I’ve got another post up over at Group 3 Solutions. We’ve turned our attention away from WordPress Plugins over to Joomla Plugins this time around. First up is Joomla Tabs & Slides. The post gives some background on tabs as a concept and then shows how to easily implement them in Joomla using this plugin. Enjoy!

Been tinkering around with custom Joomla 1.5 component development. Here are some helpful getting started links with “Hello world” -level tutorials:

1. vojtechovsky.net
2. softmarket.ro
3. packtpub.com

Out of the box, Joomla 1.5 is a powerhouse of functionality. But as with any stock system, there are a few things that may need to be tweeked in order to get the result you want or expect. Take Joomla menu controls for instance. They’re fine and functional, and 90% of the time no additional work is necessary. But a common practice with menus is to output them as unordered lists (ul) and then style them with CSS instructions. So, say you want to have your menu display on a horizontal line, with pipe separators between each menu item. Easy enough to define a style for this by specifying a right- or left-side border for list items in the menu. But since that rule would apply to all the list items (including first and last), you’ll have an extra pipe (at the end or the beginning). With manually constructed menus you can simply add a special class to the last (or first) list item that will style it differently (to remove the unwanted pipe). But with Joomla menus, each list item is the same, so there’s no ability to tag one with a special class. What to do?

That’s where Joomla 1.5’s new drop-dead simple module override functionality comes into play. Jisse Reitsma explains it very well over at his tutorial on Joomla module overrides at Open Source Network. In his tutorial, he explains how to alter the menu module to automatically tag the first and last list item with “first” and “last” classes. The short version is that Joomla 1.5 allows you to define a module override by simply making a folder named the same as the module you are modifying, copying the output template of the module into this new folder, and adjusting as necessary. So in essence, you’re copying a part of the module into a new location (see tutorial for specifics), modifying it, and Joomla automatically uses your modified version instead of the stock version. This prevents your mod from getting overwritten by Joomla upgrades. Brilliant!

I’ve already got this technique working on a couple of my own installations, and plan to add this mod to every theme from now on. That is, unless the Joomla devs go ahead and just build it into into the core at some point. Hint hint.

Well, I must confess that this WordPress plugin for Joomla would rock if it works as described. Comments on the page are hit and miss, so looks like I’ll have to try it out for myself to get a better idea. Groan. =)

Here’s an oddity that I don’t quite understand, but am happy to simply note the solution for. =)

Installed Phoco Gallery on two sites recently. On the first site everything works fine. On the second site clicking a thumbnail generates a 404 error. Hmm. Everything is configured the same, but I found this post on their support forums that offered a solution. It wasn’t the exact same problem I was having, though. I was using the Random Image component instead of the Tree component, so it wasn’t clear if it would be the same problem or not. In the end, simply creating a menu item (on any menu) that is a Phoca Gallery page will alleviate the problem. I checked, and on the older site I did indeed have a test menu item for Phoca. On the new site I did not. Adding a menu item for Phoca (even though unused) was enough. How strange, but at this point I’m just happy it worked! =)

Update: It appears the menu item has to be published and not in the Menu Trash. Heh. =) I stuck it on an unused menu.

After installing Joomla, remember to:

1. Set the RSS feed cache directory (/cache) to writable (I used 777, not sure if that’s required, but 666/664 didn’t seem to work), or the RSS feed module will throw up an error in its output.
2. If adjusting template configuration, make sure and make the template’s params.ini file to writable (666 worked).

Another DOCman issue, this time with a plugin I hadn’t tried before called AutoThumb 1.41. Installing through the normal ZIP upload method returned the following error:

JFTP::mkdir: Bad response
JFTP::chmod: Bad response
JInstaller::install: Failed to create directory. “/[path]/plugins/docman/autothumb/libraries/phpthumb/cache/source”
Install mambot Error

So, the solution was to change the ownership of the /plugins/docman directory, and then give 666 permissions to the files inside it. Once this was done, the normal install process worked fine. =)

Ok, there are a couple of gotchas when installing DOCman 1.4x with Joomla 1.5x. The readme.txt file is less than helpful, but the short version is this:

1. Temporarily allow 777 permissions on the following three directories (this can be found in the DOCman support forum):
   /
   /administrator/modules/
   /plugins/
2. Install plugin as normal (I uploaded the ZIP using the standard Joomla installer).
3. After the install you’ll get an error message like “Warning: fopen([path]/administrator/components/com_docman/docman.config.php) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in [path]/administrator/components/com_docman/classes/DOCMAN_config.class.php on line 121
   To alleviate this, change /administrator/components/com_docman/docman.config.php to be 666 writable (probably forever, but that assumes you’ll be changing your DOCman options as you toy with it).
4. Set permissions back to 755 on the three directories from step 1.

Voila!

Note: After this is done, no permissions changes need to be made to install the various official Joomla add-ons (which are indispensable) through the normal ZIP upload method:

• DOCLink
• DOCman Search
• mod_docman_catdown
• mod_docman_latestdown
• mod_docman_lister
• mod_docman_mostdown

Add-ons available at the DOCman downloads page.