I have a joomla site and would like to integrate some old unfinished webcomics to it, so I can pick them up where I stopped in a CMS that won't leave me in an absolute frothing rage (thanks, wordpress).
I've got some experience with Joomla and I believe it would be a pretty good platform for managing multiple comics... except for the small issue of horrid navigation between pages/articles. Joomla's integrated article navigation is a humble but passable start, but if you intend to use categories to organize chapters then getting from the end of one to the beginning of the next is... yeah. This is a pity, as Joomla's category and article management options are beautiful for archiving and presentation, and adding gantry 5 to it means a great deal of control over the reading experience. Basically, joomla has pretty much everything I want, except for the navigation.
Ideally, what I'd like to be able to accomplish for comic navigation in joomla is:
Clickable full-article-image leading to next article/page
Prev/next article buttons (already available)
Prev/next category buttons (do we have those?)
The latter two in a module I can choose where to publish (optional)
And this is it, basically. I understand that implementing the first could be very hard without some major template customization, in which case I'd be willing to insert the image as a link in the article body... but only if there was one single code I could use, like the one that generates the next category article button. Because I'm not willing to create hundreds of menu items to generate links page-by-page.
So is any of this doable?
This is a quick answer but too much for a comment. I'm assuming since you are on SO that you don't mind coding (as opposed to just configuring).
I think you need to do two things. First you need to create a pagination.php for your template. This will let you really super control what the pagination looks like. You can have images, special css and js, whatever you want. You can also add the "last" and "first" options.
I think you need to make a new plugin to replace the core pagenavigation plugin and that also generates the previous/next category links. (Or I guess you could make one just to do categorynavigation depending on what you want.) HOWEVER, it seems to me that there is data on the sibling links that is already being generated in the content category model so you might be able to use that. (Check the code; I think there was never a UI for it, but it is there. Even if it isn't there, siblings are very easy to obtain in nested sets)
The other thing you can really think about if you go that route is changing the whole thing somewhat to use a module that gets the current ID and category ID from JInput. You might also be able to use JPagination. The important thing, however is that you make sure to do the caching the way the pagination that is there does it. In other words you really want to cache the whole list in the order you want so you are not running so many queries and slowing your site down. You may want to look at the categories and category modules to get some ideas about the queries to do.
Hope that gets you started, but it is definitely something you can do without too much trouble.
Related
Like the topic say I want to overwrite/change the "Menu Manager: Edit Menu item" layout. To illustrate my question:
In the picture whiche is shown I want to change the labels: Layout, Option, Integration.... and add some other options to it. How can I do it? Or is this even possible?
In order to change the text, simply use language overrides, google is your friend.
In order to add functionality, let's first of all explain what we're talking about to ensure we're on the same page.
Joomla components have views which can have one or more layouts, i.e.
/components/com_content/views/category/tmpl/ contains two layouts, blog and default.
A layout can additionally contain an .xml manifest (in our case, blog.xml and default.xml) allowing us to create a menu item for the specific view/layout combination. The .xml file contains the parameters that the user will set, you can add your own as well.
When you want to change Joomla, usually there is a way to do so without touching the core, which would be pretty bad, as any Joomla! updates would break your work.
For the view layouts a special feature called template override was developed, which allows you to create an alternative to the view layout in a safe place (under your template folder, in this case your admin template), and this is the most elegant and effective way to achieve your result.
Beware though, you are just creating a layout, most likely you will want to add functionality, if it's complex you might be better off creating a dedicated component to keep the code clean. Or you can just put all the logic in your view, query the database from there. But in this latter case, get paid, and run away. Never answer the phone to the customer again.
A final alternative is to write a system plugin that will manipulate the page markup after it was generated in the event onAfterRender(). This is a simple and good approach if you only want to add a button or make minor changes, but if you do anything more than that, see the above advise about running away.
I've created an alternative layout for one of my articles which can be applied successfully, but as has been highlighted in various forums: if you view the article using the Single Article menu type the alternative layout doesn't get applied because of an XML override.
