I have now finished my first mambot which I have called mosviewonly.  This little addition allows you to specify areas of your content which you want viewable only by certain group members.  The groups being the three standard Mambo groups;

• public
• registered
• special

I have been asked LOADS of times, well at least twice, how I did the pop-up login box (now found over at www.andy-stewart.com).  This is something that I first saw over at Jason Murphy's website and thought was way cool and an excellent place to put the login box.  His is hidden somewhere on the site, but I wanted mine to be a little more obvious.

This article has been translated to Polish, available at mambopl.com

When I was starting to add content to the andy-stewart.com website, I decided to change some of the standard Mambo icons and images with my own - to give it a more personal touch.  I had recently purchased a heap of icon images in PNG format, and decided to use these.

Another reason for using the PNG format, was that I was having issues with the transparencies of GIF images especially when I had defined them with a drop shadow.  I would get little white areas around the shadows which looked rubbish when placing them over coloured backgrounds etc.  PNG promised to do away with these issues - and certainly within Opera and FireFox it did.  Unfortunately Microsoft in all it's wisdom had not implemented the PNG transparencies format properly and I was left with a grey/blue background behing all my PNG images.

Hmmmm, it seems there may be an issue with my WebcamXP component and the Firefox browser, as seen by this posting on MozillaZine.  The issue, identified by yardbird, is a complete crash of Firefox and even a hosing of WindowsXP.  The issue, unfortunately or fortunately, does not affect all Firefox users; which makes tracing the problem somewhat harder.

I am working my way through the java code produced by the component to make sure I haven't made some nasty mistake in there, and will post any problems I find.  As soon as I have found any issues I will issue a fix.

If you are a Firefox user, please look at the WebcamXP component and drop me a line via e-mail or within the forum to tell me how you got on.