I just started with Joomla 3.x and I'm writing a component for Joomla v3 which is supposed to create new usergroups for creating 'groups'- the design requirements being:
An organisation may set up a group to offer access to some set of services -including communication but also also other types of services - to their members
(the other services is the reason why I believe the community and forum joomla extensions are not suitable- they mostly focus at fora and social media services, not the services I will implement.)
Other persons/members of the organisation may register to this group, which allow him/her to access these services
ps: it is also possible for person to set up a personal account and get access to the set of services. This person may also join one or more groups at a later stage
How to do code the creating of new usergroups? I noticed a possible suggested solution at How to create custom User Group Programmatically in Joomla 3.x, but I struggle to understand how to use the suggested JTableUsergroup class because of the limited documentation at http://docs.joomla.org/API17:JTableUsergroup(?) Does creating an instance of JTableUsergroup results in the creation of a new customer user group?
Another question: how to add users to a customer usergroup? The only hint I found was at http://api.joomla.org/cms-3/classes/JUserHelper.html - using the method addUserToGroup of class JUserHelper.
Many of the Joomla development concepts are well document but I could not find one for managing custom user groups...
Appreciate your help;-)
First, overall, the best consistent documentation of Joomla APIs is in the docblocks for the classes. Then to be honest what I do a lot of times is to search for where in the core the API is used. There are some great pieces of narrative documentation in the wiki, but on the whole I always start with the docblocks which are very complete. However in this case it's pretty simple.
You need to do something along the lines of
$newrow = JTable::getInstance('Usergroup');
//code to add your data
$newtable->save(); // Shortcut for check, bind, store
However, if I were you I would look carefully at UsersModelGroup because there are a lot of other things that should normally happen in this process such as running the user plugins. So I might include and extend that model (which manages the table class) rather than going to the table class directly. In fact your whole component might even be able to extend almost all of the users component or it might also be possible that you could do what you want with plugins rather than reinventing the whole thing.
In terms of assigning users to groups that is trickier because of some legacy things in the code. I think the setter followed by a $user->save() ($user being a JUser instance) is probably the way to go when adding to groups. What I probably would do is to write a custom JFormField that would manage opt-in groups because the core usergroup field includes everything. You could extend that and exclude the groups that you want to have only managed by admin.
I've an existing MVC3 project that implements a certain functionality, this project has it's own views, and a separate Database.
now I'm required to use the same functionality inside one of my orchard project,so I thought that I can host this solution in somewhere and view it inside an iframe or something.
Am I thinking right?,
is this the correct step to take in order to achieve this requirement inside Orchard?
to make it more clear, all I need to do is to view this solution and interact with it's controls and views from a hosting page inside orchard, and the subsequent requests should be handled by my solution in order to hit it's own data store and get back with the requested data in order to be displayed to the user.
any help would be appreciated.
Update:
thanks for Bertrand Le Roy for his answer, I can now view my solution inside my
orchard website.
I came in to one more HUGE problem, which is that my application can no longer connect to my external database.
I've a DB that is hosted in some where else, and I'm using EntityFramework to deal with it.
the problem is that if I put the connection string inside my module web.config, or main orchard web.config, I run into several types of errors like:
"System.Reflection.TargetException: Object does not match target type."
or
"System.Data.MetadataException: Unable to load the specified metadata resource."
My question is: How could I pass my connectionstring correctly to my solution, assuming that I'm using Entity framework as my ORM.
Many thanks.
You will need to put it into a module.
You will have to move route definitions to a Routes.cs file (look at any existing such file for examples).
You will also need, in order to access your data store, to opt out of the ambient Orchard transaction around the data access code (using (var scope = new TransactionScope(TransactionScopeOption.Suppress))).
If you are using dependency injection, you may have some work to move that to the Autofac-based way of doing things in Orchard.
If you want your work to appear seamlessly in the Orchard admin, you may want to decorate your admin controllers with the Admin attribute. If you want your front-end to use the current theme, you'll have to add Themed attributes and maybe refactor your views so that they only emit HTML for the content zone instead of for the whole page.
Add a manifest (module.txt) to your module folder and you should be good to go.
Joomla comes out standard with registered user, and public user
If I add a third (registered) User that allows the third user to a) create a single separate page in Joomla that the user can input pictures (like you do on face book). b) Access all pages as the standard registered user does.
How do I go about that in Joomla 1.7, add a third (registered) User and give it level 2 accesses?
Then how I create a single page for each user. Somehow I need a reference to each user’s page and show that in a list and control the list search parameters. And i need the page viewable when selected and in the page info needs to be received by the third user. I’m not creating face book but I need that sort of techno somehow.
Can someone point me to what I need to look at, editorials, videos, etc. I know I need to lean PHP better.
Could I make a foulder for each registered user to hold photo's and name the folder acourding to the user's name or email address.
I would recommend to go with a component that offers the functionality that you need. You will find it easier to control the user rights there as they are standard settings available. This is more convenient than building everything from scratch.
Some well known components are:
Community Builder (main component free)
JomSocial (commercial component)
There are more components and plugins available, you may also want to search the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) for something suitable (http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/social-web)
I want to create my own form that are submitted and values of that form will be stored in joomla database. How can i used the Joomla connection code to interacte with the joomla database.
