PHP-CSS-DIV-CMS Joomla-Java Info

Show Different Content to Different Joomla Users

23.07.10

Yesterday I showed how to Hide Columns When Editing the Front End of Joomla as it often causes overlap issues that make editing difficult. In this post I'll show a quick and easy way to show different content to different users. Being able to show different content to registered and logged in visitors is a very common request for a Joomla site. By default, you can have Joomla show the "intro" copy to guests and they must to log in to see the rest. But what if you want to show some specific content to guest visitors, and then different content to registered users once they have logged in. There are a couple of extensions that give this functionality, but as a rule of thumb, I'll always trying and use the core if I can to get what I want. In this case, I figured out a simple method that worked for my needs.

Join me next week for the 2nd in the series of free Joomla webcasts from Safari Books Online.

Its on Tuesday, April 6, 2010 1:00 pm EST and I'll be looking at how you can take advantage of the more advanced features of Joomla to make a successful website for your organization or business.

10 attendees will get signed copies of the best selling Joomla book - Joomla - A User's Guide. The last webcast filled up quickly, so make sure you register now!

One of the new features in Joomla 1.6 is more choice for the template in the administrator backend. I was able to spend a few minutes with Andrea Tarr of Tarr Consulting (www.tarrconsulting.com), the brains behind this new accessible admin template, and ask her about it.

Joomla! 1.5 was notable for the inclusion of the Beez template. For the first time Joomla was shipping with a solution for creating accessible websites. With 1.6 we will be extending that to the backend with the addition of the accessible administrator template Hathor.

One of the great things about working at Simplweb is helping people quickly and easily launch their Joomla websites. Two recent launches we had have been a news website about Haiti and a small business Veterinary Hospital in Waterbury, VT. Two very different sites. Infohaiti.net provides up to date news from Haiti in a high article volume blog type format, and all in the french language. Waterburyvethospital.com is a small business brochure site for a brand new vet clinic that aims to establish their web presence.

I was surprised to see how much searching it took to find this solution and so thought it worthy of a blog post...

... When installing a fresh copy of Joomla 1.5 you may notice that it comes with a configuration.php-dist file; my assumption upon seeing this was that I should rename it 'configuration.php' and chmod it 777 so that the installer could write the values I fill in during installation to the file.

Well, don't worry about the configuration.php file until the end of the install walkthrough screens; you're likely to get an error when trying to install sample data using a pre-defined configuration.php file - instead, wait until the last install screen where a congratulations message is displayed, then copy the code it provides into an empty file called configuration.php and upload it to root.

More info @ the forums...

There are a few people whose every word I follow and try to incorporate into my business, and Brian Clark of CopyBlogger.com and Teaching Sells is one of them.

In 2008, Brian launched his Teaching Sells course. A complete guide to setting up and running and online paid membership websites. It was insanely popular, I joined up right when his doors opened, and so did people like Aaron Wall (of SEO Book).

After 2 rounds of students, Brian closed his doors and has been busy im[...]

Joomlashack's Inspirion Joomla Template is one of the most innovative templates currently on the market. Its built using the 960 grid, a CSS system that gives you a tableless layout and a fast loading site, great for SEO!

Its one of the first commercial professional templates to validate XHTML Strict. This is a high benchmark t[...]

It's 2011 and it's a great time to start a freelance web design business. What's even better is to do it providing services for open source CMSs, like, say, Joomla! To help a budding freelancer start 2011 firing on all cylinders, I have gathered a massive giveaway drawing packed with subscriptions, hosting, books and clubs worth thousands of dollars. Will you be the lucky one? Read on to find out how to enter the drawing.

We have just added a 6 month subscription to Safari Books Online in our massive Joomla Freelance Web Designer Giveaway, bringing the prizes to over $1600 worth.

Have you entered?

When is Joomla 1.6 coming out? What has changed in Joomla 1.6? Should I use Joomla 1.5 or 1.6?

In the same way when 1.5 came out and people were wondering about their 1.0 websites, the same questions are being asked again of Joomla 1.6.

Let's look into our crystal ball and try and answer these three questions!

When is Joomla 1.6 coming out?

Right now Joomla 1.6 is in alpha. That's the first of a series of stages that it will go through before its ready to use on a prod[...]

The following draft text has been drawn up in order to clarify and further define the nomination and election process to OSM board positions. We invite you to submit your feedback via the Joomla! People site link at the bottom. Thank you! 

Elections: Two calendar periods are generally planned for elections each year: April and October. Exceptions can be made if the board vitally needs specific skills (for example, if the Treasurer leaves).

Number of Board members: The recommended number of board members to carry out the responsibilities of OSM is 13. This number may fluctuate up to 15 or down to 11.

Term Limits: All future board appointments will be for one 2-year period with exceptions possible if the board vitally needs specific skills (Treasurer, Legal Council).

Selection Criteria:

• Community: nominees should have a strong track record of successfully collaborating with, enabling others, and earning the respect of the Joomla! community.
• Character: nominees should have demonstrated integrity, with a history of acting honestly, fairly and openly when in leadership roles.
• Experience and Expertise: nominees being proposed for specific roles should have strong experience and expertise in those areas.
• Success: nominees should be able to point to a history of success and leaving previous roles in a better state than when they arrived.
• Diversity: our goal is to work toward, and honor gender and cultural diversity. We are committed to seeking nominations from all talented and dedicated members of our international Joomla! community.

Election Procedure:

• Public nominations open on the 1st of the month and close on the 14th. Nominations must be made with the agreement of the nominee.
• The OSM board examines the candidates and suggests names to the Community Oversight Committee (COC) before the end of the month.
• The COC approval takes 10 business days to approve or reject the names.
• OSM contacts the successful and unsuccessful nominees. 

