Now that we have Joomla! 3.0.2
installed on our Web site, there's a couple of other things I'd like to show you.
So, one of the things is language overrides.
Language overrides were present in
Joomla! 2.5, and they were present in Joomla! 3.0
also, but they were so buggy you couldn't use them in 3.0, or 3.0.1.
The bugs have been fixed in 3.0.2, and now I can show you how these work.
As you know, Joomla
has a lot of text behind the scenes that's actually tied to the functioning of
certain items on your Web page.
So for example, the text when you go to your Login screen, this text here for
User Name, and Password, and Forgot your username, and Forgot your password; that's
all text that comes out of Joomla
itself, and these are part of something called language files.
The language files contain that text in English,
and if we were working in Italian, it would have that text translated to Italian,
or any other language that you happened to be working in, and then Joomla
can swap in those values for the different languages for those particular
locations on the Web page.
The Search box is something that you might want to change at some point in time.
The fact that it's this Search... inside of the box is not necessarily ideal for
absolutely everybody. Maybe you would like to get rid of that.
And fortunately, language overrides will allow you to do that.
Even if you're only working with a single language Web site, like an English only
Web site, you can still use language overrides to customize Joomla's text,
very, very quickly and easily, and you don't have to go digging through Joomla's
file structure the way you used to have to do this before language overrides.
So here in the back-end of Joomla,
I'm going to go to Extensions > Language Manager.
And over here on the left side of the screen, click on the Overrides function.
So this is where we're going to install this language override. What Joomla
is going to do for us is it's going to save our specific little bit of text that
we would like to have that's different from Joomla's core files, and it will
save it out as its own special little file.
So as we continue to upgrade Joomla, the core language files may change going
forward, but whatever we type in for this text through the language overrides
feature here, that will never change, and Joomla
will never override it.
So that's great. Once you set the Web site up once with this language, you won't
have to change it again.
So I am going to click on the New button to start a language override, and then
the first thing it asks me for is a Language Constant.
And a Language Constant looks something like what you see over here in
this little blue box.
They're usually all capital letters, and they're usually connected by
underscores; something like COM_CONTENT_READ_ MORE, and the text there, that is Read more:,
you can change that.
But I am not a Joomla
programmer, and I am sure you're not either, so how do you come up with what
those language constants are?
Fortunately, you don't have to worry about that.
If you know what the text is on the Web page, come over here, and start at the
left side of the screen. Type in the text that you're searching for, so
search..., and click the Search button.
This will pull up those language constants for you right here, and you can decide
which one is the one that you want to edit.
Well, in all likelihood, it's this one right here: the SEARCHBOX_TEXT. So I am
going to click that, and the Text right now is set to the Search...;
I could change that. In fact, I could just get rid of the text altogether, and
erase it entirely here in this box, and I can say Save & Close.
So I have gotten rid of the text that was available for the
MOD_SEARCH_SEARCHBOX_TEXT.
Now when I come back here to the front-end of the Web site, let's say I go to the
Home page, now I have a Search box that's completely empty.
And the way I did that is through language overrides.
So now you know how you can change text in other areas of your Web page.
Places you might want to change some of your text that's generated by Joomla
includes your Login screen; perhaps you'd like to change the text here for
Forgot your username, or Forgot your password. Or User Name; some people like to
spell that as one word instead of as two separate words.
And you can use this feature to customize all of those messages inside
of Joomla.