I need a very lightweight discussion board for joomla 3.0. You should be able to enter a topic, name and message. I want people to be able to comment on the topics too. I do not want a full-fledged forum, just very basic.
The extensions I've found are all too advanced.
I'm thinking of two way to do this. Either by a custom form which submits an article in which comments are allowed, then i show them in a category listing. That would be great, but I'm not sure where to start to make that happen. I have some basic programming skills if needed.
The other way would be with a content creation extension I think? But since the ones I've looked at cost money I cant just test them and see if it works.
Any ideas?
A forum is definitely too heavy for what you need. You might be better off looking at the Blog category on the Joomla Extensions Directory. As you're using Joomla 3.0, you are a little more limited as to which extension you can use, however there are still a few:
Commercial:
EasyBlog
RSBlog
Non-Commerial:
CjBlog
JUBlog
As a second resourt, you could try using Komento
Hope this helps
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Please Bear with me as I know It needs research from my side but still want to ask as It would make things a lot easier for me.
Here is what I want to implement.
An online shop where I would configure admin areas for different store owners (vendors). The store owner can belong to same area or different areas. Using the admin area, each store owner can select from pre-configured list of products and define prices for the products in different locations where they have a physical store. The end user can browse the products listing based on his location (area). If multiple vendors belong to same area as customer, the customer will see the product with multiple prices from different vendors. If none of the vendor configured the product of that area, customer will not see the product.
Now the question is, what would be the appropriate option for the above requirements.
Magento, Opencart, nopcommerce or something else?
This is based on my experience. My advice, if you want sth that goes beyond minor tweaks and a couple of new features, stay away from opencart for the time being.
First of all, you will have to pay (not little...) for extensions and mods of often low quality and crappy support. You should also feel lucky to find one that will cover all the features you want and interoperability between extensions is just non-existent. And if you ask for more features chances are you will have to pay again. There are some free extensions but most are a joke. Like, put a link in your footer or disable sth.
So your next option is coding. Opencart is easy to learn if you know basic php and you can start writing code fast. But.. Opencart lacks a solid mechanism for extending it (until v2.0 at least) and after a while it gets both chaotic and frustrating. Also, you will often need to implement stuff that needs some basic backend functionality from opencart but which is either offered in a way that is useless to you or with basic needed features absent. As a result you will find yourself creating your own "library" of functions that will allow you later to focus on your extension. Moreover there is actually no framework on which you can rely. Sure there are some functions and some methods that you can use, but that's it.
Another thing. The opencart community is not one of the easiest to go along with. I don't mean they are bad or that they will bite you, but people there try to make money and do not find it easy to share things with you, be it advice or code. Also, they are competitive. And they do not accept criticism, even suggestions, gladly. And there is a scent of eliticism in some threads that can upset your stomach.
This is how I have experienced opencart. I have to admit that I like opencart itself and I find pleasure in coding for it and even now I am debugging some new extension of mine. But often it reminds me that there is so much lacking and I often spend so much time doing trivial stuff that it makes me wonder if it is worth it.
I do not know about magento. It feels similar to opencart to me.
I would suggest drupal to anyone wanting to implement something custom. There is all a framework and powerful free as in speech extensions and a great truly foss community. There are a couple options there for building an eshop but I would go with the commerce module. It takes a while to get used to all the concepts but you can achieve what you want with just mere clicks. You won't even have to write code if you don't want to.
Again I repeat, avoid opencart if you need sth too custom (as you do). If not, opencart is one of the fastest to deploy.
I need to implement some WCAG 2.0 guidelines into a Joomla webpage. I've read a lot about this guidelines on W3C, but the problem is that I really don't know where to start. Please help!
I'd suggest starting by looking at Drupal's example - http://drupal.org/about/accessibility
Probably most interesting would be the issue queue:
http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?issue_tags=accessibility
It's a big challenge. Best to work with others in the Joomla community as there are no quick fixes.
Do not get lost in the Ambiguous 780 pages from W3C WCAG, i can not shake the feeling that if one needs that many pages to implement something in HTML, your doing it wrong (do you know a 780page doc for HTML?), a good title therefor IMO would be; "how-to make web-accessibility not accessible, by W3C".
I would recommend the following article:
https://patstapestry.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/tips-and-tricks-for-website-accessibility-testing-with-the-screen-reader-jaws/
following her guidelines you can try tackle the specific problems your pages may have, one-by-one
Also test with NVDA, TalkBack and VoiceOver;
http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey6/
I'm working on a travel site and am interested in adding some functionality so that visitors can easily click on a travel destination and add it in a "bag", pretty much like a shopping cart on traditional e-commerce websites. When a few destinations are added the customer should be able to type their own text along with the picked destinations and then send an offer by clicking a button.
A travel guide will then receive the form data to customize a trip for the potential customer.
Every destination in Joomla has its own article and therefore need some sort of button that the user can click to add trip to the "bag". If this functionality is inserted in the article by some piece of code or if it's a module in the sidebar doesn't really matter.
I have tried using "SimpleCaddy" for Joomla. I have modified it but I find it really hard to turn it into something useful.
