How do configure front page static articles for Joomla 2.5 - joomla

I'm still pretty new to Joomla and I'm familar with adding custom HTML modules in various positions. I'm also familar with setting up the blog layout for the front page with leading articles, intro articles, etc. However I have a case where I would like to have a image slideshow with a static lead article under that, with 3 intro articles (one in each column), with all new articles listed below this hortizontally instead of being added to the top of the list. Is this possible and if so how can it be done?
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Thank you
Jim

For the slide show +static article I would either put it in a module in a position or put it inside a lead article. In terms of keeping your one article at the top one trick is to give it an order of -1. Another would be to manually maintain the order you want and use order by order.

Related

Comic navigation in joomla?

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.

Joomla 3 Article alternative layout

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.

best way to handle complex page layout in joomla

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

Joomla 1.5 / Modification of YooTheme "ZOO" Component

I'll start out by mentioning that there is a developer forum for Zoo and I have used it already. My purpose posting here is that I typically get a thorough answer within minutes or hours at SO, whereas the responses on dev forums can be slow or non-existent due to the smaller population base.
My question regards Yootheme's ZOO 2.3.2. By default, a product "Frontpage" appears to have a "Categories" box rendered on top of the items. If one turns off all the available options in Frontpage/Template configuration (hide Titles, Count, Descriptions, etc.), an empty box still remains on top of the items.
I've been able to manually remove the box in its entirety by addressing the following file:
media/zoo/applications/product/templates/default/frontpage.php, and commenting out lines 84-92:
<!-- <?php
// render categories
if ($this->category->childrenHaveItems()) {
$categoriestitle = $this->application->getParams()->get('content.categories_title');
echo $this->partial('categories', compact('categoriestitle'));
}
?> -->
Seems like there should be a more eloquent way of doing this on the admin backend, but I couldn't find one. Am I missing something or is my solution the best one?
ZOO is designed to easily be able to modify the built in templates to suit your needs. ZOO templates are meant to be overridden much like Joomla uses template overrides. Rather than editing the default template, you simply create a new template that does what you want it to. The default template should not be changed.
Here is the documentation on ZOO templates - http://www.yootheme.com/docs/home/item/create-a-new-template
Rather than edit the file you mention above, you make a new template here -
media/zoo/applications/product/templates/YOUR-TEMPLATE-NAME/frontpage.php
Then do all the changing you want without messing up the default.
There is an easier way: First, you must identify what calls the item called "frontpage". In PURE yootheme at least it is called from "home" in the "mainmenu". So click "home" buton of the mainmenu, then over the right menu "Parameters(Basic)" you just chose "-select aplication-" instead "frontpage" and that's it.The Frontpage and its "box" are now gone. At least it works for me.

Ajax driven timeline-style blog (in Drupal)

I have created a blog in drupal using CCK and taxonomy.
I wish to display my posts in a timeline, according to the posted date (using views).
So far I have created a listing of the post titles on a timeline.
I now want to display the posts using ajax, wherein clicking on a post title will load the content of that node on the same page. Going ahead I'll add each fetched node into a ul tag and thus create a carousel kind of display of all fetched posts so far.
Whats the best way of achieving this, considering that I have enough knowledge to create a custom module.
Here's where I got my idea from.
http://www.jvm-neckar.de
Try the aptly named http://drupal.org/project/timeline project. I used it long time ago... its a nifty module and you can visualize your various posts on a scrollable timeline. Posts that are frequent will be together and posts that are apart (in time) will be apart -- its all scaled accurately. It has integration with views, of course.
I'm not sure about whether it will meet your exact requirements. Check out an example here:
http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/examples/jfk/jfk.html

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