DISCUSSION: Anna's Joomla Tips

[liamseo]

i was wondering if you have cart system template which i can work on..

been looking around the site.. but im confused with all the boards and all..

a lil help please.. i am looking forward to compare it with other sources..

[AmyStephen]

Hello Liamseo -

Welcome to Joomla!

There is a link at the top of this page called "Extensions" that lists over 700 different "add-ons" for Joomla! The categories are listed on the left. That is the best way to find stuff like cart systems.

Also, in case you are really new, check out the "Absolute Newbies Guide to Joomla!" which has a ton of really good tutorials written by different community members

Very helpful stuff! Good luck! Amy 

[liamseo]

wow.. that was really a fast reply amy.. thanks..

ill go check that out.. im beggining to like it here.. thanks.. 

[AmyStephen]

Glad to have you here. It won't always be that fast -- sometimes, your posts will get "stuck". Feel free to PM me and if I am not busy, I'll try to help out.

Also, I was just looking at your signature (Oh, and thanks for sparing us from your overly sexy picture!) -- check out the forum rules at the top of the page -- there is a button that says "rules". I think there are a couple of problems with your signature line -- and the rules should spell it out.

Good luck! Joomla! is fantastic! Amy

[luciano991]

Anna,

A million thanks for your wonderful tips. I am just learning Joomla as a graduate student. I'm creating an online community for the alumni. Your tips gave me a way to organize my thinking about site development with Joomla and give me some great ideas about workflow. thanks again. all the best.

Mark

[tesseract]

Great news! But, I still have question about the following:

theres also a mambot in which you can insert a module right into the content area(mainbody). you might missed seeing that function in the joomla backend

its the "Load Module Positions" you can use/call it by this tag:

Code: Select all

{mosloadposition user1}

let say right on your wyswyg editor,.. you write:

Code: Select all

blah blah blah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blah
blah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blah blah blah {mosloadposition user1}
blah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blah
blah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blah

where "user1" wil load the "user1" module position.. lets say you want to have the "top" module position loaded on that area.. just use:

Code: Select all

{mosloadposition top}

easier this way... that is if youre not comfortable rearranging your template and playing around the index.php of the template of yours.

its right in the core of joomla 1.0.7(so no need to download anything, since its published by default), what version are you using btw?

If I would like to insert a module such as a menu in the content area, there is no text box/code area where I can write {mosloadposition user1}  How could I do this?

Thanks!

[AmyStephen]

Just enter it right into your Content Item text area -- just like you would normal words and pictures.  First, though, you should disable any WYSIWYGI and just use a regular text editor. Sometimes, the answer is so easy, it's difficult!

Good luck!
Amy

[tesseract]

Thanks for the answer.

However, if I am adding a menu - "Table section", there is no content or content box. Do you mean in the actual content that is in the section categories?

Do you know if there is a menu tutorial out there? I am having trouble getting the menus to do what I want.

Thanks again!

[AmyStephen]

Tess -

I am going to suggest a couple of things.

#1 - I recommend "The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Joomla!" this lists a number of excellent User's Guides written by several community members which will absolutely help you to understand menus and content and sections and categories, and oh my! Trust me - I started seven months ago. It is important to read this material.

#2 - after you look through that, also, look at the FAQ familiarize yourself with the various offerings. I try to look at it a couple of times a month to see what might be new there -- or to see what's been there that finally makes sense to me!

#3 - Review all of the various forum categories available and post your next question into what you think (at least) is the right area. If you do not get a response within a day, or two, (yes that is reasonable!), feel free to PM me. If I am available, I will try to help or find someone who can help you.

Good luck - happy reading!
Amy

[tesseract]

Thank you! Will do.

I am getting it slowly but surely.

[tekram]

As mentioned by Anna:

The other nice thing about having sections and categories is that you can assign different templates to them. So anything appearing in the “News” section could have two columns instead of three, leaving out the position that houses login and polls (for example). Then when some other member of your organization adds a news item, it will look like all the other news items and not like the product features pages.


So, how does one set different templats for each section?

[AmyStephen]

1. Select the Site-Template Manager-Site Templates menu option.

2. Click the option button next to the template, desired, and press the Assign button at top.

3. Using the Assign template NAMEHERE to menu items list, select the pages desired. (Hold Ctrl key down for multiple) and press the Save button at top.