Click here for discussion and feedback on the Joomla! People site.

(This post is in reply to one that Dries Buytaert wrote on OStatic.com)

I agree with Dries that Open Source CMS' are putting more power into the hands of people who may not know or want to learn code, and that as their learning curves get less steep we will see more people jumping into creating and growing their websites themselves; depending on the type of website they want to have.

We've of course seen the *huge* acceptance of wordpress for simple content publishing (read: 'blogging') amongst all sorts of people ranging from tech pros to near-luddites.  As people use more websites that have richer feature sets everyday they'll no doubt want to see the functionality of those sites in their own; for a while yet, though it may not require custom coding, I think the role of 'web master' or 'web developer' or whatever-you-want-to-call-them will be around for quite some time.

That role will continue to exist but may change to focus on conceptualizing the end result and making it happen with the right combination (and configuration) of 3rd party modules/extensions; whether through just hand-holding/teaching people wanting to develop their own sites or actually putting the pieces together themselves.

I'm really excited for Mark Boulton's redesign of Drupal 7; right now a major hindrance to non-technical people using Drupal is its stratified admin interface, which often leads to developers custom-creating UX per-project to suit each client's administrative needs.

To help people jump-start their web projects we've taken a hard look at another Open Source CMS called Joomla for example, and come up with a packaged solution called Seedling (http://www.plantseedling.com).

Seedling's distribution of Joomla is cool because it comes pre-configured and loaded with a suite of extensions and easily changeable theme; so people can develop their web projects a lot quicker and with more power under the hood.  Plus, it comes with optional email/ticket support - so new adopters of Joomla can get help when they need it.

Until core installs of Open Source CMS' are a lot more user friendly I think solutions like Seedling will really help bridge the gap for those folks who want to learn via DIY and/or can't afford the services of web developers.

There are so many reasons to making your site easily visible on Social Networking websites and platforms - they raise general visibility and offer access to communities which may not otherwise find the information you spend time publishing in your posts.

Of course, one of the most agile word-of-mouth Social platforms on the web is Twitter and you may have recently noticed a pretty cool widgety thing people are using on their blogs/sites to include a 'retweet' link and counter of how many times a post has been tweeted - its powered by a site called 'Tweetmeme' and installs pretty easily on any website - whether using static html or a CMS like Joomla.

When you take a peek at the tweetmeme page containing the necessary embed code it may not be too easy to tell how to use it with your Joomla site - and though there's a couple of plugins/extension floating around Joomla, it may not offer the flexibility you require for clean theming/templating.  However, there's an easy way to go about embedding this and all it takes is a small modification of the de facto embed code. 

All you have to do is:

• copy the following code(s),
• replace 'http://mysite.com' with your own root URL and:
• replace 'twitterhandle' with your twitter handle (if you want reweets to automagically incude @yourtwitterhandle - you can opt to delete that line from the code otherwise.

For individual article template files (eg 'templates > your_template  > html > com_content > article > default.php'):

  <script type="text/javascript">  tweetmeme_style = 'compact';  tweetmeme_url = 'http://mysite.com<?php echo $this->article->readmore_link; ?>';  tweetmeme_source = 'twitterhandle';  </script>  

For article list pages - like section or category template files (eg 'templates > your_template  > html > com_content > category > blog_item.php'):

  <script type="text/javascript">  tweetmeme_style = 'compact';  tweetmeme_url = 'http://mysite.com<?php echo $this->item->readmore_link; ?>';  tweetmeme_source = 'twitterhandle';  </script>

The trick then is to take this code and include it in the appropriate version of your theme's template files - Of course, you can see I've wrapped the code in a div called 'tweetmeme' so you can then add in some css for that div wherever you want in your template to style the tweetmeme widget.  You can learn more about Joomla templates and the files which they can comprise of in the official documentation wiki.

Basically what we've done here is include some php to tell the embed code the specific URL for each post - so the widget works cleanly on individual article pages as well as displays showing multiple articles at once.

*You can see the widget in action here on this site above - just below the title of each post. Try it out and retweet this post to see how it works!

One of the great things about the recent Joomla! Developers Conference in New York was that, with Andrew, Ian, Louis, Ron, Sam, and myself, we had all four Development Coordinators plus a majority of the Production Work Group all in one place for the very first time. This gave us the chance to talk in depth about an important issue that is critical to the future of the project -- the release cycle.

As many of you know, version 1.5 was released in January of 2007, almost 2 years ago. That means that it will be over 2 years between versions 1.5 and 1.6. I think most of us would agree that this is too long between versions. But just saying we should release more often doesn't address the underlying issues and challenges.

Fortunately, Louis had given this a lot of thought, and he led a discussion of how we can get to a more dynamic release cycle while preserving the stability and reliability that our users have come to expect. I wrote up a short proposal based on that discussion and just posted it to the General Development list here.

As I stress in that post, although we are excited about this idea, it is only a proposal at this point. We want to hear your feedback before we make any decisions. So, if this is a subject that you care about, please read, consider, and then let us know your thoughts. Thanks!

The Community Workgroup Teams were busy as ever during the month of August. Below are the reports rounded up from the Community Workgroup Google Group.

Ecommerce in Joomla has popped its head up several times over the last few days. First, over the weekend I got a question from a potential Joomla hosting customer at Simplweb asking if we offered any shopping cart extensions. Then I read an article on the Joomla Magazine about best practice for ecommerce in Joomla. Last was an announcement from JoomlaJunkie about using PayPal checkout. For most ecommerce applications I have seen from clients, I think that in most cases, an integrated Joomla shopping cart extension isn't the best solution. Keep is simple and use a 3rd party application to take orders and checkout your customer.

Source