Joomla 1.5 Multimedia

Walker, Allan. (2010). Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia. Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing. 

Preview Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia: Chapter 4 is available for free download.

While I’m waiting for a review copy to arrive, I’ve been reviewing the Chapter 4 preview available from Packt. If this chapter is any indication, Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia promises to be valuable to folks with a wide range of experience.

If you’re a relatively new Web designer, Walker does a nice job providing a quick overview of image editing, how to select the correct file size for an image, and other basic concepts.

Walker quickly moves on to cover the flexibility that Joomla! offers designers in incorporating images into articles, including working with the WYSIWYG editor and with custom HTML.

The book also does an excellent job covering the variety of components and modules that are available to create slideshows and image galleries on one’s side. Based on my own experiences teaching WCMS courses, and managing numerous client projects, I believe that he does an excellent job in covering the most popular, feature-rich galleries, like Phoca Gallery, and Joomgallery, as well as a variety of well-done, aesthetically pleasing flash-enabled lightbox slideshow modules.

The chapter also briefly discusses modules for incorporating images stored on third party services like Flickr–a great consideration for photographers and others who use these services.

This chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of writing alt and title attributes when incorporating images into one site. While this is important, I would have liked to have seen a little bit more depth here:

• alt tags shouldn’t be written, for example, for images that exist for purely aesthetic reasons; text readers should not be reading things like: “spacer gif”;
• alt tags need to be meaningful and descriptive of content; they should, however, be concise; a couple of examples would have been useful;
• point out online resources like the validation service offered by W3C that help designers and developers ensure that their code is well-formed and valid, including a review of one’s alt tags.

On balance, however, this is a solid chapter and a good indicator that the book’s coverage of other multimedia should prove to be useful to novices and more experienced developers alike.

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