Joomla component - how to convert standard php form into joomla component - joomla

Currently i have been using an iframe component to display a php page that i have written. the reason i used iframe rather than writing a joomla component in the first place was for 2 reasons, the information that is displayed in that page is from a remote mssql sever and the second was that i didnt really understand how to write one.
Now i have completed the creation of the php page that i display within the iframe, but now i need to be able to have it inherent within the joomla site, for both display reasons and security.
basically its a single page that displays information in a bunch of drop down boxes and then a submit button is clicked and it posts that information to another php page that again queries the mssql server and displays the results based on the post from the previous page.
query.php, posts some variables to results.php and is displayed in a table.
i have the functionality perfect, but i dont understand the documentation i have read so far. is there any simple component i can see the code of so that i can try and work out whats going on?

You might want to look at http://docs.joomla.org/J3.1:Developing_a_MVC_Component/Introduction and follow the process outlined.

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Load Wordpress page in a div without reloading page and while changing url

I am coding a website for a client and they requested that because they have so many sidebar pages under one parent, that when the page link is clicked, it loads in the same area every time without the page reloading. They also requested that the URL changes on reload and that you can visit each page by going to that specific url. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do this. I have found a lot of tutorials and snippets that are half way there but they don't offer the exact functionality.
For example, if you go here: http://lookseewatch.com/independentinsurance/commercial-insurance/
You'll see a long sidebar of different types of commercial insurance they offer. When you click on "Automobile," or any link for that matter, the page should be loaded into the div area on the right of the sidebar. The url then should change to reflect this change to http://lookseewatch.com/independentinsurance/commercial-insurance/automobile/. All of these pages are separate and dynamic in Wordpress.
Can anyone offer me some assistance? This is currently how the sidebar is being generated:
wp_list_pages('title_li=&child_of='.$post->ID.'');
Let me know if you need any other code from me or have any questions about the functionality.
Thank you!
This is kinda complicated. There are a lot of ways of catching user events, stopping default behavior and running custom code over it. For exemple, you can listen to anchor clicks and return 0 to not load their links.
But if you change URL in browser address bar, as long as I know, a JS can't control it, because it's outside of a webpage domain, and controling browser components from an external webpage would open a lot of security flaws.
This looks like they wanna avoid banners loading to count less hits :P If performance is the issue, first of all you can use a cache plugin, that will store in HD all DB queries, and use those files in future pageloads instead of making new queries.
You can also build a full sidebar into a PHP variable, cache it in HD and read from there, instead of building the whole code everytime. It will be like adding static HTML snippet.
This can be done with a technique called pushstate combined with AJAX. There's a great jQuery plugin that's called PJAX that implements this. http://pjax.heroku.com/
I have just published a plugin called WP-PJAX that makes to whole wordpress site PJAX driven. I'm not sure if this solves your problem, but it might be something for you.
https://github.com/pelmered/wp-pjax

Links in pages won't load using Ajax

I am using a script for Ajax from Dynamic Drive on my site to load content into my div. It has worked great for me until I created a page where I want links. For some reason I am finding that if I create a page with a single link, the page will not load. I can click on it all I want and the page still will not load. If I have a page that is just purely text content, it loads. Is this a flaw with Ajax, or am I not doing something right? My intention with my site is to have a "Store" section so I can use Amazon Affiliates. I can't even get my page to load even if I have a simple link say pointing to Amazon.com. Unfortunately this Ajax script has been the only successful way I've been able to get my content to load into my main div. For some odd reason links in the links section on my site will appear and that page will load, but not for my "store" page.
My site is: http://veterinarycare.atspace.cc
I'm not asking for a direct code, but just a step in the right direction.
'store.html' gives a 404 Not found... Does this file exist? That is probably your problem... Your links.html page for example has a link to ASPCA and that works fine.
You may also want to look into jQuery, as this is a bit neater for doing ajax and other javascript effects. You could probably get all that javascript mumbo jumbo down to 5 lines or so...
Also remember that your site isn't going to be particularly google friendly with all the content being loaded in via javascript.

