More fucking around with the autoSuggest scripts today…
I dropped autoSugget in favor of the built-in jQuery autocomplete. Works identically, and I have it working. There’s just one caveat. If you focus on a result using the keyboard it will put the value instead of the id into the textbox. This is just wrong. If you use the mouse, it puts the member’s name in the textbox. I don’t get it.
I encountered this PHP error message for the first time today. I think this should have been something I’d uncovered much earlier. But here it is anyway: ” Illegal offset type in isset or empty”. This happened to me when I passed in an array argument where a string was expected.
This media plugin from david persson is pretty complicated. I finally have it setup so that it’s putting records in my attachments table. But I’m not seeing the tmp directory with UUID filenames. I need that. I’ve stopped wrestling with this for now, posted up a couple of messages to google groups and stackoverflow.com. Will see what kind of advice comes along.
Next up are a couple features I need: one-time password for “forgot my password” functionality, and auto-suggest for the member search form. This is sort-of working. I think that I need to take some lessons from the construction of this plugin and modify my signup process slightly.
Now I’m onto the Auto Suggest stuff for my search page. I first need to make an ajax service for the jQuery to work. My ajax url seems to work, I think that I just need to coerce my json_encode() output as well as maybe tweak my model (using virtual fields?) to fit the format of what autoSuggest jQuery expects.
Well ain’t that a bitch…I’ve changed the Joomla site so that it now uses built-in fancy css-menus from the Quasar RocketTheme template…but the menus work like shit in IE 8. Works great if you enable “compatibility mode” in IE 8…basically making it act like it’s IE 7. So I guess the Rockettheme guys have developed to IE 7 instead of IE 8. I trust there will be a workaround to be found. The funny thing is…in IE 7 compatibility mode my transparent gradient background and background coloring works the way I want it to. Not in any of the other browsers though…
Working on rebuilding the public-facing site today. It is a real PITA. Lots of SQL wrangling.
The SQL wrangling is going okay. Now I am trying to figure out how to pull in some of the gantry features. The documentation is god awful. I have even signed on to the the IRC channel to try and get the skinny from developers there. No luck yet…
I think the way to go is to take a look at one of the more full-featured free downloads from the rockettheme site. The one called Quasar might have the suckerfish menu in use. Or a better menu…
I might have solved this mystery. I installed the Quasar template to try out its menus. After fiddling with it for a longgggg time I finally found an option in the main menu module which says “always show submenu items.” Setting this to Yes made my sub items show up finally.
Turns out that when you delete Extra Field Groups and Field Groups (maybe?) from K2, it will delete the items under those groups too. Wtf.
And the import articles process in K2 requires that your content be at least assigned to a Section. I just made one called “System” and used that.
Also, it appears that you’re supposed to link in the menus to K2 Content Items…instead of plain old Joomla Articles. I am not sure what the difference between the two will really be.
This is quickly getting out of control. I’d love to have some of those user-permissions capabilities as well as customizable templates, and I also like the way author and other metadata is laid out, this K2 idea might be a bad one.
I did find a place to edit Category & Item parameters globally, but there are also other levels at which you can edit these: Category, Sub-Category, Item, and Module.
Ultimately it was the Module level settings which “fixed my problem.” But I am growing to think that K2 is the actual source of more problems than it fixes, in my case.
One tangible benefit that I can see, is that if it is actually tricky to associate small column-header images for articles, the typers will not have to do any coding whatsoever.
I am going to use the K2 after all. They’ve included some user/group permissions capabilities. I need a better sort of presentation manager for the articles. One which lets me setup a small image that can be shown in the teaser along with a “Read more” link to the full article.
So far so good with the K2 stuff. Wasn’t too bad to setup, but I need to wrap my head around the bigger picture. The features I was hoping for seemed easily within reach with K2 so that’s good.