Welcome to Joomla!
Amy 

[kuenwah]

Thanks, Anna, for your tips. One question:


OK, I apologise for not being able to find a simple thing but....

how do I change the sub-heading text "The latest news from the Joomla! Team" in the news section of a Joomla site.

For the life of me I can't find it anywhere in the Latest News module...

Many thanks

[nathandiehl]

One Suggestion (i didn't read all these posts very carefully, so it might have already been suggested?):

i would recommend the links to extensions that are currently going to mamboforge would better be served to go to the extensions site here at Joomla!.

[AmyStephen]

Nathan - Do you know who is authorized to make those changes? I am not - I just answer questions in here once in awhile! I agree with your recommendation. Just can't make it happen for you. I am not certain anyone with the right authority gets these posts, either (but, I also don't know how that all works.)

Thanks! Amy

[AmyStephen]

@kuenwah -

I recommend you start with the Absolute Beginners Guide to Joomla! . If you want, you can email me at [email protected] since you are not able to PM (until you build up 5 posts.) Sorry that you did not get an answer right away. The guides in the Absolute Beginners area are more about what to click in the interface to do what you want to do. Anna's tips are about planning (which is HUGELY important) but don't help with your question.

Email if you want or take a look at the Absolute Beginner's Guide material (and then email if you want).

Thanks! And, again, my apologies for your wait!
Amy

[karawolf]

Anna's tips helped a lot, as did the Joomla Quick Start pdf, but  ... I still can't quite figure out how to bend the menu system to my will.

I have a site structure in mind already -- adapting an existing site to Joomla (or vice versa) -- which has four main sections.  For example, the first section is 'Learn', under which there are several categories, like 'Resources' and 'Articles'.

I want my persistent menu to show:    Learn | X | Y | Z

When someone clicks on Learn, I want a section page to come up which has sample content from the Learn categories (like an article beginning) and a sub-menu that shows:    Articles | Resources | A | B

Click on the sub-menu, say 'Articles', and one gets the Articles category page which lists all of the available articles (individual content pieces).

That sub-menu part I can do; it's the main persistent menu that I can't figure out.  Everything seems to be geared toward linking to an end-content page or a category listing page -- I don't see how to get a section page, or specify the content therein.

Holp?

[mcsmom]

At the same time, if you want to have specific modules, including menu modules, appear when you come to a category, somewhere you need to have a menu link to that category so that the module can be assigned to it.

[Koda]

Hi Everyone I am still lost on the picture upload Nees some help on how exactly to do it


Thanks

[DanielDearing]

I found the whole set of tips extremely useful. thankyou Anna et al.

One thing that you could perhaps consider mentioning in the section about adding text and images is how to add an external URL to an image. It wasn't obvious (especially to a newbie like me) how to add a hypertext link to an image in an article. In the end, I just tried selecting the {mosImage} tag and adding a hyperlink to that. It worked fine - but it would have saved me ten minutes of head scratching if it had been in Anna's Tips

Thanks all, Daniel Dearing

[guilliam]

I found the whole set of tips extremely useful. thankyou Anna et al.

One thing that you could perhaps consider mentioning in the section about adding text and images is how to add an external URL to an image. It wasn't obvious (especially to a newbie like me) how to add a hypertext link to an image in an article. In the end, I just tried selecting the {mosImage} tag and adding a hyperlink to that. It worked fine - but it would have saved me ten minutes of head scratching if it had been in Anna's Tips

Thanks all, Daniel Dearing

the manual addition of url in content is the most basic, however most wyswyh editors for joomla has advance funtionality for this that you can easily paste in the url where you want to link or even anchor on the same page.

hope anna adds this in her next update.

- g

[amuso]

Hi and thanks to Anna for the great tips. I've read them and they helped me a lot as well.

However there's one thing I miss about TinyMCE, and I'm not sure if it's possible or if there's a module to TinyMCE that can do this. But here goes.

I'm running Joomla 1.0.11 and have extended TinyMCE with G2image which makes linking images from my Gallery 2 installation very easy. However I cannot seem to find a way to easily link to another Joomla article without finding the URL manually. I've seen this done in a couple of other editors though, and I really miss this function. I believe one of them were WYSIWYGpro ( http://extensions.joomla.org/component/ ... Itemid,35/ ), and I can't recall if JCE had it as well.

