The ExtendedLink plugin provides a means of adding strings to the end of each Joomla menu item's URL. This is perfect for style assignment as will be discussed below.

We release a Club Template every month, and it is accompanied by a series of preset styles. With such a selection, it may be difficult to choose a particular style over the others. You may now want to use and may wish to use difference styles in different areas of your site.

Until the release of the new plugin, this has only been possible by creating a duplicate of your template package. This is by copying all the files and folders, then renaming all names to reference the new template name, different from the original. This new template package can then be installed into your Joomla site in the usual fashion, then assigned to certain pages of your site using the menu assignment feature in the template parameters.

One of the more important aspects of Joomla!, if not the most important, is the writing of content. Quality of your content is directly affected by the tools provided for you, this is were RokPad comes into play.

Joomla!, by default, provides its own WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor (TinyMCE), as well as a None editor which is a basic HTML textarea field. There are various alternative editors available, as developed by third parties. The WYSIWYGs are popular due the diverse assortment of tools they provide, they allow those who are unfamiliar or comfortable with HTML syntax, to easily write well formatted and beautiful content. This is achieved through the use of shortcut buttons in the toolbar which control an array of functions such as headers, colour, indents, images etc... as well as a visual preview of how it will appear once saved and rendered by Joomla!.

Although we at RocketTheme consider WYSIWYG editors very useful and powerful tools for all types of users, we never use them. Using a WYSIWYG editor is no substitute for inserting your own HTML as it results in leaner code and a lesser likelihood of problems due to incorrect formatting. There are a series of conflicts that can come into play once you attempt to construct more complex content, other than the typical Word Document, meaning disabling the editor is the best course of action to avoid frustration.

K2 is a great new GPL extensions for managing content that packs alot more punch than the traditional Joomla content component can offer. It provides a flexible article format that allows you to add images, attatchments, comments, even custom fields to your content. Once you've created your content (or migrated it from traditional Joomla content), you can completely customize the resulting views with simple overrides via CSS or template files. Such is the power of the extension, RocketTheme is proud to release four of our key extensions with native K2 support.

Something I really never thought about, since we never had the necessity for it and there never been any requests for it, is the Google Maps support on RokBox.

Just recently I saw a thread in the RokBox Support Forum about some guys throwing out plenty of tricks to have Google Maps working on RokBox. I have to admit I really liked that thread, the tricks discussed were excellent and it goes to demonstrate how flexible RokBox is, and how it can solve almost any possible need.

Even though RocketTheme is primarily a Template club, extensions have always been an important aspect of our monthly releases. Now, we are placing a greater focus on our Extensions with the birth of the Extensions Club; separate download areas for the extensions; independent demos for the extensions; details and documentation for each extension plus a community forum to express your thoughts and concerns. Extensions provide an additional functional, visual and versatile layer to your site.

RokTwittie is our latest Joomla! Extension. The name speaks for itself, it is a module that brings Twitter to your Joomla site. This includes the ability to publish your site statuses, updates and searches from Twitter, which also includes multiple usernames support. Although, it is not intended to be a Twitter application for tweeting with your account, but is a showcase, with a vast assortment of features that are customisable to fit your needs.

This is kinda quick for another releases, but there was a bug that needed fixing for the RokDownload Link content plugin to work correctly. As well, since the number of bugs being reported was dropping down, we figured it was finally time to move this to a beta. So 1.0b1 is now out and available.

It is really a quick bugfix of .98a so check that out for all of the goodies.

You can downloads it from the RocketWerx site

Any issues should be discussed on the RocketWerx forum.

Well, another release of RokDownloads is in the bag. There is the usually round of bug fixes of course. But this one is actually kinda nice because it includes the RokDownloads Link Content Plugin. This is also probably the last alpha release unless some major bug pops up.

Well its been a little delayed, but the new version of RokDownloads is available over on the RocketWerx site. The Questions do keep coming about whats going on with RokDownloads and what is on the horizon for it. We are going to be talking about that more and more here shortly but for the moment here is a brief glimpse as to what is going on.

With the release of the February 2009 RocketTheme Joomla Template, Akiraka, we quietly released a new extension called RokCandy. The name was chosen because this seemingly simple and innocuous concept will make you say 'sweet!' when you start to fully appreciate what it can do for you. So what is RokCandy? Basically it provides macro functionality to any element on a Joomla page. This means you can put a simple macro definition in any article, module, etc, and this will be expanded when you view the page. This combined with the built in support for any number of variables creates a very powerful solution that can be used for almost any application.