Below you will find an guide to all of the core button features available in the default JCK Editor toolbar.

Many functions in JCK Editor have their equivalent keyboard shortcuts. This is one of the reasons why working with the editor is simple and efficient.

Everyone likes to edit their own way, so we’ve made it easier to adjust the color of the JCK interface - so you can generate matching color schemes like never before!

Out of the box the JCK Editor comes equipped with 2 skins - the default Office2007 and Kama skin.  So if fancy a change, you only need to go to the editor parameters and select a skin fitting your flavour!

You can configure the editor to use P, BR or DIV tags to insert a new line break (which means the text/image following the tag will be moved to the next line when displayed in the browser). This is done by changing how the editor’s interprets the ‘Enter’ and ‘Shift Enter’ keys...

Out-of-the-box the editor’s width is set to 100%, this calls the editor to expand to the full 100% width of its container. If the container is 200px then the editor will expand to the full 100% width of that 200px container however, as different configurations vary you can also define the width of the editor in pixels...
 

The editor allows different users to have their own personal folders which can be used in a variety of ways, for managing and storing online documentsn or for linking and embedding to media, flash, electronic documents and image files. These folders can be set to label either with ‘username’ or ‘user ids’. In 1.6 administrators can now select user groups to be exempt from the default user folder settings, taking advantage of Joomla’s new A.C.L system.

You many have a template that uses a dark background and need to change the colour of your editing area to match. This can be done in the editor’s plug-in parameters…
 

By default the editor follows the same image directory structure as Joomla! while files are stored in the /file directory. You may need to change the image, flash or file directory to better fit your needs - here’s how…
 

 By default the JCK Editor is set to use Html Entities, this done because these entities makes data safe for outputting into an HTML document. An HTML entity is a special character string that is translated by an HTML parser into a single character or symbol. All entities begin with the & (ampersand) and end with a ; (semi-colon).

By default the editor works to help the user by automatically formatting the presentation of the source code.  This format is only active when viewed in the editor source mode and works to aid the user to better identify his or her's code. This does not modify your code but only the presentation of it. With the auto format OFF everything will appears on one line, it won’t try to indent it!

The easiest and best way to achieve this is to download the’ File icon’ plugin from our repositry and install it via the JCK manager. This will also give you the benefit of being able to upgrade the editor in the future.

Out-of-the-box the JCK Editor comes packaged with 3 default template which can be applied to the editing area on the fly. These templates are predefined pieces HTML which can be used. You can edit the templates that are available, and also the styles you can use. Also the templates preview icons is customizable too! You can use this for anything you like, email templates, full pages, snippets.

We've used the most common web friendly fonts but it is possible to configure the fonts displayed in the Font combo list.  To do this you need to go to the editor’s plugin configuration > Advanced Parameters and type the name of your font into the ‘Font Family’ drop down box. Save - Job done!

I will quckly run through what you need to do to configured the editor to use custom font-sizes in the drop-down font combo in the toolbar. It really is quite simple. To do this we will need to add one parameter to the editor's 'config.js' file.

Maybe you want to simplify or fine turn how the editor works for a client or in a specific component? To do this you want to remove the collapse toolbar arrow functionality for the editor toolbar. Good news it’s very easy to do - all you need to do is add add one simple parameter (config.toolbarCanCollapse = false;) to the editor's 'config.js' file.

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type, type design, and modifying type glyphs. The main advantage of elegant CSS typography lies in its ability to be both attractive and improves the user experience. The editor is perfectly placed to bring these two elements together - here's how to create a custom (typography) style-sheet and how best to configure the editor to use it.

There are many ways to apply styles across a document, but often you many only want to use a style on certain elements. Or, you may want to create a style that can apply across several elements in a document, without repeating the style rule.  To do this, you use the class attributes. These attributes are global attributes that can be applied to nearly every HTML tag via the JCK Editor.

HTML elements can be displayed either in block or inline style. The difference between these is one of the most basic things you need to know in order to use the editor effectively for styling. From the point of view of document structure, block-level elements are elements that may contain other elements, both block and inline in types.

System Requirements

Joomla! runs on the PHP pre-processor. PHP comes in many flavours, for a lot of operating systems. Beside PHP you will need a web server. Most of the times Apache is used, but also PHP can run on different web-servers like Microsoft IIS. From version 3.4.6 the JoomlaCK Editor requires PHP 5+, this was done to better support Xamp which is a easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. Due to the PHP5's strict compliance the editor no longer support PHP4.

The installation of additional components/plugins/modules in Joomla 1.5 is quite easy. All you have to do after downloading the component you wish to install is go to your Joomla admin area > Extensions > Install/Uninstall. In the Upload Package File section click Browse and locate the archive of the component/module/plugin you wish to install.

Please note that the aSpell is a server-side application, in order for the JCK Aspell checker plug-in to work it must be installed on your server. The good new is that it this free app is very popular and widely supported by those offering professional open-source hosting.

Please note that the pSpell is a server-side application, in order for the JCK Aspell checker plug-in to work it must be installed on your server. PSPELL can be used starting with PHP version 4.3.3. If using Microsoft Windows, you must allow the web server user to execute the aspell program.

As standard practice the editor look for a CSS file called “template.css” in the template CSS folder.  If your template uses a differently file name for your CSS style-sheet or your style-sheet is located in a different folder you would have received the “Warning: css/template_css.css does not appear to be a valid file...” error message.

IMPORTANT: Please note that your content is likely to be deleted by Joomla! regardless of the editor or plug-ins used unless you have configured your Article Filters. From Joomla! 1.5.8+ a default article filtering was set in place for all user groups except ‘Super Administrators’, in Joomla! 1.6 this rule is imposed on all user groups by default. This includes the following tags: 'applet', 'body', 'bgsound',

This typically happens when the file browsers connector.php file does not have permission to be executable or when the file browser is not permitted access to the images & files folders. It results in the < Resource Type > not being set and files are not loaded in due to a 500 internal server error ...

For the purpose of this article, I assume that you are familiar with the Joomla administration area and understand how to use FTP to access the files on the server that is hosting the site. First, you will have to use an FTP program and login in to the location of your Joomla site. You will have to use an FTP program that allows you to change permissions directly on the server, most do.

If you have received the following error when installing the editor; it is possible that your Joomla FTP library has not been configured correctly.  The simplest solution is to switch it off and install the editor again via Joomla’s extension manager.

To do this, you will need to log into the administration area which ‘Super Administrator’ privileges.

The error message is telling us that the editor does not have permission to talk to the necessary file. In other words the editor is trying to access a file but your servers file permissions are not allowing this to happen.

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded... Are you getting this error while installing a Joomla extensions? If you have received the error above or a similar "seconds exceeded" error your server has reached its maximum execution time. This means that your server is unable upload and install the extensions within the allocated time set by your hosting provider.