Anyone know of a plugin/module to TinyMCE that accomplishes this?

[dansaintandre]

MOS Thumb Mambot
A feature-rich replacement for the MOS Image Mambot Features: Generate thumbnails of images that exceed a defined size PopUp window to the full size image (can be disabled) Add captions below or above Images If you like this Mambot please consider to make a donation Installation: If you want use the PopUps you will have to add the following line to your template, above closing -tag:  You have to unpublish the MOS Image Mambot when using the MOS Thumb Mambot

http://www.joomlaya.com/component/optio ... atid,1171/

Please let me know how this works for you with Joomla.

I have battled many an extension that "required" the disable or removal of some other item before things would work.  In similar fashion, some extensions require that still other extensions exist -- a dependency -- before it will work.  Sadly,
the install notes and other docs did not make mention of these requirements.

If you know of dependencies that are not [well/obviously] documented, please post to point them out.

~~~ Dan 0;-D

[Dan Pryor]

These are great! Thanks to all involved with keeping these tips front and center for new users like myself. After a couple days of struggling and clicking where I shouldn't have, I've decided (like most new skills) to take the advice of the more experienced and work through the tutorials, etc... One thing - in the "Absolute Beginner's Guide To Joomla" they have Anna's Tips as part of Phase 4. For me, these would have been very beneficial right from the start. There is so much good theory and background in them.

Also, are all of the tips still relevant, since they seem to have been authored in 2005 and there appear to have been many updates to the Joomla package?

[shoshanaz]

Is there a module template somewhere that has the necessary starter code for module development or a guide?

Cheers in advance

Check out http://help.joomla.org/content/view/775/125/

[saochoi2882]

thông tin phản hồi từ đay

[Shaid]

Yes, this is very much useful for newbies like me.
Thanks

[dannissa]

HI,

I am new to Joomla and find it hard to figure out how to set up some modules - so it's been really helpful to find tips like these. I have been following them and it certainly makes things a bit easier. I haven't, however, gotten to the more complex things - just messing with stuff on the surface so far -  so I wanted to ask, just to be sure: I realize these tips have been written a while ago - so are all those tips still applicable to the most recent version of Joomla or has anything changed? Just to save me and other noobs time trying to figure out things that may not even work any more...

[PROXIMO]

this is an great information I ever saw around. first of thanks very much for taking your time and making those information for us.
I have an small question if you dont mind please.
I am running an school project and I really like to use joomla for this.
basicly I would like to add all the students grades on this webpage and I want them to download their grades whenever they like.
but for doing this. there are somethings I couldn't figure out. for example; there is 3 level of in our school , these are level1 student,level2 student and leve3  student.
I have all their grades,and  ready . I want to make an group of in these students so I dont want them to level1 student be able to download level2 students grades.
every level student need to download only their grades.level1 student has to be download only level1 students grades ,not to leve2 students grades.
I was thinking about DOcman or remository for doing this but I have no idea DOcman or remo has anykind of features like that?
basicly it is going to be resctrict area for all levels students, I want them to download only files I will let them.
all these students are already registered on this website.so if I can make somekind of group permission, that would be great but as I said I dont know , how to. Can you please give me some advice?
thanks very much

[rliskey]

I want them to download only files I will let them.

Robust user access levels are one of the BIG missing features of Joomla!. Here are the Joomla-centric solutions I know of (none of which are very good):

1. Hack the core to create new user groups.

2. Buy a third party extension (see the extensions site).

3. Install a complete, new Joomla! site for each user group. I know this seems like a very bad choice (and it is), but it does work if you have a small and fixed set of groups, and plenty of server space to spare, and plenty of time to administer many multiple, almost-identical sites.

Since is seems you are only dealing with three groups, solution 3 is really not too bad a method for you.

Another option is to create three new directories on your site. Password protect each directory with a .htaccess file. Place the grade reports for each group in their respective directory. Then give the correct password to each set of students. The problem with this solution is that, if they are typical students, all three sets of students will have all three passwords within about an hour.

I get around this problem with a $49 application called Easy Grade Pro, which has an Internet export feature. It gives every student their own password.