If you are a Joomla user or developer, then you would have come accross the requirement of linking to articles and/or menu items from the WYSIWYG editor.

The current way is tedious. You’d either have to try and guess the URL and have some sort of workaround so that you can remember how to format links. This requirement has always stumped us in the past, but after some R&D prior to coding up my own solution, I found out about the Linkr extension for Joomla 1.5!

Beautiful! an extension which brings the ability to link to internal pages in a click for click fashion _without_ having to read those complicated query strings in Joomla 1.5. Yes there is JCE, but the editor is a little too bloated for my liking. I was happy with the standard WYSIWYG editor I just needed to link to other pages in Joomla.

If you like JCE, then good for you, but if you’re like me, and are actually looking for a quick fix for this requirement without throwing in another Editor, then the linkr extension is the extension for you!

Check it out! http://codes.statsful.com/linkr

On Ubuntu linux however, it’s a different story. While the default browser for Ubuntu is Firefox and Canonical has a version of Opera in their repository, there is no linux native version for Internet Explorer. This would have been a problem had it not been for ies4linux.

With IEs4Linux you can run even older verisons of IE on any linux distro that can run Wine and just in the recent months there’s been .

You can check them out at on the following links:

IEs4Linux current version: installs Internet Explorer 5.5 and IE 6 on Linux
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page

IEsLinux beta version: installs Internet Explorer 5.5 and IE 6 on Linux, but also supports Internet Explorer 7
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Beta

To compress javascript I used the Code and Coffee online JavaScript compression/encoding tool, and for cleaning up the CSS, I used CleanCSS which was sent to me by a former colleague.

Code and Coffee: Compress Your JavaScript
http://www.codeandcoffee.com/2006/10/02/compress-your-javascript/
A good javascript compression tool – what I like about it is that it gives you the option of not garbling everything into one line – although you can if you wish to.
unoptimised JS size: 70kb
optimised and gzipped JS size: 21kb

CleanCSS: CSS Formatter & Optimiser
http://www.cleancss.com/index.php
A nice CSS optimiser. The unoptimised CSS for devscripts was a little bloated and used verbose shorthand for anything such as padding: 10px 10px 10px 10px; instead of padding: 10px. CleanCSS picked all this up and converted them to non-verbose/reduced shorthand. Not only that, but it also ripped out the documentation in the CSS file making for a much smaller file size.

unoptimised CSS size: 63kb
optimized and gzipped CSS size: 9kb

After this was done, I created an include script which will read all separate stylesheets into one file, then gzipped the output – but this is outside the scope of this commentary.