Multimedia use in your Joomla! CMS
A powerful feature of the Joomla! CMS is its ability to organize and manage content. This content can be text, images, documents, audio, video, and anything else you can think up to deliver to your site users.
Joomla ships with its own "Media Manager" tool. This allows the ability to upload, organize, and delete different types of media to the images directory, or subdirectories if you wish. The media manager offers a thumbnail view as well as a detailed view of the file's properties, such as name, file size, and so on.
The purpose of the built-in media manager is to allow site administrators to manage media content from the website pages, without the requirement for File Transfer Protocol (FTP) access to the server. As a developer, using FTP is an essential transmission method, but when handing over a Joomla! based website over to the end clients, the need to restrict such access is commonplace.
Once files are in place on the web server, things start to get interesting. We have our media on the server, all ready to go, and now what? Before we get too much further, now is the time to highlight Joomla! Templates.
A Joomla! Template is a number of files within the Joomla! CMS which control the presentation of the content. Templates allow you to obtain a completely different "look and feeling" on your site pages. When combined with images, a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and the CMS database content templates contribute to the overall design and layout of your website.
When producing website pages, often the location of main elements will stay the same; these might be menus, banners, and so on. These pages will probably also require the same logo, colors, and styles, which is where our template and cascading style sheets come in handy. Templates also have the important role of allowing us to publish certain Joomla! content into specific areas of the template.
The CMS and template approach offers the ability to not only deliver our multiple media content in different positions around our website template, but we also have the flexibility of showing the content we want, when we want to. We will be devoting a whole chapter towards Joomla! Templates and how they can enhance our site multimedia features.
For now, it has been important to highlight the fact that "out of the box" Joomla! seems to offer basic web content management. With knowledge of the product as well as additional extensions and configurations, it can provide a stunning web solution that is brimming with multimedia features.
Text
Text is made up of letters, numbers, characters, words, and symbols. These put together form words, which convey an idea, belief, or fact. Text is the most widely used form of communication and is considered a fundamental element of visual multimedia.
Text is used everywhere on websites, it is even used in parts of the site that many users do not see. An example of this would be the HTML source code for the website pages:
Text can be used on page headings, main content, captions and help tips, documentation, error reporting, basically everywhere across your website.
A font is a particular style of text and plays a major role in the look and feel of modern websites. Fonts are used all over the Web now to style and define text. Without fonts, all of the text we see would have the same look to it, making things very uninteresting.
In modern websites, the text and the type of style you would like applied to it is usually defined using a stylesheet. Within a stylesheet document, it is possible to set font and text properties. These properties can apply to small or large areas of text used on your site pages:
Images
Next to written text, images are probably one of the most utilized types of media in websites.
Images not only communicate information effectively (the old saying "a picture tells a thousand words"), but they are an important element of design, marketing, and branding which may distinguish your website from others.
The definition of an "Image" can often be used to describe the following elements:
- Photographs
- Graphics
- Diagrams
- Drawings
Images can be placed on web pages as a singular item to complement text, or they can be placed together to form galleries, which play a major multimedia role on some websites:
Images can be created, edited, and saved into numerous formats. Some of these formats are more applicable for use on the Web than others.
For more detailed image information, please view Chapter 4, Adding and Managing Image Content.
Audio
Audio (or sound as we know it) can be used to inspire human emotion and deliver information. Audio is a major element of human entertainment, as well as a contributing element to videos, gaming, and other multimedia presentations.
The use of audio can add interest, be informative, and entertain. An often overlooked fact is that audio can also provide an interface for visually impaired users to attain the information they require:
Internet is now an audio-rich delivery mechanism, with audio being easily downloaded from websites and application portals. Most modern computer setups now include speakers, which depending on the way you look at it, has helped the evolution of audio usage within web pages. Possibly the equation goes the other way and greater audio usage on web pages has specified the requirements for computer users to need speakers.
All of that said, gone are the dancing Santas that used to load into web pages, and play a nasty Christmas MIDI file with no volume control! Now we are talking about websites containing "podcasts on demand", and "dial up your own personal radio station playlists", and impressive audio players including time counts and player controls.
Like images, sound files can be created and saved in many formats, including AAC, MP3, MIDI, WAV, as well as many others. Choosing the correct audio format to use on your website is imperative for the efficient delivery of the audio content to your site users.
Video
Video can be defined as a sequence of still images put together and displayed on a screen to form the illusion of motion:
Video is one of the most powerful multimedia types, as it incorporates both images and audio. It can also contain text in the form of titles and descriptions.
Video has been known as one of the most demanding media types to work with due to the overheads of processing and working with large file sizes. Transmission and storage of video has often made it an unsuitable medium to use in certain conditions. However, things are changing rapidly, and video is now often linked to or "streamed" into an application, rather than the files hosted themselves.
Video can be saved in a variety of formats and compression types. Some of these will be very applicable, and others you should stay clear of for website use. More information about working with video can be found in Chapter 5, Using Video within Your Joomla! Website.
