Automatically create a Joomla category for each new user

A request was made for a plugin for Joomla...

"Everytime a new user is registered / created, a category gets created with username as the title of that category."

Well, I didnt have time to create a plugin, but heres the hack, it should be easy enough to follow - I dont think its the type of feature that will be needed often, so a hack should suffice.

Simple Joomla Shadowbox / Lightbox Module 2.0

This module will display multiple thumbnail images in any module position, when an image is clicked, it will open the full sized image in a shadowbox style lightbox.
Checkout the demo!

You may set:

Folder for images
All shadowbox options including options to use it as a slideshow
Optional Title
Image alignment: Left, Center or Right
Vertical or Horizontal layout of images
A placeholder message when the image is not set.

Nice new features/options include:

Automatic detection and use of thumbnail images
Use a scaled version of the full image if a thumb does not exist
Automatically use the image file name as the title for the shadowbox i.e. My_Car.jpg becomes "My Car"
Custom resizing of thumbnails

To use:

Install module
Select your image folder, there are 2 options either choose a folder from the /images/ folder, or choose a folder in the /images/stories/ folder.
Activate!

Tips:

To use thumbnail images instead of scaling down the full image, simply place an image in the same directory with the same file name, but add the _thumb suffix. I.e. My_Car_thumb.jpg will be used as the thumbnail for My_Car.jpg

Do not use spaces in file names for better compatability across systems, use underscores or hyphens instead.

Click here to download JT Shadowbox 2.0 Beta

Automatic Joomla Categories!

** New V1.2 - Easily add existing sections& Customise category names **
At the push of a button you can create a new category inside your specified sections, named “Month Year” e.g. March 2010 or whatever you like. A great time saver if you have a blog or news style website with lots of sections that all have categories based on the month for example.

Details:

If you have an article based site with alot of sections and categories, it can take a long time to make new categories inside each section manually, instead use "Auto Cats". It can also be used to quickly create new sections, and you have full control over the name format of the categories, (default is Month-Year, but you can customise this)

How to convert Worpress to Joomla

Note: This guide is a work in progress, please let me know if you find any problems with it : )

NOTE: If you are here because you want to convert Wordpress to Joomla, you should know that there are solutions available that can convert a Wordpress database to a Joomla database and vice versa, the purpose of this guide is to provide you with an universal means of converting one CMS to another, maybe you want to convert moveable type to wordpress etc. Basically by pulling the required data from one CMS and converting it into a useable format for use with your new CMS's database.

To complete this guide you will need:

• Existing Wordpress or other CMS site
• Clean setup of Joomla + YVComment (If comments are required, this is a free comments component - read the documentation and setup correctly)   Note: even though YVComment was used here, at the time the were not many other solutions available, I would reccomend using JComments now.

This guide will hopefully give you all of the information you require to convert your Wordpress blog to Joomla, it is intended for people that have a decent amount of confidence with a bit of DIY and want to learn a method of converting or migrating content management systems, Wordpress and Joomla are just examples of common systems the same principles of this guide can apply to all other systems, if you do not feel confident we actually provide this as a professional service contact us for more information.

Essentially all I will be doing here is providing you with a step by step guide on how to convert all of your Wordpress blog posts and comments into Joomla articles and comments :) You may wish to do this for a number of reasons, probably because you require a more powerful content managment system. Please link to this guide from your website or blog, but please dont rip it off, this guide is copyright JayTucker.com 2009.
Please note, even though this tutorial has been written for Wordpress to Joomla, the same method could be applied for Joomla to Wordpress, and the same goes for Moveable type, Drupal, or any other CMS conversion/migration.

OK, Where to start?
Well as you should know, when you make a post to your Wordpress blog, the content that you posted along with a few other peices of information are sent to your Wordpress MySQL database.
So lets think about this for a second... The information relating to your blog post is living in a database, obviously you will want the content/post data and the comments that go along with each post, but what else? Well you will also want to have the correct creation dates, correct categories, and other related information!

For the purpose of this guide I have setup 2 subdomains for jaytucker.com, these will be www.wordpress.jaytucker.com and www.joomla.jaytucker.com - I think you can guess which one will be used for which content managment system :)

OK so I am assuming that you have a setup similar to me, e.g. one setup of Wordpress and one setup of Joomla - NOTE: The Joomla setup should idealy be a clean install with no sample data, I will also be assuming that you have access to PHPMyAdmin, PHPMyAdmin is a web based MySQL database administration tool, You dont need to know how to use it, as I will be showing you step by step, and click by click what to do, but you will need PHPMyAdmin, If you dont have it, I would reccomend installing WAMP on your local machine, and making a copy of your Wordpress installation and Database on your local machine, there you can use the PHPMyAdmin that comes with WAMP to complete the task.
Another thing I will be assuming is that all of your blog posts are either 1) uncategorized, or 2) Only assigned to one category. If you have blog posts assigned to multiple categories  you will need to first login to Wordpress and move them into only one single category as Joomla doesnt have multiple category support. It is OK though to have articles that are organized into categories and also uncategorized as Joomla has the feature of articles being "uncategorized" too :)