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Showing posts from July, 2012

Joomla / Eclipse: Use Eclipse to edit files

Even though I could use any Editor or Notepad, after some days of Joomla! I was yearning for some syntax highlighting and maybe even automatic code completion... I did some Java programming in the past, and I am really used to the Eclipse IDE. Eclipse IDE for JavaScript Web Developers seemed to be a good deal for what I was up to do, so I gave it a try. I feel kind of stupid even posting about this, but upon starting up Eclipse, I started to wonder how I would do that - being that Eclipse works with projects, and I didn't want to put all of my components into an Eclipse workspace, and I didn't want to put up a subversioning system. Turns out it is quite simple: Right-click somewhere in the package explorer,  select 'New', 'Project...'. In the dialog, open the folder 'General' and select 'Project'. Click 'Next'. For the name, I usually put the com_componentname / mod_modulename, as in my file system. But I don't think it matters.

Joomla! 2.5: Component as Article

Can you put a component on a page together with other articles? Like, for example, to have a component and a blog layout on the "Home" page? Yes, you can! There are some nice extensions that allow for this. I used the "Plugin Include Component" plugin, which is available on extensions.joomla.org . With this plugin, you simply create an article that contains a special tag, indicating the component to include. Just like this: Install the plugin and put the following code in whatever article you need it in (substitute 'componentName' and 'viewname' for your component's and view's name...). {component url='index.php?option=com_ componentName &view= viewname '}

Joomla! 2.5: Menu Items

Some time ago, I started to create my own components. Everything was working fine, but there was one thing that bugged me (even though it is not really necessary... it just looked strange): When I create a link to my component, I always ended up with something like this in my menu manager: Similar thing for the menu item type: I felt like I somehow missed something, but the tutorials did not say anything about it. After playing around for a little while, I found out that the solution actually is pretty simple: The site > views > viewname > tmpl > default.xml file specifies these texts. Joomla! will look for these keys in the language files. Thus, you just need to add some entries to the language files and voila - everything looks nice and clean, just like this: Step-By-Step: Let's assume you already created the default.xml file with contents similar to these: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <metadata>