Tagged: Joomla

All websites designed by Freshpage are built upon a user friendly content management system. This means that you can log in 24 hours a day and make changes directly to your website, saving a fortune on website maintenance costs.  Of course if you have any problems or questions when using the system, Freshpage will be on hand to help.

If you use the FLEXIcontent Joomla extension, and have enabled the FLEXIcontent search, you may want to be able to order your search results by relevance to the keyword search phrase. Unfortunately, this isn't currently possible.

As a workaround, I've written a hack for the FLEXIcontent search file which checks to see if the search phrase is in the title of the item. If it is, it simply swaps the item with the first in the search results. This isn't perfect, but it will mean that if someone types in the exact title of the article they want, that article will be first in the returned results!

Updated January 2013: The latest version of advanced module manager includes support for flexicontent, so there is no more need for this hack.

Advanced Module Manager is a fantastic Joomla extension which allows complete control over where Joomla modules are displayed. The major drawback I found with it is that it doesn't fully support FLEXIcontent.

FLEXIcontent is, for me, a must have extension, which massively increases the control over how articles are displayed and how they interact with each other. I use it for all news, article and magazine websites that I build, the latest example being RusArtNet, where it allows easy displaying of images and linking between related articles.

Luckily a FLEXIcontent user named Rehne produced a hack for Advanced Module Manager supporting allocation of modules based on the FLEXIcontent category:

Advanced Module Manager and FLEXIcontent

I've updated this hack to work with the current latest version of Advanced Module Manager (v1.16.5), which you can download here EDIT: link removed. I'll proably update this hack as and when I need the latest version of Advanced Module Manager.

XMap is an excellent plugin for Joomla which dynamically generates both an HTML and an XML sitemap for your website. However, it has a problem where the homepage URL is not generated in a Search Engine Friendly way. Most people do not want their homepage URL to contain anything but the basic site URL (www.yoursite.co.uk), but XMap will always append the alias of the homepage menu item, for example www.yoursite.co.uk/home.html.

To fix this, open you will need to change the following two files in the XMap installation:

components/com_xmap/xmap.html.php
components/com_xmap/xmap.xml.php

Find the following line in both files:

$link = Xmap::getItemLink($node);

and add the following line immediately after:

$link = str_replace('/home.html', '/', $link);

You may need to clear the XMap cache via components->xmap->options in order to see the changes applied.