A Thousand Shades of Awesome !

Skype for iPhone and iPod touch is about a thousand shades of awesome!

Finally, the king of VoIP applications has arrived in the App Store allowing iPhones and yes, even iPod touches, to enjoy free phone calls and instant messaging.

The free Skype app isn’t the first VoIP iPhone app to offer this functionality, but it is without a doubt the very best of breed. The interface is responsive and intuitive. The icons are sharp. The audio quality is superb.

Best of all, everything just plain works as expected. No bugs, no frustration, just pure simplicity. Skype works on all iPhones and even second generation iPod touches using the earbud accessory with the built-in microphone.

Current Skype users will appreciate the fact that this is not a crippled version of Skype’s desktop application. Instead, this iPhone app is an almost duplicate, feature-to-feature adaptation of the desktop version. Skype is a solid app and one of the must-have communication utilities every iPhone and iPod touch owner should add to their home screen.

The Skype iPhone app allows various kinds of calls and messaging across it’s robust VoIP platform. This includes calling landlines as well as other Skype users. Skype-to-Skype calls are absolutely free of charge, but do require that both the calling party and the receiving party are using the Skype app. And even though Skype will charge you to call landlines (and mobile in some countries), the cost savings per minute is much less than your carrier’s calling plan. Either way, you can’t lose with Skype. It’s a free app that saves you money.

In addition to phone calls, Skype also supports instant messaging across 3G, WiFi, GPRS, and Edge. You can see who’s online at anytime then instant message them. This also requires both parties to be running Skype. In our tests, instant messaging works great unless you’re trying to chat to more than one person at a time which means constant toggling between them.

The current version of the Skype iPhone app only works on WiFi for phone calls, although some iPhone developers with the latest SDK are reporting that Skype running on iPhone 3.0 works well on 3G. Hopefully this won’t change when iPhoen 3.0 is officially released this summer, although it’s easy to see how this might not be included given Apple’s relationship with AT&T.

Currently, the biggest drawback to using Skype has to do with the limitation in the iPhone that prevents apps from running in the background. This means you can’t get alerts when others want to contact you unless you have Skype open. This may be addressed for the iPhone 3.0 release this summer which is reported to support background processes and alerts.

Jailbreakers beware that the latest version of Skype will not run on jailbroken devices. If you do try to run this app on a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch, it will crash your device. Skype chose not to address this issue for jailbreakers and instead they added a disclaimer to the app stating that it is only supported on an unmodified iPhone OS.

Some Skype users seem upset that this iPhone app, unlike it’s desktop sibling, does not support video chat. We’re not sure why this is an issue for some users because even if the app did support video, the iPhone’s camera is on the wrong side of the hardware. This makes video chat utterly pointless on the iPhone, and completely useless for iPod touch users.

All these little nits aside, the Skype app is an awesome addition to your iPhone or iPod touch. You’ll find it extremely useful if you spend a fair amount of time on Wi-fi networks, saving you money with free Skype-to-Skype calls and cheap calls to land lines. The upcoming release of iPhone 3.0 could also mean even more Skype usage over 3G and the ability to keep it running all the time. And if Apple eventually puts a camera on the other side of the iPhone, Skype could dominate our calling habits by enabling real-time, mobile video chat.

Switch off the WYSIWYG Editor when inserting HTML code

The default Joomla WYSIWYG editor is great when you want to be able to format your content articles. However, the editor will strip off any HTML you try to insert. Therefore, to insert certain HTML code you need to make sure that it is switched off.

To switch off the Editor for the current user you need to logon on to the Administrator backend, click to Site > User Manager. Click on the account you logon with, and choose No WYSIWYG editor. Once this has been done, any content items you create / edit will feature pure HTML which will not get stripped off by the Editor.

Back up your Joomla website

Ok we all know you have taken all steps to prevent your website to secure your website and prevent it from being hacked. However, there are many other things which can go wrong with your Joomla website. When you have a busy site, you can never have enough backups. The following are easy ways to have a complete set of backups of your Joomla website. Did I mention that each of these comes for free?
Backup your SQL data

Backing up the content of your Joomla website is critical. You will probably be able to recreate your template if you lose it, however recreating your content is a much harder thing to do especially if you rely on several 3rd parties / visitors for your the content.

The jombackup mambot from Jomres is a small mambot which when published creates a MySql backup, compresses the file and sends it to you. The default settings are enough, no playing around with parameters is required. Just enter your email address, publish and you'll soon start getting a daily backup right to your mailbox. Try not to obliterate your mailbox too, and don't use the same email server as the host of your site, so that if you lose your site, you don't lose your email too Wink

Backup your template / media / customisations etc.

These are things which do not change often ... so a simple FTP transfer to a backup area should be sufficient. You can also choose to use a component for your backups.

A good component for backup is the JoomlaCloner backup component. This allows you to backup and restore your website easily. It also allows you to move your website from host to host.

Another non-commercial one which comes to mind is the JoomlaPack component. This creates a zipped file of all the content in your website which you can just download. This also makes it easier for you to take a backup whenever you need.

Load a module within an article

Did you know it is possible to actually load a module directly in your content? E.g. We want to load our Featured Articles module in an article rather than in a module position. We can do this using the Load Module Position defaultJoomla mambot.

Joomla 1.5

In Joomla 1.5, there is a default plugin which does this. You can call any module position in a content item with the following code:

{loadposition user4}

Remember, you have to enable the loadmodule plugin from the Plugin Manager.


Joomla 1.0

Edit: See bottom for a new way of doing this, using a 3rd party module though

The Load Module positions mambot allows us to load any mambot position as a mambot. Therefore to load the module in a content article we can use the following workaround.

* From the Template Positions (Site > Template Manager > User Positions), choose a module position which is not used in your template e.g. user8. If all your positions are used in the template, create a new position.




Create a new template position

* Assign the module you want to display to the position you have chosen above - Modules > Site Modules. Make sure that Menu Item links is set to All (otherwise the position will not load)













Setup the module with all necessary parameters

* In your content item enter the following: { mosloadposition user8 } (be sure to remove extra spaces before mosloadposition and after user8, spaces were added intentionally in this example). This will be replaced by the content of the module(s) assigned to that position.

Testing Joomla site changes while site is offline

Sometimes when you need to make drastic changes to your website, you put you site offline, so that your clients get a site offline message and don't see any temporary incorrect configurations.

You as the developer / administrator of the website need to be able to see the live changes. To do this you need to open a new tab / window (and connent to your live site url) in the same browser where you are logged on as administrator doing the backend changes. If you have maintained the browser session correctly the actual current content is generated beneath the site offline message. Other users who hit your site while the site is configured as offline will only see the site offline message, and only you (due to being logged on as administrator) will be able to see the changes.

The essential thing for this to work, is that you need to ensure that you need to have two windows / tabs running under the same browser session.