I'm looking at building a site for a client and wondered if Joomla is even up to the task.
Amongst other functions on the site I have a need to display products in two different ways.
Each product has a brand and a type so, for example, a particular laptop might be brand=Acer, type=Laptop. Clearly this will be database driven.
I want the menu system to show the products in different ways; 2 top level menu items would show...
types within brands, eg...
Acer
Laptops
...
brands within types, eg...
Laptops
Acer
...
Each lower level link would show a list of the appropriate matching items.
Is this even possible or am I more in the realms of needing to do it all myself and forget Joomla?
The stadard menu system does not provide such function. But I you should have a look at 3rd party extension such as virtueMart (webshop for joomla) or SOBI (directory-system for joomla). They might give you what you need.
Related
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'm new to Joomla and i'm considered in the phase of discovering it yet , my problem here is that i'm using Joomla to make a cafe online ordering website , i want the customer to access the website and make his order from it, so i have to provide him with an active menu containing the cafe menu items, so i have to provide a radio buttons(or something like that) in order to give the customer the ability to choose his order items and to confirm his choices at last. i searched a lot about how to make that using Joomla and didn't reach to any thing , so it will be great if anyone can help me in such stuff.
You can not build complex custom forms with Joomla out-of-the-box.
The best solution depends on your needs - especially your further processing of the order.
If you just want to send it by mail to someone or to have it saved in the database, then it would be a enough to use a form extension for joomla. You will find many form extension on JED - they vary a lot in features, usability,flexibility and price. I often use breezingforms because it is very flexible and you can extend it with your own code (mostly).
If you want a full "shop" then you should have a look at the virtueMart extension for joomla. Or even at a shop system instead of joomla.
If you want full control you can write your own HTML and PHP Code and inject it into Joomla by a module such as Sourcerer from nonumber.nl. Or you write your own extension...
I was hoping someone could help me. I've searched high and low for an answer for this one, and I haven't been able to find the exact answer (even within the forum).
How can I display the category name in the url in Joomla (v2.5). I have 2 categories in my site so far. For example, I have a category called Refrigeration. I created an article called test and put it under the Refrigeration category. But for some reason, it will only display in the URL as:
www.something.com/test.html.
I would like it to display like this:
www.something.com/refrigeration/test.html
I know you can create a hidden menu, using the category (such as "Refrigeration") as the parent, and placing the related articles underneath that category (ie - with "Refrigeration" as their parent). But this seems rather inefficient. I just really want to be able to separate my articles on the site into different categories, and have that category display in the url.
Or, is the only way to accomplish this to install an SEF extension?
Any help is greatly appreciated. Please let me know if I need to provide further information.
The default Joomla SEF functions solely on the menus structure. It's hard to believe, but once you accept that Joomla Menu's aren't for actually "building menus" and more for build url / site structure, life will become a bit easier.
To do what you want, you can create the hidden menu for each category, and it should work without having to put each article as a menu item underneath in the hidden menu. However, it would be much easier to use a SEF component to handle it for you. There may be some lightweight plugins available, but I haven't seen one.
SEF components can be found here: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/sef
I created a website for online shopping and i want to give my admin panel to some vendors so that they insert their own products related with a particular category they are dealing with.
For ex :- In electronics category,there are various options like cameras, mobiles etc.
1.So, i want one vendor who is related with mobiles should be allowed only to enter his related products(only mobiles) from admin panel.
2.And he should not be allowed to see or update the products in other categories like cameras.He will only be given access to update his related category.
How can i achieve this?
Thanks
This is not out the box and multi-user done properly is an Enterprise Edition feature, even if you want to do it 'multi-store' instead of 'category'.
You will probably find someone has written a module to support the functionality you are after, however, what you are after goes against the overall design of Magento Community Edition.
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.