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!

 

On a site using the Joomla Bamboo template Pure, I was having trouble with footer not clearing the sidebar.  I discovered that a custom html module with just a non-breaking space in the bottom position would fix the problem.  I didn’t mind the dark banner that stretched across the screen and I was willing to live with this work around  (having tried all kinds of clears, etc. on the footer module.)

Then I discovered that that “fix”  didn’t fix it in PC browsers:  Firefox and IE8.   Consulting the joomla bamboo forum I found a similar issue with a suggestion to be sure images had explicit heights.   I added heights to my flickr and facebook modules and the problem was solved.   The PC browsers were apparently not reading the heights declared for the iframes used by these modules.    And the template seemed to need to calculate a total height for the sidebar.

This topic came up on the Joomla New England list and Terry posted the solution:

In case anyone needs to know, what worked was to split the FBML version of the code in two. That is, paste the script tag at the bottom of the head tag in the template HTML, then paste the rest of the code into the module (or article). In other words:

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