What can I do with a wrapper? - While working on my first joomla project for a client, I ran into several things he needed that didn't quite fit into joomla as easily as I would have liked them to. For example, I needed a fanclub sign up form. At first I tried pasting in my source code for a form into a static content page. Then, I went back into the page to edit it and - whoa! it integrated itself into the admin gui. I can't explain how exactly this looked, but try pasting form html into a static page and you'll soon see it won't work.


Now, there are several mods and components out there that allow you to put in a form (facile form) but these seemed to have too many options to learn in order to make it happen. Perhaps it's just me being lazy or dumb (take your pick), but I did'nt have the time to figure out these mods. What I ended up doing that was quick and easy, create your own form.html page outside your joomla, on your server, and just enter the path to your form.html in the wrapper. Make sure that your form.htm includes the css file for your template so the look is consistent with the rest of your site.

The wrapper also came in handy for including a photo gallery, and a paypal shop that my client already had and wanted to use.

So, if you can't seem to find that perfect module or component for your site, create it in html and wrap it up.