If you just want to get your work done, there are some components already avaiable in Joomla Extension's website to your form's needs. CkForms is a good one, you can create simple forms with it that are automatically saved in the database (supports upload of files too).
If you want to learn how to write extensions in Joomla, you should read Joomla Official Documentation website.
Extensions in Joomla are divided in "Components", "Modules" and "Plugins". More informations about these differences can be found here and here.
What you're trying to achieve sounds a "component" to me. Downloading the CkForms and reading it's source code should get you started to Joomla's way of writing components.
EDIT: Joomla has a huge API with a lot of features. It has a database module of it's own, with insert methods and such. Reading Joomla's API website before implementing your component it's a good idea to avoid "reinventing the wheel" and it's a good practice since those methods are extensively tested by all Joomla users.
The JForm class helps you build forms.
Documentation can be found here:
joomla CMS: http://docs.joomla.org/API16:JForm
joomla API: http://api.joomla.org/11.4/Joomla-Platform/Form/JForm.html
This class provides you with ready to use form elements and form loading and/or processing methods
This class includes validation methods, date picker control, color picker, etc.
Of course, as another mentioned above, if you are building a module, component, or application, you will need to learn how to to develop a module, component or application. Of these three, the module is the easiest to implement.
The application gives you much freedom b/c you are not constrained to the CMS paradigm, front and back end complexities. However, there is little documentation about how to develop applications with Joomla framework b/c joomla as a framework is relatively new
This tutorial gets you started understanding how to use JForm to create a form in Joomla: http://www.ostraining.com/blog/how-tos/development/getting-started-with-jform/
Or you could just create add a html module to any position and then write the form in html i.e.
<form method="post" action="mycreatedpage.php"> <input type="text"/> <input type="submit">
Now just create a page that handles the code by emailing or inserting into db. I havent tried it but i think it should work.
Looks like everyone already told you almost everything I know except for the component creator. Very easy to use, and it follows Joomla standards. Will get you up and running within minutes.
I have got good working experience with Joomla RSForm Pro. It has got options for
validation
user email/admin emails on submit
file uploads
and many more
Good tutorials too. Get started with http://www.rsjoomla.com/support/documentation/view-knowledgebase/21-rsform-pro.html
Good luck!
Create View.
Create Model.
Create Table.
Create Controller ( if Needed ).
Create Form xml file.
Go here for more information:
http://docs.joomla.org/Standard_form_field_types
Take a look at the Chronoforms extension - does more than you want.
You have two options:
Use an already built custom form extension
Create your own custom form extension (or outsource it)
Now if you only want to modify the user registration form, then you can do some PHP customization to accomplish your goal.
Making forms in Joomla can be done in a couple of ways.
If you just wanted a contact us, you can just create a page with a menu item for the User contact form. This gives you a page with a Members address and contact form. So all you would need to do was add the user as the company of the websites home address and email. But the form is very basic, name, title, textarea for message.
Next up from that you could just make a Custom HTML module add add a form to it in plain HTML like +Sean said above this, you would need to code in PHP your own form process script. You would not get error in form data checking unless you also wrote it.
Next you might rather look on the Joomla Extension Directory JED for one of the good extensions for 3 and 2.5 Joomla RSForms!Pro is good, and can do all we have needed. This lets you add fields one by one and move your form around. Then can auto generate or custom the html of the form.
You can easily create your own forms with Fabrik
Chronoforms are now a days a very popular solution for custom forms in joomla. Chornoforms support twitter bootstrap also. In simple 5 steps you can create a contact form with unlimited fields and also embed various function like DB save, Email, Thanks Message, Redirection on any page. There is events and events will have particular events.
Also possibility of extension of Normal joomla registeration. It will not extend the core registration but at the time of registration you can take various information from users.
I would use Chrono Forms, they work really well and are easy to use.
Download here
Here is a full tutorial on the new Chronoforms 5 to help you get started quickly and understand most of the features available.
CLICK HERE
You can use plugin to insert external php form in content. It is easy and you don't need to make plugin etc. Please use this.
I suggest you to use breezingforms: http://crosstec.de/en/extensions/joomla-forms-download.html
It's one of the best solutions for custom form creation in joomla.
I'm looking to build an integrated login and user management system between Joomla and eGroupware, ideally with Joomla as the driver. That is, users would log in to Joomla and have their credentials passed into eGroupware as well, so that they could follow a link over to eGW and not have to log in again. Also administrators could add new users to Joomla (or update existing user info) and have those changes reflected in eGW as well.
I tried out this component but all I could get it to do was to synchronize passwords between existing users of both systems (matching on their usernames). Documentation is in Portuguese so I might have missed something in translation. Also I've checked out JFusion but it as yet has nothing available for a bridge to eGW.
Any general advice on how to proceed is greatly appreciated. I have some Joomla experience but not much at writing extensions/modules; would it be easier for me to try to adapt JFusion or something like that or to write something myself?
The best approach would be to write two Joomla plugins: one of the authentication type that will create the session in eGW when someone logs into Joomla, then one of the user type that will respond to the onAfterStoreUser event and update the profile in eGW. This way, you won't be hacking either Joomla or eGW. There's a tutorial on creating authentication plugins for Joomla here: http://docs.joomla.org/Tutorial:Creating_an_Authentication_Plugin_for_Joomla_1.5 Creating a user plugin will be a similar process, only you'll be responding to the onAfterStoreUser event.