Simplify Your Web

Latest News Enhanced Extended is an all-in-one news/articles module presenting the latest, featured, popular, related or random article snippets in a consistent fashion. It is a spin-off the 'Latest News Extended' module with added functionality and extreme flexibility. It is highly configurable and expandable. Get out-of-the-box styles and animations. Take advantage of the latest Joomla! 2.5 added features.

Translations

Example 1

Basic options

• Category(ies) / K2 Categories: select the categories the article are from
• Sub-categories: automatic selection of sub-categories
• Exclude IDs: exclude articles from the list of selected ones
• Include IDs: include only these articles
• Meta keywords: the common article keys (another way to categorise the news)
• Related articles: use meta keys to 'connect' articles to an article view
• Featured: whether to show featured articles or not (or only those or first in the list)
• Category order: the order category
• Order: the order in which the articles are presented (even random or popular order)
• Max count: the number of articles to show (nothing shows all)
• Start At: the article number to start from

Overall

• Height: the height of the module (module title excluded)
• Width: the width of the module (module title excluded)
• Item width: the width of an article
• Item Width Unit: the article item width unit in percentages or pixels

Head (the image/calendar area)

• Head type: whether to show a calendar with the article's date or the 1st image of the article or the intro/full images introduced in Joomla! 2.5 or the author's picture
• Image/Calendar width: the width of the head
• Image/Calendar height: the height of the head
• Default image/calendar: the image to show if there is no image in an article or if one want to use a specific calendar background

Linking

• Link to: whether to link or not to an article or links a, b, or c introduced in Joomla! 2.5
• Link label: an optional label to use instead of the link's title
• Show category: show the category's name (will show for individual articles if the articles are from different categories, otherwise will show one link for all)
• Category link label: a specific label to use instead of the article's name (a good example: 'More news like this')

Image Options

• Keep image space even when no image is available
• Background-color: visible when images are transparent
• Border width: will draw a border around the images
• Crop pictures: will fit the image into the size selected, cropping it if needed. Otherwise it will show the full image with the selected size
• Filter: a filter to apply to the thumbnail
• Quality .jpg and .png: use compression to balance image quality and file size
• Thumbnails Cache Path: the folder in which the temporary images are located ('tmp' by default) [default is 'tmp']
• Reset pictures: whether to re-create the image thumbnails every time the page is loaded or not (set to no for better performance in production, but set to yes for testing purposes)

Calendar Options

• Top, 2nd, 3rd and bottom positions: the order in which the elements composing a date are shown. 'empty' will show nothing but will leave a blank space
• Weekday format: the format to use for the weekday (short or long)
• Month format: the format to use for the month (short or long)
• Day format: the format to use for the day (with leading 0 or not)

Style

• Style: the overall look of the calendar (5 styles by default)
  • original & originalCCS3: simple calendar look with text centered and a top area with possible background gradients and shadows
     
  • simple sided: simple text elements aligned left or right
    
  • complex sided: elements aligned left or right with the top position anchored
    
  • rainbow: calendar with a selection of colorful backgrounds
    
• Background image: whether to use a background image or not. Use the one selected in the 'basic options' 'head' section or any of the ones provided by a calendar style. Note: although you can mix and match calendars and background images, elements may not fit into the calendar image selected
• Shadow width: the width of the shadow (for CSS3-ready styles only)
• Radius: the border radius (for CSS3-ready styles only)
• Font: the font for the calendar
• Font size reference: the size the whole calendar text is based on
• Colors: text, background and background 2 (for CSS3 gradients) - hexadecimal values

Body Options

• Font size reference: the font size the rest of the item is based on
• Alignment: the way the text will show relatively to the head (calendar or image) - not all options are available in all styles

• Letter count max: the number of letters max
• Force one line: makes sure the title stays on one line

• Text introduction: the text to show (the article introduction or the meta description)
• Letter count max: the maximum number of letters to show (0 will show nothing, empty will show all)
• Strip tags: whether to strip the HTML tags or not (only available if the whole text is shown)
• Keep tags: when tags are allowed, keep only the ones specified (empty will keep all tags)

• Show hits: show the number of visits for that article
• Authors: select from which authors the articles are written from
• Show author: show the author's name, alias or username
• Show date: show the article's date or the number of days since it has been written
• Date: which date should be applied (created - published - modified)
• Hits/Author/Date pos. : where to put this information compared to the text

Style Options

• Style: the overall look of each individual article (4 styles by default)
  • original: an image/calendar area alongside a text area
    
  • original (bleed under): same as above but the text can show under the image/calendar
    
  • full width: the image/calendar shows in full width
    
  • overlap: the text shows over the image (not usable with calendar)
    

Animation Options

• Configuration: the vertical or horizontal configuration of the animation
• Animation: the kind of animation to use (over a dozen animations are available by default)
  • Simple fade: a fading transition effect
  • Simple slide: a slide transition effect without controls,
  • ...
• Direction: the direction of the transformation (if the animation allows for it)
• Auto Start: start animation or wait for user interaction
• Speed: the time spent by the transformation (ms)
• Interval: the time between 2 transformations (ms)
• Visible items: the number of items to show at a time
• Move: the number of visible items to move at a time
• Pagination (through separate free animations downloads)

Advanced Options

• Load jQuery: load the library if none is present already
• jQuery Version: the version to load
• Show errors: disagnostics if there are issues with images...

If you have found this module useful to you, please post a review at the Joomla! Extensions Directory.