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

Adding movement to our site's header—Parallax effect


For this first modification, we are going to work with one of my favorite effects, the Parallax effect. We are going to use this in our header. If you remember our template, our header look like this:

Though this header looks fine with our template (I did it myself, so don't be a critic), we want something more eye-catching. We are going to change this header to a Parallax-powered one.

If you have never seen a Parallax effect, I think we can describe it as a mimic of a 3D effect. It basically consists of some images, each one on top of the other. We can use this to create an illusion of distance. We can see this better with a representation, as shown in the following picture:

As we can see there are three elements in the image: a cat, a car, and the moon. The cat is in the first instance...