Category: Joomla

What is the xreference Meta and Joomla External Reference Field?

The reference field is not something that is new in Joomla 1.6 and up. Joomla 1.5 had a ‘Key Reference’ field in the articles advanced parameters tab. What is different is where the field is now found and the way the data entered is utilised.

In Joomla 1.5 the content of the key reference field wasn’t actually utilised at all. It was a spare field which you could use in a template override to quote an external reference, or change the name in the language files and use for whatever you want.

In Joomla 3 there is a new field in the Metadata Options called ‘External Reference’ which comes with the tooltip ‘An optional reference used to link to external data sources’. The reason why the field has moved from parameters to metadata is obvious – it is now used to output a meta tag, but what is this xreference tag and more to the point, what is it used for?

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Disabling Joomla’s Auto Update by Extensions

Template overrides are great, but sometimes you have no choice but to take a component apart to get it to do what you want it to do. It’s great that all the code is open and you are able to do that too.  What’s not great is when you hand over that site to someone else and then an update notification pops up, prompting the new owner to undo all your hard work and ultimately break the site.

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Stripping Joomla 3

So Joomla 3 has been around for a while now and seems stable enough that you can use it for production sites without having to check up on it everyday to see if anything new has broken. And with a new site comes a new template. As always, I wanted it to be fast loading, so I set out to investigate what it is that joomla is inserting into my site.

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YRNO2 Joomla 2.5 beta module available

I’ve just finished the basics of the next version of the popular yrno joomla module.

YRNO2 is Joomla 2.5 specific and has a load of new features including:

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Google+ Timeline Feed for your Website

Posted in Joomla

I was asked earlier today to create a Google+ widget for a website to replace a twitter widget. I was suprised but also interested to get it working.

Currently there is no widget maker from Google but there is an api which allows you to do the same thing.

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Translate K2store Product Attributes with Joomfish

If you have a K2store and your site is in multiple languages, you might have found that there was no way to translate your product attributes and their options.

Now there is……..

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French Translations for K2store

Posted in Joomla

I have been working recently with the K2 component/plugin K2store.

As a simple shopping cart it works great, but I had a nightmare trying to get hold of any translation files.

The forum is full of people asking questions about how to translate different parts of the store into lots of different languages, but no one has uploaded any of their finished files. I posted a few weeks ago about setting up a downloads section which was promiced to be added to the downloads section but as yet hasn’t happened. I imagine they are working on a 1.7 version as K2 was recently released for 1.6/1.7.

Unfortunatly forum posts aren’t live until approved by a moderator so it can be weeks before you get any reply.

Anyway, I got the language file translated into French and thought I would post it here for anybody who needs it. There may be some parts missing as my store was quite heavily modified, but for most installs it should be fine.

Download: French Translation for K2store

How I Upgraded to Joomla 1.7

Inspired by Robert Vining over at www.joomstew.com and the fact that I am building most of my new sites using Joomla 1.7, I decided it was time to finally migrate this site to the latest Joomla version.

I think the actual decision maker was when I was adding about 50 flickr gallery modules to a site using 1.7 and found the new ‘save as copy’ feature saved me about 50% of the time it would normally take to save and create new modules for each page.

So, how did it all go?

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Playing with Adobe Edge and getting the Output into a Joomla site

Last night I had my first play with the new Adobe Edge prieview (available free to download and works for just over 100 days). It creates flash style objects using only html, css and javascript.

Having never really used flash before I was unfamilliar with the layout of the program (it’s a kind of cut down flash ui) but with the help of youtube I managed to knock something out in about an hour, including the time taken to prepare some images to use.

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K2 Store Quickicons Admin Module Released

I just made a quick module based on the K2 Quickicons admin module to add the quickicons from the K2store component to the Joomla dashboard.

After just building a site for a client with K2store, I thought the only reason they would want to go to the back-end of the site regularly (It is an online rental site and the products don’t change) would be to check on the orders if they ever lost any of the emails.

For that reason, I just adapted the K2 admin module to show the K2store icons and repackaged it.

You can download the module here

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