A blog about Joomla

JoomFish: default language when entering the site

monimanu — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 09:50:57 +0000

When installing a new language, usually the website remains set to enter the site on the older language. If you, however, want to change that, go to:

Extensions -> Plugins -> JFrouter and set ‘Language selection for new visitors’ to ‘site default language’.

In order for this to work on your used browser make sure you clear your cache memory of the browser and clear the cookies. (In the same plugin there is an option that allows the website to set a language for a specific user by installing a cookie).

There are no translations available.

monimanu — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 09:45:50 +0000

Whenever you install joomfish and a new language, this thing appears on top of the content you whenever you don’t have a translation for that article:

There are no translations available.

In order to get rid of that phrase go to:

Joom!Fish > Control Panel > Parameters-> ’what to show if there is no translation available’

and set that parameter to “The original content”

Insert iframe and other code into articles

monimanu — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 09:47:21 +0000

By default, the TinyMCE editor that comes with Joomla has the Code cleanup option enabled. That means that, whenever you want to insert an iframe (for example) in an article, at saving it will get cleaned up and it disappears. If you want to able to easy insert such things as youtube videos or google maps, here’s what you have to do:

Go to Extensions -> Plugin manager -> Editor – TinyMCE. At plugins parameters, Code cleanup on save select never and than click apply.

Customize logo, different size

monimanu — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 13:34:59 +0000

Whenever we download and install a template and we want to customize it, one of the first things to change is the logo. Some templates (such as Panacea) allow you to modify the logo through a graphical interface, usually located in the template maganer. That’s the easy way. Unfortunatly, some templates let you change the logo only by working with the internal part of the website. For these templates, there are two ways of changing the logo:

Go to your site via ftp and replace the current logo with your new one, but make sure that the new one has exactly the same name and extension as the original one. Usually, you can locate the logo here:

templates/the_template_you_are_using/images/logo/style x

Upload the new logo somewhere in your site and then find the code that links to it and change it. For that, go to the template manager, to the template you are using and click the Edit css button. Edit the style you are using. The line that inserts the logo looks like this:

/* Logo */

#rt-logo {background: url(../images/logo/style5/logo.png) 0 0 no-repeat;}

Modify the path to your desired logo and that’s it.

A problem that occur though, in both cases is, what happens if your logo has different size than the default one. Well, some of the templates handle it nicely, but most of them don’t. Therefor, if that is the case, in your template maganer, find the logo parameter and set the auto size to off. Then, in the template.css file, find the following lines:

/* Logo */
#rt-logo { width: 112px;height: 112px;}

set the size of your current logo and save.

That’s it!

Change width of a dropdown menu

monimanu — Mon, 23 May 2011 10:49:31 +0000

If you want to change the width of the dropdown menu, you can best do so by changing some parameters in the fusionmenu.css file. Find the following code:

/* Dropdown Surrounds */
.menutop ul {width: 187px;padding: 6px 0;margin: 0;}
.menutop .drop-top {display: none;}
.menutop .level2 > .drop-top {display: none;}
.menutop ul.columns2 {width: 361px;padding: 6px 0;}
.menutop .columns2 > .drop-top {width: 361px;}

/* Dropdown Items */
.menutop ul li {width: 184px;margin-left: 2px;padding: 6px 0;}
.menutop ul.columns2 li {width: 178px;float: left;margin-left: 2px;}

And modify the bolded numbers with the new dimensions. This way you can modify the width both for single column and double column menus.

Article Submission Layout customize

monimanu — Mon, 02 May 2011 13:58:30 +0000

If you ever used the Article Submission Layout from Joomla Core, maybe you didn’t need all those fields to be available to the user. There is a way to customize the form to fit your needs. If you are using the default template, go to:

/public_html/components/com_content/views/article/tmpl/form.php

if you are using another template go to:

/public_html/templates/NAME_OF_YOUR_TEMPLATE/html/com_content/article/form.php

Find the portion of the code that you do not want to be displayed and just comment it like this:

code

*/ ?>

Read more bug on Joomla

monimanu — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 08:40:15 +0000

I noticed this on various rocketthemes. When inserting a read more inside an article, it tends to mess up the display on all the articles on the same page, including the current article. It either doesn’t display anything, or it makes the text all bold, or italic, or both. I haven’t figured out why exactly but, a solution to this is to go to the html code of the article. The read more code is:

The idea is to make sure that no empty html tags are before or after this line of code. This means that no html tags are opened and closed without real content inside of them. This thing is good:

Hello, world!

But this thing isn’t:

Just make sure you erase the unnecessary code and everything will go ok.

Smart Former Gold upload files

monimanu — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:07:37 +0000

When creating a form using Smart Former Gold, you have the option to use a file upload. The files you upload are, first moved to:

../components/com_sfg/files/tmp

and after that moved to

../components/com_sfg/files

There are some things that you need to know. First is that all the files and folders in the com_sfg folder do not have write permissions, so, in order for the upload to work, make sure to change all the files and folder permissions to 777.

Second, when working with the uploaded file, through Jumi or other plugins, you have to make sure you use the correct file name. The idea is that, even though in the data base the name of the file stored is the same name as the file in you computer, actually on the server, when uploading it, the file name is changed. Smart Former Gold puts the id of the database in front of the file name, so, actually, the file name stored on the server becomes:

id-filaname

Scrolling modules on Paradox template

monimanu — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 15:19:24 +0000

Using the Paradox RocketTheme template for Joomla! I encountered the following problem: putting some images on the scrolling modules, some of them would load properly, others would fail to load, displaying a loading logo instead. The problem was not with the browser: different images failed to load on different browsers. I solved the problem by disabling the smartload feature of the template. You can do that by:

Extensions -> Template Manager -> rt_paradox -> Features -> smartload

Joomla Email Protection

monimanu — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 14:55:00 +0000

Using Jumi, I tried to display on a Joomla! page the an email address. The result was ok using Google Chrome, but on Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, the following piece of code appeared alongside the email address:

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The actual problem was because of a protection against spam-boots Joomla! added to its core. There are several ways arround it. First would be the obvious replacing the email address with something[dot].something[at]something[dot]com. The one that I chose (I am really unsatisfied with who the first solution looks like on the page), was to disable the email cloaking plugin that comes with Joomla! by default. You can do this at:

Extensions -> Plugin Manager -> Content: Email Cloaking -> Disable.

Having done that I got rid of the problem but now I had some breaches in the security of the website. After some google searching I discovered a plugin, similar with the email cloaking plugin of Joomla! that does not generate that error. You can download it here.