I received a review copy of Joomla 1.5 Multimedia from Packt Publishers and was expecting to read a lot that I already knew about Images and the image manager in Joomla!.

But instead it was an eye-opener about the possibilities that Joomla! and some special extensions gives you to create a complete multimedia experience for your visitors.

This book is a great addition to your search engine optimization efforts as we all now that video, mp3, podcast en mobile web interfaces are becoming more important everyday.

Joomla Multimedia

Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia will have some information for you that you can skip through if you are building Joomla! websites for a longer period of time, but the main part of the book will help you to further improve your and your customers websites.

I am not going the repeat the complete list of chapters of this book, you can follow the link above to get a better content listing than I can do… what I will tell you which chapters captured my special interest:

• Chapter 3: Text, Characters and Fonts: This shows you some good information on how to improve accessibility and still play with fonts in your design.
• Chapter 5: Using Audio: How to set up podcasts and the handling of mp3 files which is very good in combination with normal blogging.
• Chapter 6: Using video: Of course information about Video including a few extensions that will aid you in your efforts to use video in Joomla!
• Chapter 7: Collaboration with external resources: You don’t need to produce all the videos yourself, you can also pull from other resources and this chapter shows some very neat information about how to do that the right way.

Chapter 8 about templates is also good, but for me personally not that interesting, Chapter 9 gives you a complete step-by-step overview of the building of a Multi Media Joomla! based website and can be a great help if you start out to implement the other ideas that come from this well written book.

Don’t take my word on it, check out this sample Chapter 4 from the book: Adding and Managing Image Content.

For my, this book will stay on my desk for a longer period of time as I am going to use a lot of information from it :-), thank you Allen Walker and Packt Publishing for this great new book.

Want to read more? Check out Joomla & SEO Blog.