I’m upgrading a site from J1.5.26 to J2.5.6 and needed a replacement for an extension that will not work in 2.5:   the Ultimate Content Display extension.

Today I found a free extension from bowthemes.com  called BT Content Slider.

With persistence I got it to work but….  there are a few caveats:

I needed to be able to select article to display in a sidebar module — one at a time,  fade in effect as they rotate from one to another.

The format for entering items is this:    id1, id2, id3 (1,2,3)

where the numbers are the article item ids.

There’s another place to specify article order — and I was having trouble with this — some articles just wouldn’t show up, even though I knew the id was good.

What worked:   be sure list is in low to high order by ids   AND  set order to “random”.

OK.  I can live with that.

Another issue came up though with an article that had no associated menu item.  

The BT Content slider has a parameter for you to set a menu item “if the article id is not found” —  I figured this was a placeholder article to show if the content selection tool had no results.   But NO!    If an item is found, it will display the page header of the menu item set in this parameter.    Odd results — click to see a schedule of an event and get “Ways to Give”  as a heading over the schedule content.    NOT OK!

So… the MORAL of this story is to use that hidden menu — and be sure all articles exists in at least one menu — even if its only the hidden menu.

May I give a plug for NoNumber.nl‘s wonderful Add to Menu extension.   Create your menu item right from the article creation/edit screen!

 

I’m preparing a talk for JoomlaDay NYC on Alternative Layouts and Custom Menu Item Types.  There had been so many posts on the joomla.org forum about these new capabilites of Joomla 1.6 and 1.7,  and so many were complaining that the “feature” simply didn’t work, I was getting a bit worried about the presentation.   I had proved them working back in the spring for a presenation at Joomla Day New England, but had things changed in the subsequent versions?

Finally last week I had a chance to put them all through their paces and the good news is that Alternative Layouts and Custom Menu Item Types DO indeed work —  for all kinds of Joomla items:   articles, contacts, weblinks, and category displays like blogs and lists.

The ONE Joomla entity where my template overrides (which worked) could not be turned into Alternative Layouts OR  Custom Menu Item Types  was the com_content layout for Categories.

I was trying to demonstrate using the sample data and the Parks Photo Gallery which is a demonstration of using regular articles to create a photo album of sorts.   I didn’t like that the Categories layout said  “Article count”  for each sub-category and wanted to change that to “Image count”. 

In the sample data, the menu item for the Parks Photo Gallery was set as a Categories  list.   When that didn’t work, I changed it to a Category list menu type and then applied my changes there.   Since there was a menu item to the top level category I had to take the further step and create the custom menu item type and then use that for the menu.   All well and good.   A parameter allowed me to skip the verbage  “There are no articles for this category”  and proceed directly to listing the sub-categories with their Image counts.

It’s had me thinking about when you would ever need the Categories layout, since I was able to get the same results with the Category layout.   Any ideas anyone?   Please email me!