Virtuemart Display Page after Remote redirect

I am aiming to create a payment module. Its users shall be redirected away from the site's URL in order for the transaction to be processed by a third party at a different URL. I would then like customers to be redirected back to a generic 'success' page that notifies them the order was a success. I have tried redirecting to the default success page (checkout.thankyou.php), but I get lots of errors; all the constants etc. that the application requires have obviously been lost during the redirect.
I would like to be able to retrieve the theme currently enabled in the configuration and use it to insert some basic HTML into the view. I would also like to access the database to perform some queries.
Can anybody advise? I am very stuck, and cannot find anything useful in the documentation! Thank you.
Can you be more specific about what type of information you want in your success page? If you just want basic HTML, then there's no reason you can't just write a basic Joomla article and redirect to that instead of trying to redirect to a VM partial. Again, if it's just basic HTML (no data from the transaction), then you can simply use a code inspector (like FireFox Inspect Element) to track down the CSS classes you like from the template and simply use them in your Joomla article to make it look like the VM template. You can find most of them in components/com_virtuemart/themes/default/themes.css.
If you need to display actual transaction data in your Thank You message, be prepared for a bit more work. You're probably going to have to write a cookie containing the record data BEFORE it gets sent offsite, and then read the cookie just prior to rendering the Thank You page.

Including CodeIgniter form in existing page

I would like to include a CodeIgniter comment form in an existing php page. Currently I am including the comment form with
$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] = "comment/index2/".$page;
require_once($directoryLevelPrefix . "staff/codeigniter/index.php");
However, when codeigniter loads the view to display the results of the form I lose the content on my original php page which contained the form. I have tried adding a redirect after the form data is added to the database to redirect to my original php page e.g.
redirect($_POST['return'])
But I want to pass some variables, such as 'thank you for your comment', and this causes a headers already sent error.
Alternatives might be to use ajax, but I would like the whole page to refresh when the comment is submitted.
I had a similar need and I just loaded the CodeIgniter form in an iframe. This was to put a contact form on a WordPress page. I went with the iframe because my needs were limited to this one form and I felt it didn't require trying to integrate CodeIgniter and WordPress in any way.
One Pro of this method is that the form can be submitted and load a confirmation page, an error page, or even be a multi-page form and all that navigation takes place inside the iframe so you never leave the page that you are on while using the form. Another Pro is that the form is totally portable.
The Cons of course are anything you might not like about using iframes which could be many things based on your needs and preferences.
That is because CodeIgniter is a framework designed to handle displaying entire web pages. You can't just include it, as it tries to send new headers and everything.
Two solutions:
You may be able to load the codeigniter page as the main page, and just include your original php code like a view file. This depends on how your original php file is set up.
You could possibly use cURL to call the page from your own server, to get the html output as a string, then echo it to your current page. This isn't very efficient though.
As C. Scott Asbach mentioned, you could load the whole page in an iframe. Probably not a good idea though, as far as I'm aware iframes are deprecated and make for messy websites.
Probably best is to just try and avoid using CodeIgniter to display a subform in an existing page :-)

Ajax generated content, crawling and black listing

My website uses ajax.
I've got a user list page which list users in an ajax table (with paging and more information stuff...).
The url of this page is :
/user-list
User list is created by ajax. When the user click on one user, he is redirected to a page which url is : /member/memberName
So we can see here that ajax is used to generate content and not to manage navigation (with the # character).
I want to detect bot to index all pages.
So, in ajax I want to display an ajax table with paging and cool ajax effetcs (more info...) and when I detect a bot I want to display all users (without paging) with a link to the member page like this :
JohnBob...
Do you think I can be black listed with this technique ? If you think so, could you please provide an alternative solution by keeping these clean urls and without redeveloping the user-list (without ajax) ?
Google support a specification to make AJAX crawlable:
http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/specification.html
I did an experiment and it works:
http://seo-website-designer.com/SEO-Ajax-Google-Solution
As this is a Google specification, you won't get penalised (unless you abuse it).
Saying that, only Google support it at the moment (AFAIK).
Also, I believe following the concept of Progressive Enhancement is a better approach. That is, create a working html website then make the JavaScript enhance it
Maybe use the urls with an onclick to trigger your AJAX scripting? Like
Some URL
I don't think Google would punish you for this, you primarily use JScript, but you do provide a fall back for their bot, so your site doesn't get any less accessible.
EDIT
Ok, I misunderstood. Then my guess would be you basically have two options:
1. Write a different part of your site where bots end up, or,
2. Rewrite your current site to for example always give a 'full' page, with an option to only get, say, the content div. Then you can get only the content with JavaScript, but bots will always get a nice page.

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