Thursday 17 March 2011

Another Joomla site

Created another Joomla site, based on Joomla 1.6 this time.  I decided to make it more of a real site and settled on Lean and Theory of Constraints as topics.

I'd say that if you're starting from scratch then 1.6 is the way to go but if you're looking to move a site currently on 1.5 to 1.6 resist it until you have to unless you you are a PHP expert or can hire one.  Basically every extension will need to be re-written.  That includes templates, modules, components and the whole kit and cabboodle.  There's no backward compatibility at all that we've been able to find and even 1.5 native extensions aren't supported.

Wednesday 26 January 2011

Module to record the username of a user when they access a page?

We've been asked to come up with a module that can be embedded in a page and will insert into a database table the username of the user accessing that page.  I've tried Google searching but can't find anything.

I did find a forum post that talks about doing something similar:
  • Create the table using:
    CREATE TABLE `databasename`.`jos_names` (`id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment, `firstname` VARCHAR(100), `lastname` VARCHAR(100), PRIMARY KEY  (`id`) )

  • Then write your module using: $db =& JFactory::getDBO();
    $query = "INSERT INTO `#__names` (`fname`, `lname`)
    VALUES ($fname, $lname);";
    $db->setQuery( $query );
    $db->query();

Thursday 6 January 2011

Load Position

A colleague just showed me something useful.


If you want to load a module within an article:
  • In the module set the position to one that doesn't exist as a position in your template, e.g. InTheMiddleOfMyArticle
  • In the article use the loadposition tag to put it where you want, e.g. {loadposition InTheMiddleOfMyArticle}
  • Check the page with the article and the module should be there.

Tuesday 9 November 2010

Interesting

It seems that whilst Joomla is free if you want to create your own template to make it look how you want you've gotta pay $129.99 for the software to do so or hand craft the PHP yourself.  That or all the free Joomla template editors are hiding from Google.

Thursday 4 November 2010

Another piece of work, another blog

I was recently informed I'm to assist in maintaining a site based on Joomla.  This will involve learing all about Joomla so I've registered a domain (sbjoomla.org.uk) and signed up with a hosting service that supports it.  Just waiting for the domain registration to percolate through so I can start using it.

Suppose I'd better find out what this Joomla thing is!