Sometimes you are looking hard elsewhere to find an useful, much needed extensions, just to find out, that the tool is already in your toolbox. This is the case with the modal script shipped with Joomla, which is a great tool (even with the known limitations) to add a basic lightbox function to your site without needing anything else, but a few lines of code.
Here are few examples of what you can do with!

Websites can include a small image called a Favicon that appears in your web browser generally on the left of URL field and also in the bookmarks to help visually identify a site. Many are saying that is among the few real good things coming from Redmond, since the Favicon was introduced with IE3, and initially supported only by Microsoft's browsers. But now the support for Favicons became widespread and is one of differentiating factors of a website, essential part of the general look/corporate identity.

Having correctly implemented spatial navigation in your custom forms is more important, than ever these days. Unfortunately Joomla's core JForm does not support adding the required info easily (for example by creating an XML file which will output the correct code.

A powerful tool to style your site is to use layout overrides to style any MVC compliant component's output in your template. May sound very scary, but shouldn't - a versed Joomla webmaster like you  will handle the challenge easily.

There are lots of ways to make your page unique in Joomla, and there are interesting ideas on how to make your template even more powerful.

One of tricks not very often used and widespread is relying in one of the tricks I published regarding to available PHP tricks you can use to enhance your template.

In another post about Function eregi() deprecated I provided some readily fixed Joomla 1.0 files to overcome issues related with upgrading to PHP 5.3 for Joomla 1.0 sites. But since a Joomla site is not built only from the core code, but there are other third party add-ons too, not only these older Joomla sites can be plagued by bad coding practices. The most problematic issues are related with templates. Most of the addons are fixed already, but you might have templates with unsupported functions. Here are couple of tricks wich might help you fix them!

Since the release of Joomla 2.5 there has been a particularly annoying “duplicate template” bug that becomes clearly evident when you install or update a template. This has caused a great deal of confusion and consternation among Joomla users, but nobody offered an easy to use fix until recently. As anyone else in this business I hit the wall with this bug, until I found a cure for it on RocketTheme's blog.

In the Joomla 1.5 world things where relatively simple: you just added "&tp=1" to the live site homepage's URL, and the available module positions where shown, with a red border and the module position's name in the top left - unless the template's author didn't applied some tricks from preventing you doing that. But what about Joomla 1.7? Anyone tried to do the trick even on a default install can see, that the trick apparently does not works here. Why?

Yep, that's something you can experience with any of your new templates, especially the ones with colored/dark background. Why this happening? And more important, how you can fix it?

The answer to the first question is simple: the 'WYSIWYG' editors used in Joomla are just doing what the name implies: are taking the template's CSS file and rendering the newly entered content to be as close to what will be shown on the site as possible. And if your template's background is colored or an image file is used to fill your background, then that will be used there too. The fix is relatively easy in the case of most current editors. Almost all of them have the possibility to use a special CSS file in the editing pages. Here we will show you the recipe that works for the family of editors based on TinyMCE editor, delivered by default with Joomla (as JCE), but the solution is similar or can be easily adapted for all such advanced editors.

By default Joomla 2.5 does not add the robots meta tag in the header and you have no handy tool by default to do it in one place, unless you don't use some add-on which let you do this easily.

But what if you prefer to do it yourself, bare-handed, without seeing even some code? You might be surprised, but in fact in Joomla 2.5 it's very easy to set up meta tag robots for your home page and content articles.

Yup, this might be an interesting feature, but how easy or hard is to implement?

There may be occasions where you would like to change the way a Joomla! Extension (such as a Component or Module, whether from the Joomla! core or produced by a third party) is displayed on your site. Of course, you could recode the Extension from scratch, but that may be a bit ambitious for you! Thankfully, there is another way.

Joomla is a great piece of software, and the developers are deserved allready full support for keeping it evolving. One of the easy methods are to keep those Powered by Joomla texts and messages in place, and visible. But what if - with good reasons - you want to get rid of those? For example to make less obvious for Joomla-hackers to identify your site as a possible next target - to name only one of possible multiple reasons. (Read also this article about how to remove the Generated by Joomla! tag!) Or you may want to keep it, but a bit tweaked, to reflect better your contribution to that site of yours. The same questions are arising: where that footers are coming from?

Why you should do that? Humm, there are arguments why yo should get rid off or keep it, but it's a matter of personal choice, mainly. The methods to removing the meta name generator tag for Joomla varies between versions. I discussed couple of ways to do it  in an earlier tip. Here is a new one, working in Joomla 2.5!

Do you have a huge collection of nice Joomla 1.0 templates, and dunno what to do with them? Let's go green and reuse them!

This seems to be an ever returning question in Joomla world, you might already read the first part of the sequel: How to reuse Joomla 1.0 templates?. So, let's go one step further, and let's see how we can easily reuse those nice Joomla 1.5 templates in the post-Joomla 1.7 world (more specifically under Joomla 2.5). Don't expect a fully covering guide on how to convert Joomla 1.5 template to Joomla 2.5 template, but instead a detailed description on what I usually do - less theory, more practical knowledge.

You might think, that this is an easy job, you just set up sh404SEF, and you're done! Maybe... but sometimes this might be really wrong. Especially if you have a multilingual site, and a properly built Joomla 1.7+ template.

In a previous tip I enumerated couple of methods on how you can make visible the template positions in Joomla 1.7+.

But there seems to be at least two different problems for some users.

A client called me one of these days with this request. He told me, that what was once a simple one click action to print, email or edit an article in frontend in Joomla 1.5 has became an uncomfortable, two click  process, which in some devices proved to be increasingly difficult. After a bit of digging around I found for him an easy to implement template override which make him happy.

You might need to use a plugin's output in a component, or to insert a module in a page outputted by an arbitrary component. I mean ANY plugin which has it's own output in ANY Joomla component you like.

I know, there are couple of ready-made solutions, but all of these are specific to a given component(s) and some components have their own plugins to do that.