Monday, 27 June 2011 15:45

Making Joomla Idiot Proof (part 1)

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Resizing images the wrong way

We all know that you should resize your images to the correct size before uploading them but thanks to the features of the wysiwyg editors users think it's perfectly ok to grab the image

handler boxes and resize the image in the editor. This of course does not physically resize the image but instead just displays it smaller with obvious consequences that I'm sure we have all seen.

It doesn't matter how often I tell users not to do this or how good my documentation is they still do it. Maybe it is laziness and not plain idiocy I don't know, but as one user said "why can I do it in the editor if I'm not supposed to" and that's a very valid point.

K2, as used on this site, will automatically resize the leading image to a predefined size but that's only for the main image and not for those inside the article. Other extensions will automatically resize all the images in an article to a predetermined size.

Unfortunately this will make all the images the exact same size irrespective of what the site owner actually wants and like the image sizing in K2 the magic performed to do the resize is only really suitable if all the images are in the same proportions.

Making resizing images idiot proof

What I really want is a way to not only make sure that the images displayed on the web site are displayed in their real size, no more 2 megapixel images resized to 200px for me, but to allow the site owner to have full control of resizing the images in the simplest way possible.

They should be able to resize any image to any dimension or ratio either by grabbing the image handlers in the wysiwyg editor or by typing amended height and width dimensions in the dialogue box or html code.

As an added bonus if the image is resized by more than a specified percentage then a popup to the image at it's original size should be available.

  • I want this whole process to be completely invisible to the site owner.
  • It should be non-intrusive and just work.
  • No need to remember any code or voodoo magic syntax.
  • And something where knowledge or laziness are not a factor.

FBoxBot is the answer

I really don't know why I've never seen or heard of this plugin before as it's been around for almost 5 years but I found FBoxBot yesterday.

I don't place too much weight on the reviews in the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) but this little extension has almost exclusively received 5 star reviews. It does everything that I want to do and unlike other popup image tools it uses extremely lightweight javascript.

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