Joomla Newsflash Modules

The standard Newsflash module selects a random article from a specific category. You can choose how many articles to show and whether to show a read more link or not, as well as whether you should have linked titles or not.

For the site that I was building, I needed something to show the latest article from a category and not show any images in the intro.

Piece of cake, I thought, surely there are lots of extensions available to do this? Well, there are, but most of them have some type of problem associated with it. One is absolutely superb and that is obviously the one I will recommend.

First, the duds:

1. YouJoomla Newsflash Pack

This is the worst of them all seeing that you have to pay $20 for the module (comes packaged with both Joomla 1.0.x and Joomla 1.5 versions) and there is a no money back policy.

The puchase process for this module is hair raising to say the least, with various signups at various points before you actually get your product.

The functionality of the module is disappointing. You can choose the ordering (good), the number of items to display (good), the number of characters (good) and choose whether or not to display the intro image (good). But that is about as far as it goes.

The choice whether to have the read-more button displayed or not has disappeared, and the worst of all, this module uses the item ID of the page that it is published on, not the item ID of the article that it refers to. In practice this means that if you click on the title of the article in the newsflash box, it will display the article with all the module settings of the page that it came from, and not with the modules of the page that your article actually lives on.

I tried to submit a support ticket but the support ticket system kept on telling me that my email is invalid. I sent an email directly to the developers and to date (about 4 days later) have not heard anything. In the email I asked for my money back in a last-ditch attempt to salvage the situation but needless to say, it is probably a lot cause.

2. Latest news with Intro Text

For some reason it makes the whole intro text clickable, with no read-more link/button, which is what I required. So no go. Luckily this one was free.

Luckily I did not spend too much time further but came across...

The clear winner

The clear winner here is the Ultimate Content Display from Joomlaworks. Hey, it works! And it is free!

Why didn't I try this one first? Because I was searching in the extensions site among the 'newsflash' and the 'latest news' modules and not among the 'article listings' which is where it is filed in.

This module did exactly what I wanted it to do and it has a plethora of settings and options. Take a look at the parameters:

Section 1:

Section 2:

Section 3:

As can be seen, the actual purpose of this module is to display certain of your articles in a flash-rotator box and you have various options for setting the fading/sliding motion parameters, with a choice of technology as well. The module is really so versatile that it can be used in a couple of ways. It worked for my purpose as well, which was just to show the latest article from a specific section/category and click through to that article with a read more - such a simple thing to want happen but apparently not that simple to implement!