My Favourite Modules – Mity Banner

For quite some time one of the things that annoyed me about Joomla is there was no way to use the “Article Full Image” in a module position so that you can easily use it as a banner on a page. Seems like a basic requirement.

While there are modules around that allow you to set a per-page banner they are typically not very user-friendly – one for example needed you to use a specific naming convention that used either the article, category or menu item ID. That’s fine for a developer or advanced user, but for the average user – not so fine.

I built a few sites that needed this feature by pretty much building the site body into the article template so that I could use the “article full image” where I wanted. This worked, but opened up other issues – namely when you start using other components you need to override their templates to accommodate the banner.

So I stopped and thought about this for a while I decided that it was time to build my own module that allowed me to take the “article full image” and display it in a module position – and Mity Banner was born.

The module is simple – it looks for either the Full or Intro image (depending on your setting) and shows it in the module position (typically in the page banner). You can then either set a default image to show if no specific image is set, or select a folder of image from which a random image will be shown.  For Category Blog items you can also use the Category Image.

It hasn’t been expanded to other components but it could be – that’s the beauty of OpenSource Software!

If you’re interested in getting a copy of Mity Banner contact me.