Please I need some guidelines (or link of tutorials) in creating Joomla (3 - 3.5) website with the purchased template design. I wonder how professionals with experience are solving my doubts in practice.
Do you recommend the installation of the purchased blank template with a single installation and configuration of modules and components or installation of template with demo examples (Quickstart)? I know the differences but I was wondering how you are doing.
Till now I've almost always used the Quickstart installation.
I wonder if you clone the main menu (and other navigation and modules) and than you rename a copy for your needs and you change the content or you delete all navigation items except Home and than you are re-creating items according to your needs.
I'm not sure if I can copy the main menu or I copy only his necessary items and than delete overage of template.
It happens to me sometimes if I click on some of category it leads me to the main menu from original item, not to the desired custom copy, even though the path is set (the default items). Therefore, I am not sure which is better... copy main menu and items or to delete all navigation and content of the Quickstart installation and form my own navigation, content and modules.
In short, how to sort out all unnecessary items, and those that I am using should I copy and modify, modify existing, or delete all and make my own needed items.
I believe you will know my concerns.
Thank you and regards,
John
I have created several websites in Joomla with blank template and also with quickstart package.
Advantages with Blank Template
You will get the core theme without any unnecessary content and
basic modules and plugins. You dont have to delete any
contents/articles later.
You will be having authority to place modules at your desired positions. To check the modules position at the frontend simply do this http://example.com/?tp=1.
Disadvantage of Blank Template
There are some module style settings embedded in quickstart package that you wont be able to set yourself without going through full documentation. So sometimes your menu seems distorted.
Disadvantage of Quickstart Package
Deleteing unnecessary articles, removing unnecessary modules is a big headache.
Database size unnecessarily increases.
Steps I follow
I create a quickstart package in localhost and create a blank site with blank template in live site. Whatever settings I need I copy from the local website so that I am saved from removing unnecessary contents from live site. Also sometimes deleting some contents give rise to some other issues. Its better t go with a Blank template.
Related
Is it possible to install new template and adjust website to it, without anyone else seeing changes until i decide to go public?
Yes there are ways you can do this.
Specify Template in URL Parameter
You can install the new template and specify the new template via a parameter in the url like this: https://website.com/index.php?template=newtemplatename
Test Pages
You can create test menu options and assign these menu options to the new template in the Menu Assignment tab in the template settings.
Alternatively Set Up a Test Copy
Unfortunately, the above testing methods may not work very well as a new template will likely have different module positions and names so your modules may not display as you would expect.
For this reason, it is often easiest to make a test copy of your website where you can change the module position names to suit the new template for a complete test.
It can be fairly straightforward making a copy of a Joomla website using the free or paid version of Akeeba Backup and Akeeba Kickstart and placing the new website in a sub directory such as /test or similar without interfering with the live website.
Firstly, I have made a sub directory for development and installed cs cart MVE in it.
I want to copy the current cs cart sub-directory and add it to the main domain folder without the testing dummy data I have added in the development phase.
How can I do that?
Secondly, if I have made new changes in the future on the development folder, how can I apply this change to the main domain folder?
Thanks a lot for the help in advance.
Note: a step-by-step guide will be very helpful!
There are a few ways to accomplish those results. First of all, if you just want the demo data to be removed you can alter the database and do the following:
Alter the table and remove every single product, property, banner, etc. Though if you have this code setup you could just run it in one time. Though I do not recommend this as this is way more work than needed and this wont get rid of the images and such stored by the demo data.
You can also do the following:
Go to the products section, click the checkbox in the top left and after that click the gear icon in the top right and select: "Delete selection". Do this a few times and for everything needed (banners, payment methods, shipping methods, etc.) and you are all set.
Or you can do this (recommended):
You can do a store-import of your current store and then switch the directories around so you have no downtime. This is also the way I do my development. You can get the store-import addon for free in the cs-cart marketplace.
But if you were looking for a way just to copy a store without transferring any data you could think about what you want to copy. Basically every setting is stored in the database (so are this similar?). Furthermore every image path, etc. is stored in the database (so are these similar?). And so on. The best way I see how you can do this is by running a store import (this will give you the option to remove all the demo data before importing the new data, you could install a new version of cs-cart with no data, then it will delete all the current data you allready have.)
Hopefully my answer suffices, feel free to ask if you stumble across some problems.
I'm building a site for a friend and I should state that this is not what I'm doing for living. I just started working with Joomla a few days ago.
Everything is good so far, except I'm stuck at one point.
This is a site for a construction company and I need to create articles for on-going and completed projects. I will create an article for each project and each article will belong to a category, 'Completed' and 'On-Going', respectfully.
I plan to create menu links for 'Completed' and 'On-Going' categories in main menu. I also want to present a thumbnail of the article on the category list. Problem is, standard look of the category list is kinda ugly, and I have no idea how to change it. I'm using a template named PixelDot, but it does not seem to do any good for my problem.