I would like to know how to best proceed? Are there perhaps any extensions, (commercial or non-commercial doesn't matter), that can get the job done?
Most definitley there are. You tagged you're using joomla 1.5, Virtuemart is a great e-commerce solution for that version. Hugely popular, well supported, large community extremely customizable... the downside is that it can be very complex if you're not sure what's going on. Simple Caddy is a great one for something really lightweight and easy to get up and running quickly - but it lacks any sort of advanced features.
Unfortunately in my experience finding one that blends between 'lightweight and easy', and 'full featured and complex' is very difficult. you may also want to try JoomShopping however - I've recently installed it on a site and had great success with it. It was really straight forward, setup was not too bad and getting it configured just took a bit of trial and error (unfortunately there are no real good tool-tips or anything to help you figure out exactly what does what on the back-end).
Those are my two recommendations; Virtuemart or Joomshopping. They both have shoppingcart features which I'm sure you could easily modify to be the users 'bag'. Both seem to have a pretty good/proven track record and a well rounded community. I think either way you'll be satisfied, but it does sound like SimpleCaddy may come up 'just short' of what you're needing.
This is a little vague, but I hope I'm allowed.
I'd like to get a feel for what the Magento developer community thinks of the Widgets API. Are they clear or confusing, useful or useless. The more detail the better. Do you use the feature? If not, why not? What don't you understand about the feature? etc. etc.
When I say Widgets, I'm referring the programatic APIs specific to the feature.
Yeah its definitely something we have wanted to take more of a look at but we haven't set any budget aside to actually investigate. I would love to create some little widgets that we could utilize for each client instead of having to create blocks that the client then has to pass data to inside of a static block. I looked into it about a year ago and just haven't looked back.
The funny thing is now there are a lot of widgets out there in the community, yet you still don't hear anything about them. I guess we just need more articles about them, which I am sure after you write one, we will all get it :). Basically people don't have time with how busy they are probably to investigate the Widget API fully enough to utilize it. And since there isn't a lot of knowledge base information about it, you don't see a lot of people using them.
I as a developer understand the usefulness of this API and it is not harder to use than any other thing in Magento. I have used it a lot cause I can understand the feature.
But me as the person who has to explain what is a widget or why I made something to be a widget, how should a user or designer use it, why there is a block and a widget side by side and what's the difference. Then I tend to think that this is a total disaster and we should have only widgets or only blocks or one common name and just some type/attribute/value that distinguish static and dynamic version of widgets so I could say : "Hey this block/widget you can drag or include wherever you like in your site and this one you can't"
I was excited about the widget feature when it came out. There is decent documentation available, and I was quickly able to code my own simple widgets. Since then, however, I never actually used widgets in my projects. I have never really understood when to use widgets, and I almost forgot about them.
I feel like we need articles and examples to show the usefulness of widgets. I need widgets to pop up in my head when a client asks for features that can be solved using widgets. Recently, a client wanted to have some text in the footer on the home page. I created a static block and declared it in layout/local.xml. With widgets, this could all have been done from the backend.
I want to add a "Community" section (Bulletin Board) to my website so everyone can communicate, but I don't know what I'm doing.
How would I go about adding this and which one offers the most documentation and support?
Whatever you do, make certain that you read the instructions on configuring your discussion software to protect you and your community for the worst parts of the internet: spam, spoofing, and abuse.
Make certain that you immediately change the admin password from the one that comes with the installation.
If you leave your communities wide open to all kinds of posting, harvesting, and general mis-use, you'll spend your days playing whack-a-mole with thousands of idiots. Develop your acceptable use policy, configure your boards to support it, then enforce it.
And if the software you are looking at doesn't support things like e-mail verification, moderation, abuse reporting, anti-spamming controls, etc., just keep looking.
Be prepared to spend time managing your community so that it doesn't become another one of the millions of web forums out there full of off topic posts that drive people away from your website.
I think what you needed is a forum software, there are tones of free and open source ones available on the net. DotNetNuke is a .NET one but can be expensive to host and phpBB is another popular choice and there are a lot of cheap hosting solutions.
is your site based on php/mysql or asp/sql? Chances are if you do not know where to even find tables, that you are not able to what you actually want.
HOWEVER, if it's php/mysql, i recommend Cool Php Scripts book. It covers creating sort of a community forum/message board.
As i said again, you are probably not going to do it alone, at least, without a long frustrating learning curve.
You can always post a job and someone would be more than willing to bid on it at elance or rentacoder or any other site of your choice
Wikipedia has a big honking list of forum software. Pick the one that best matches the programming language(s) you're familiar with, the features you need, etc.
This is what you need.
Edit: They don't offer a hosted version there. You can use this instead. It's hosted on it's own site, free, and doesn't require a download.
I find Vanilla to be a much better forum application that phpBB for reasons of aesthetics as well as extensibility. I have not seen/used it in a situation where many sub-forums were required, so depending on your scope it may not be the right choice, but for small-to-medium sized forums I'd suggest trying it first.
First, you need to choose a forum software that matchs your requirements.
Then, just follow the Installation Guide provided by the software you have choosen.
More information at Forum Software Reviews