Book Image

Joomla! 1.5 JavaScript jQuery

Book Image

Joomla! 1.5 JavaScript jQuery

Overview of this book

Ever wondered how all the great-looking, feature packed, amazing Joomla! sites are made? Would you like to add image transitions, popups, scrolls, AJAX forms, image galleries, no-page reloads to your website, but are worried that they will be difficult to implement? To make any Joomla! site look more professional, interactive, and interesting you need the ease and power of jQuery.This book will help you to use the jQuery library with the Joomla! CMS. It will take you through adding jQuery functionality to the Joomla! CMS and show how to use it to make the modules and themes more dynamic, interactive, and responsive, and add effects to your Joomla! site.The book starts by showing a plain Joomla! site without any JavaScript enhancement or features, then accompanies you through the process of site enhancement.First you will learn how to make use of third-party extensions to include jQuery features into your site. These can be image galleries, jQuery powered menus, tooltips, and many, many more. Later on you will learn how to modify your template to add some features to your Joomla! site, You will also learn to build your own jQuery-powered Joomla! extensions, and how to pack them so that you can use them in any project you like. Further, you will learn to create your own modules and components.By the end of this book, you will have learned how to enhance any Joomla! site with JavaScript and jQuery.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Joomla! 1.5 JavaScript jQuery
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Optimizing CSS and JavaScript


By this point in the book, our sample site will have quite a good load of JavaScript and CSS files. Each file request requires time and adds to the overall site load time. Now our site has over 20 CSS files, and more or less the same number of JavaScript files.

What can be done to reduce the number of calls? Well, as developers, we could pack our JavaScript and CSS files in as few files as possible. But as we are using lots of third-party extensions, and as it will be quite a huge task to try to pack these files, we should search for another option.

A good option will be to use a plugin like the JCH Optimize plugin, which we can find in the Joomla! Extensions Directory at the following URL:

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/site-performance/12088.

Once installed, this extension can be found under Extensions | Plugin Manager:

Just enable the plugin and then click on it. To edit its options, we are going to see which options are available...