James Leong | Web Developer » Joomla

Joomla Expose Configuration

james — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:35:33 +0000

If you are familiar with Joomla, you might have heard of Expose. Well, if you would like to use it out-of-the-box, it will be great. Trouble is, sometimes you just need to do some touch-ups to fit into your Joomla template. And then you get into problems. Suddenly, you come face to face with a monstrous configuration file with no idea of where to start.

Well, being really desperate, I slowly dissected the file and got the following 8 sections, with 2 no idea sections.

Gallery
Main Panel
Image
Image Strip
Image Info
Album List
Album Info
Image Description

To help with future skinning, I will now proceed to label the different pages with the different segments. First, it will be the front page.

Front Page

From what I can see, the whole component is controlled by Gallery configuration. From the front page, there is also a segment that is configured by Image Album List.

Image Strip

After clicking on an album, you will enter the image strip screen. Here the configuration will be controlled by Image Strip.

Image Page

A selection of an image on the image strip page will bring you to a new page which has 2 components, Image Info and Image.

Hmm.. come to think about it… the naming is quite obvious… but somehow.. when you are staring at a whole chunk of xml… the feeling can be quite intimidating.

Also, if you are a hard-core guy and bent on changing the icons, you can actually recompile the flash files:

artwork.swf
fonts.swf

I downloaded the source files from the expose site.. but just in case the site got busted, here are the source files.

Okay that’s all for now.. and really sorry for boring the Non-Joomla readers…

Content Management for Microsites

james — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:32:07 +0000

One of the problems I face recently is to segregate the website so that different people have access to different segments of the website.

Recently, a CMS we are supposed to build has the following configuration. The full site has to be managed by the main office, while a small microsite is to be managed by the Thailand branch office. The Thailand folks are not permitted to amend the contents in the main site but have full authority over their own contents. The main office will have full access across the entire website, including the Thailand microsite.

Found something which seems to solve the problem! Will get my girls to look into it.

Using Windows Live Writer to Post to Joomla

james — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:00:29 +0000

After a lot of trial and error. Sort of finally get it working. Tada!

The above image is a snippet of the Joomla contentI just posted using Windows Live Writer. Configuration to get it working:

Joomla 1.5
XML-RPC – metaWeblog API (enabled)
XML-RPC – Joomla (enabled)
All the other XML-RPC (disabled)

This is absolutely amazing. Imagine all my customers being able to do things like Cut and Paste and very quickly dump all their info online. Cool!

Survey Component in Joomla

james — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:41:03 +0000

Hmmm.. today just got hit by a customer which require a Survey Component in Joomla. Well, actually, a survey sounds too complicated… as a survey is generally multi-page with an analysis engine behind it.

What a customer really needed is some kind of dynamically manageable forms. So after doing some kind of simple component research, decided to to try out RSForms.

Why RS Form? Well honestly, it is because it has the greatest number of votes and reviews at http://extensions.joomla.org/ . Really dun have much time to waste on crappy components.

So here goes. Did a simple installation on my Joomla 1.5 instance at http://xtremax.com/joomla_1_5 and got

And within 10 minutes, created a form like:

Difference Betweeen Drupal and Joomla

james — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:28:05 +0000

Was really thinking about this for a long time…. after all, both are pretty famous content management frameworks by now. However, since Joomla seemed to be more popular at the point of time when I needed a CMS engine…. I just chose it as the platform to work on…. However, just recently, my brother was telling me about how his really good student claimed that Drupal was a much better system than Joomla… and how he advocated porting an existing Joomla customised solution to Drupal,,,, so I guess…. I just had to take a look.

Honestly, I do not know much about Drupal… till this point. I mean…. how much can I know… when i just read a single e-book that is more like a basic usual manual. But anyway, below are some observed differences.

Pro Drupal (this list contains all the Pro Drupal Points)

Superior User and Roles Management.

Well, it seems that Drupal has better Authorisation and Authentication based on roles. For one, you are able to add customised roles to Drupal and start assigning Permissions based on those role. That is something which I do not see in Joomla. In fact, Joomla basically has 2 sets of roles, i.e. front end and backend roles… and users seem to be pretty much stuck with that. Anything more fine-grained will require some components…. which seem to distort the Joomla framework.

Taxonomy based Content

Not exactly sure if this can be called an advantage yet, as it seems very confusing to a beginner like me. But it does boast several advantages like having unlimited number of sections. For Joomla, It seems that content is limited to a 3 level hierarchy. That is a limitation especially for more extensive site maps… (But of course… there are always clever work arounds….)

Another way of looking at it… the Sitemap depends more on the Menu Structure which can be easily defined in both Joomla and Drupal… and can have minimal correlation with Joomla’s sections and categories…

Taxonomy seems to be a neat way of allowing content tagging and easy navigation. Allows easy navigation to related articles instead of way of defining the site map.

Triggers and Actions

It implements some kind of Event Based architecture. It allows code snippets to be triggered based on some events.

Cool Ajax Configuration Interface

I like a nifty feature that Drupal has. It allows drag and drop on the webpage. This allows easy customisation of hierarchy structure. Very cool.

Pro Joomla

Installation can be done via packaged zip files

I was looking around at the Drupal modules… and it seemed that the only way installation can be done is directly unzipping all the codes in a module directory. It does not allow a person to simply upload a zip file to install the module.

This installation process is very important… for custom component development companies… as it allows a neat hand-off of project codes.

Opinions

Hmmm… having so it seems that Drupal happens to be the more flexible system. Well, can’t really say too much about it… until I get my hands dirty and starting looking at the codes. Till then….

Will be looking into:

Learning Drupal 6 Module Development

Joomla 1.5 n Drupal

james — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:23:50 +0000

Well after seeing Windows Live Writer seemless integration with WordPress…. I did start to get excited about the possibilities of its integration with CMS systems like Joomla and Drupal.

Imagine the flexibility of data entry it will give my clients… if they are able to type their contents on an offline editor and effortlessly publish its contents onto the CMS system.

Well, not sure about Drupal, but Joomla’s integration with WLW still has someway to go. (no time to check out Drupal yet) It seems to be able to publish mainly html articles… with no support for images. Hmmm… this is not exactly good enough for me yet. Guess I just got to monitor it.

Okay… will work more on this tomorrow. Good nights!