a z-index value less than the menu container

So the CSS for the menu container should be like :

#menu-container {
         position:relative;
         z-index:100;
}

and the Flash movie should be :

 wmode=opaque 

This should place the drop down menu in-front of the Flash movie

Hope this saves anyone from frustration! Have a nice day

Yesterday I received an email from Dario saying he's implemented a new feature for DOCMan Ultimate Download Module. Dario's added the ability to filter documents by category ID. I was asked to implement this feature long time ago but I didn't have time cause of my military duties! Thanks to you Dario and thanks to everyone at the opensource community! You're making this a better place!

Download v1.6

Calendar Stamp 1.5 has been released today and I am happy to announce it's now Language-Issues Free!, The new version fix all language issues reported before. I've moved months names (short and full) to the language file so now no more problems with non-English characters on languages like German, French or even Japanese! Also this release features a minor function when using user_style mode. Now the user can choose to display the months in letters short (like Jan) or full (like January). The code has been cleaned (new version is 100 line less than the previous one!) and optimized for better performance.

In a previous article I wrote about using JText method to output text from the language files. This week I was working on Calendar Stamp and moved all the text to external files. I discovered that JText doesn't work in content plugins unless you call the function getLanguage and load the language manually. Something like this should work:

   $lang =& JFactory::getLanguage();
   $lang->load('plg_content_plugin',JPATH_ADMINISTRATOR);