Inserting Video Tricks and Tips

One of the most common questions about working with Joomla! 1.6 is how to embed video in articles. The reason this is a problem is that embedding inherently creates risks because of what might be embedded. It could contain malware of some kind, and even though it is safe today who knows what might happen in the future?  This is why, the iframe  tag which is commonly used to embed content is routinely stripped out of articles both by WYSIWYG editors and by the Joomla! input filter as a security measure. Letting just anyone insert an iframe could be a problem. So you do want to think carefully about who you allow to embed video on your site and what formats and host sites you allow.

Let's say you have decided the despite the inherent risk you want some embedded video? How can you do it?  Naturally, there are a number of options. If you want to have lots of unsupervised users embedding things you probably will want to get a specialized plugin from the JED. A number of editors also have plugins for inserting videos

But let's say you just want a limited amount of video and you want to limit the

Joomla! and CiviCRM

In our book we suggest CiviCRM for non profits and schools. It is a extremely powerful application that sometimes doesn't follow the "Joomla! Way" making it sometimes seem hard to take advantage of its highly customizable API. With the  recent release of CiviCRM 3.4/CiviCRM 4.0 (3.4 supporting Joomla! 1.5 and 4.0 supporting Joomla! 1.6) this has become much easier. This is mainly thanks to the inclusion of a helper in the front end and a lot of work that has been done to simplify and standardize the CiviCRM API.

Four recent posts on Civicrm.org highlight this.

Speleo recently posted about a 1.6 compatible membership authentication plugin that assigns access level based on membership status and let's you redirect to a renewal page if a membership is expired.

I recently posted about using the API to easily make standard Joomla! modules containing CiviCRM data.

I also wrote about how the helper allows you to use plugins to take advantage of CiviCRM's built in hooks.

There was also a recent post by Charles Campbell about what sounds like an amazing Joomla! 1.5+CiviCRM implementation for crisis response.

There is also a Make it Happen (fundraiser) going on to finance continuing support of Joomla! 1.5