During my research, I stumbled upon concepts 'Layout Overrides' and 'Alternative Layouts'. I have basic html and css knowledge, also some PHP, but I am totally lost on which file(s) to modify. I also need a little help on get the entry text picture as a thumbnail on the category list (this is the list where you see 'articles' aka projects which belongs to the category (completed or on-going), when you clicked on relevant menu button)
Any help will be highly appreciated. My Joomla version is 3.4.1. (which I believe most up-to-date version as today)
I'm sometimes making it more complex while I try to make things detailed and clear, I hope this is not one of those cases.
First, I would suggest using tags rather than categories to manage this. Tags are much better suited for temporary labelling or dividing into groups.
Second, go to the template manager, template view for your template.
Go to the create over ride tab and select the view that you want to override (i.e. tagged items).
This will automatically copy all the files to the correct location in your template.
At that point you can play around with the layouts to your heart's content.
Also ... some pieces of the layout you may want to override may not be in the traditional layout but may be in a jlayout. You can do the same thing with them. THis is all documented in the docs.joomla.org site as well as around the web.
I also would do this with Tags. One reason is, assuming you are using SEF URLS, that the projects article pages will have a unique URL. If you move a project's article from "on-going" to "completed" then you may be changing that SEF url. This will cause your search engine ranking for that page to be lost.
I would tag each article "on-going", "completed", etc and then create a menu item to display only that specific tag. The project's article would stay in its original category, that could be my project type, project location, etc; which also will increase the SEO for that given project's article.
I am a newbie to Joomla 1.7 & Virtuemart. I have used many CMS so far and in Joomla I need to do very common task. I need to have different layout for homepage, for product list and product details and so on. Every single page is generated from index.php which is in *joomla root/templates/my_own_template/* folder.
And one more question. Is there any Virtuemart 2.0 or Joomla 1.7 documentation? Because what I could see is that the versions are really different from old ones for which most documentation are written.
Thank you in advance for answers.
You're probably not going to find much documentation yet since that is usually the last thing that a developer does once the code is out and tested.
As for changing templates, you don't necessarily need to change templates to have different layouts. First, VM has several different theme files (theme is a VM template) that render the various pages. There are already different layouts you control in the admin. You can also change a particular page by adding or removing the various modules from pages. You can associate a module with all pages in the site, a selection of pages, an exclusion of pages, and no pages at all. Components like Advanced Module Manager give you even more control over where and when a module displays. A properly coded template will have collapsible module positions. So a page with no modules in the left column will not have a left column.
Lastly, Joomla 1.7 also allows the use of template styles. When you install a template, it creates a default style. You can duplicate and edit that style, then assign it to various menu items to achieve very different looks from one page to another. http://docs.joomla.org/Help16:Extensions_Template_Manager_Styles_Edit
Brent's answer is good – he's right that the look of a page can be determined by which modules are assigned, which VM layout is used, and by assigning different Joomla Templates/Styles to different menu items.
One issue that arises a lot with complex components like VirtueMart is that it can be awkward to assign different templates (or modules) to different menu items. This can mess up your menu structure, and there are times when VM will decide on a different menu item to display something rather than what you thought it should. So that messes up the modules and templates/styles. This is part of the down-side of having a menu-item-driven assignment system.
AMM is good for assigning modules to different pages independent of menu item - as is MetaMod (which has explicit VM support).
For assigning templates/styles to different pages in VM I would suggest Chameleon. Chameleon has form controls for selecting lots of different factors about VM (e.g. all the sub-page types, category of the item, cart contents and more) and you can use any of those factors to trigger a certain template/style. It can also trigger other actions like adding CSS/JS to the page, removing arbitrary menu items, switching the home page, etc.
So ultimately, using Brent's techniques and with Chameleon, MetaMod and/or AMM, you have a huge amount of control about how individual pages in VM look.
I need the browse page to show quantity box, custom attributes, and Add to Cart button all together.
It doesn't show it at all. Only when you go to the product page, you can see them.
Any solutions?
Thanks, Ahmed.
Ahmed, you'll have to modify the template directly to do something like that. VM uses a large number of template files written in PHP. If you're using the default template, you can find them here:
components/com_virtuemart/themes/default/templates/
From there, it takes a little looking around to figure out exactly which template you need to edit. If you need to edit a browse template, my recommendation is go to your VirtueMart Administration in Joomla backend and look at Admin | Configuration | Site | Layout to get an idea of which files you're using. It will probably say "Default" in the dropdown, with a Configuration link directly below. Click that link and look at the very first item, Product List Style. From the description of your layout desires, you might be using Flat Product List.
The main file for editing that layout is:
components/com_virtuemart/themes/default/templates/browse/includes/browse_listtable.tpl.php
If you're a programmer, you should be able to look thru the code and correctly guess which code elements are being used to display VM product details. If you're not a programmer, you can still fake it by commenting out sections to see what "goes away" on the actual product page. Use what you learn to strip out useful code and move it around.
Another useful file to pull VM product code from is:
components/com_virtuemart/themes/default/templates/product_details/flypage.tpl.php
This is the actual product view (unless it's been changed in VM config), and contains pretty much all the common code elements that extract product details. You should be able to lift some of that code and place it where it needs to go in other forms.
Good luck with all of this. I find VM coding painful, and community support in the VM forums can be... sparse...