Look at this home page, it's definitely improved over the last few videos,
but it's certainly lacking something special, and one of the things it's really lacking
besides color is, it's lacking a photograph.
So what I'd like to do is add a random image module to the home page
of this Web site, and I'm going to put that over in the left column and I will have
a image that will rotate.
It's not a fade-in, fade-out slideshow that comes with Joomla!
it's an image that it chooses from a directory of images, and every time the page
is refreshed a different photo is chosen or at least one is picked at random and
usually it's a different photograph.
So, let's go ahead and try putting a random image on the left side of the screen
and we'll see if that improves the look of this particular Web page.
So here in the back end of Joomla!
I am going to go to my Extensions>Module Manager and I am going to create a new module,
this time this will be the Random Image module down here under R,
and I am going to give this a title of Random Image, but I am going to hide that title
because nobody needs to see that, and the position for this is going to be
under Protostar, and I am going to look for the left side of the page, position-8.
And then under Basic Options I can indicate the type of image, the folder where
it's located and a width and a height, but unfortunately I don't have the
ability to upload images right here.
So, I am going to just say Save & Close for the moment and I am going to jump
into my Media Manager, so I can create that folder and upload a bunch of images to it.
So under Content>Media Manager, I am going to make a new folder and I am going
to call that folder random, so this will be inside of images/random,
create the folder, and I am going to go into the random folder and I am going to upload
some pictures, I am going to hit the Upload button here and then say Browse,
and if I go to my Chapter 8 folder, to folder number five, I am going to go ahead and
select the five images that I have here and say Open.
I have already gone through in Photoshop and I have trimmed up all those pictures,
so that they are exactly the same height and width and I am going to
say Start Upload, so boom, there we go, I've got all five of my pictures
uploaded here to the Media Manager.
Now I am going to go back to my Module Manager, Extensions>Module Manager and
I am going to go back to my Random Image module, and to the Basic Options tab,
and here I am going to type in my Image Folder, which is images/random.
I could set up a link if I want, it would be no matter what image was displayed
it would go to the same page on the Web site, I probably don't really want to do that,
so I am just going to leave that blank.
And as for a width and a height the image module sort of defaults to this
32 pixel wide sort of pix or type of thing if you don't specify a width and a height,
so I am going to specify a width of 200 pixels and I am going to leave
the height alone, it'll scale that appropriately.
Finally, under my Menu Assignment I want this to go on only the pages selected,
I am going to select No pages and then just check off the home page, that's the
only page I want this random image to show up on, and I am going to go ahead
and say Save & Close.
Now when I come back and I refresh the front end of the Web site here's my random
image showing up over here on the side, and as I hit my Refresh button, I get a
different picture loading each time and I have something of a three-column
layout here which is kind of nice.
If I wanted this to show up on other pages of the Web site and I could certainly do that,
I could allow that random image module to display on other pages
of the Web site as well.
But one other way that I could energize this page would be to actually have this
picture and maybe not in this column, but what if it appeared here right
underneath the content, and I'll show you how to do that in the next video.