iris lines designs

On a site using the Joomla Bamboo template Pure, I was having trouble with footer not clearing the sidebar.  I discovered that a custom html module with just a non-breaking space in the bottom position would fix the problem.  I didn't mind the dark banner that stretched across the screen and I was willing to live with this work around  (having tried all kinds of clears, etc. on the footer module.)

Then I discovered that that "fix"  didn't fix it in PC browsers:  Firefox and IE8.   Consulting the joomla bamboo forum I found a similar issue with a suggestion to be sure images had explicit heights.   I added heights to my flickr and facebook modules and the problem was solved.   The PC browsers were apparently not reading the heights declared for the iframes used by these modules.    And the template seemed to need to calculate a total height for the sidebar.

I'm preparing a talk for JoomlaDay NYC on Alternative Layouts and Custom Menu Item Types.  There had been so many posts on the joomla.org forum about these new capabilites of Joomla 1.6 and 1.7,  and so many were complaining that the "feature" simply didn't work, I was getting a bit worried about the presentation.   I had proved them working back in the spring for a presenation at Joomla Day New England, but had things changed in the subsequent versions?

Finally last week I had a chance to put them all through their paces and the good news is that Alternative Layouts and Custom Menu Item Types DO indeed work --  for all kinds of Joomla items:   articles, contacts, weblinks, and category displays like blogs and lists.

The ONE Joomla entity where my template overrides (which worked) could not be turned into Alternative Layouts OR  Custom Menu Item Types  was the com_content layout for Categories.

Szaki Table is a Joomla Extension that allows sorting a table by any column header.

I used it on a client's site to make a list of educational opportunities sortable by date, location, type.   All was well until we added a column for cost and entered cost in US Dollars using the $ sign.

The entire table was replicated in the cell with the $!  

I've uploaded my PPT presentation "What's New in Templates with Joomla! 1.6"  as a .pdf file.

I've also uploaded a .txt file of all of the snippets for a basic template. 

This topic came up on the Joomla New England list and Terry posted the solution:

In case anyone needs to know, what worked was to split the FBML version of the code in two. That is, paste the script tag at the bottom of the head tag in the template HTML, then paste the rest of the code into the module (or article). In other words:

My puzzle was that my alternative layout for a category blog would not show up as a choice in the category manager.

I turned to the Joomla Forum  and found that others had posted about their alternative layouts not being implemented, even when they chose them for a particular category.

Here's what I posted in reply:

Two years ago I blogged about a solution to have different "read-more" links for different sections of a website.

With Joomla! 1.6 it would be possible to have two variations of the php file that generates the blog,  one that would include the words "read-more" and one that wouldn't.   Since this affects the display in the blog "page", not the individual articles, this layout alternative would actually need to be an alternative menu item type.

Here's how you would do it: