Today's Joomla Tip: JCE Content Editor

The JCE editor is a great alternative to the TinyMCE editor that comes standard with Joomla. For one thing, it has a built-in spell checker! You can set your editor to highlight misspelled words in your content, as you would see in most email clients.

It also has a few other nifty tools not found in the TinyMCE editor, and allows you to switch between HTML and formatted views without doing round trips to the server. It's a little thing that actually saves a lot of time.

Setup is pretty simple, if you keep a few things in mind. Once you've downloaded the JCE package you'll find that there are three installation files to upload to Joomla:

com_jce_152
plg_jce_152
jce_iframe_150

The first two should be installed as Joomla plug-ins. Go to Extensions -> Install/Uninstall and then browse to and upload com_jce_152 and plg_jce_152.

The third component should be installed as a JCE plugin. Go to Components -> JCE Administration -> Install and then browse to and upload jce_iframe_150.

Once these are sucessfully installed, go to Global Configuration and click on the Site tab. Under "Site Settings, set your "Default WYSIWYG Editor" to JCE, click Save and you're done!

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Today's Joomla Tip: Joomla 1.5 and SEF

I've tried a number of SEF add-on components to make my Joomla websites Search Engine Friendly. In the end I discovered that the core SEF module included with Joomla 1.5 works best.

However, moving websites from a development platform to live servers sometimes caused the SEF component to stop working. When enabled, all my pages would return "Internal Server Error". After a little investigation, here is what I've found:

1. Make sure the file ".htaccess" in the root gets ported along with the rest of the website! SEF, and in particular, Apache mod_rewrite will not work unless this file is present and correctly configured.

2. Porting a site sometimes means moving it to a different directory. If you're having trouble, try uncommenting the following line in .htaccess:

RewriteBase /

Where "/" is the root directory. If your joomla installation is not in the root of the webspace, be sure to specify the correct path here instead of just "/".


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