A Plug-in for Joomla which Plays Videos and Audios without External Links

Abstract

Joomla has become a most commonly used Content Management System which facilitates users to build their websites on their own. Plug-ins, Modules and Components extend the functionality of Joomla. Each of these extensions is rapidly improving to support various needs of the people who use Joomla. This research focuses on creating a plug-in which enables the user to play videos and audios without searching other websites for video and audio files. Today, almost all video players that have been invented for Joomla, play videos or audios once the player gets the external link to another website where the media is currently available. The objective of this research is to avoid that and load the video or audio from the local machine in order to hasten the process and make it more reliable. The plug-in provides separate folders once the plug-in is installed, to hold videos and audios, which can be saved initially by the administrator or uploaded later by the uploading method that is provided by the plug-in. Once a user decides to watch a specific media file what he/she has to do is select the desired file from the playlist that will be provided by the plug-in and the selected file will be then retrieved from the correct file location and the player will then play the file. The importance in this file retrieving is that the player reads the file not from an external link but from a folder that is installed together with the plug-in. When the site is first created, the administrator is capable of saving videos and audios that are related to the site’s definition in separate folders. It is more efficient to avoid external links to retrieve media files that are needed for a website in order to make it faster and easier for the users. Then connection problems and many other issues in playing media files on a site would not thwart the frequent use of a website and it would increase the popularity of the website gradually.