I have a Joomla site that is setup for Sales and Support where the article info such as date, hits etc is useful but on the marketing side none of that is needed, hence an alternative layout would work well.
I want to know how to enable my alternative layout using the Single Article menu type - I've already got the layout how I want it (testing it by having it overwrite default.php) but want to set it up as marketing.php instead and only have it applied to what is needed.
You're probably not going to like this answer because you have already written you're alternate view. If you were rewriting it to begin with, why would you not write in a way that the side bar parameters (date, hits, ect) are within a container that is only loaded conditionally. This way you would only have one view to worry about and a lot less headaches.
I have to convert a static site for a client and it has to retain the exisiting layout.
Fortunately, most of the pages don't have to be editable, so for those I was going to use more or less the existing html.
The challenge I am having is that for many of the pages that do need to be editable, the content is laid out in columns (2, 3 and sometimes mixed)
This ( http://globalstrategies.org/index.php/give/hope-partners ) is an example of a page like that, and you can see others on the site where the layout is relatively complex.
I had thought of creating a jce stylesheet that would at least layout the page in the editor in a reasonable way (a bit like a responsive site, by having the columns stacked one after the other) , but I am concerned that my client may accidentally delete the surrounding classes/divs that create the more detailed structure.
I'm pretty familiar with Joomla and have built quite a few sites, but I've not used an cck tools and was hoping not to have to do that in this case, though maybe now is the time to learn.
Any advice / recommendations would be welcome !
Richard
Maybe ContentBuilder could do in your case, it's fairly easy and creates super-simple code, I've accomplished similar tasks with it. You provide the user with 3 fields (one per column) and create a layout for its display.
Another alternative is possibly even easier: you could override the use of the page functions in a template override of com_content/article, instruct the user to insert at most 2 page breaks, and use the page breaks to build the layout as you require.
If your sites is upgraded to the Joomla 3 you can use the build-in Bootsrap to do the layout.
You can find some more information how you can achieve this in the following page:
http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/scaffolding.html#gridSystem
I've recently made my first couple of simple modules for magento. Basically just trying out making a module that printed 'hi'. Then one that included the site design, and finally one that inserted it's own block into the content area to print some stuff.
Now, what I really want with this module is to be able to list products (using the same layout as normal product listing) but based on ID's. Like from cookies or as an example, static array of product ID's.
How would I go about to reuse the product listing code as much as possible and retaining the theming for it? Also if there is some small detail I wanted to change in the layout - how could i make a small template adjustment on the fly/programmatically?
Is this even the right way to go about it, to create a new module and somehow include existing functionality in it? Or should I just try to recreate the product listing and mimic the design?
Lots of questions I know, but it's hard to find relevant information beyond the very simplest modules. TIA.
I am working on Joomla 1.5 right now and was wondering if there is a way to figure out, from the UI, on which module this is part of ? Eg, there is a picture viewer on the home page and I want to know which module is triggering it.
I do it the hard way no, where I goto all modules and check if each had anything to do with it. But was wondering if there is an easier, faster way.
Thank you :)
In Joomla 1.5 you can simply add ?tp=1 to the url to force the system to show you the template positions. You should just about be able to make out the name of the position in question. From there go to the module manager and filter the list by position.
It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out - the module will have rotator, slideshow or similar in its name/type.
It is probably set to show on the home menu item only too.
In my experience, this is an issue with most CMS - Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla included. And it can be very frustrating. My approach is normally:
Search the module listing for something likely. So, in your example, I'd search for 'picture', 'viewer' 'gallery', etc. and, hopefully, a likely-looking modue would turn up in the listing. Usually, viewing its settings screen makes it obvious whether that module is the relevant one or not.
If that fails, I usually look at the source (easiest with firebug), and identify something that is likely to be fairly unique - e.g. a class name or a specific attribute in the markup. Once I have that, I resort to find/grep on the command line to identify the origin.
If you find yourself with a lot of extensions, and this becomes a regular problem, you could think about modifying templates to include a comment that identifies their module.