iris lines designs

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.

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:

I'm getting ready for two conferences this spring and have worked up a new Templates card with all the php snippets plus sections on Template Overrides, Layout Overrides, Custom Menu Item Types, and Parameters.

I'm in proofreading mode on the  NEW Template Cheat Sheet for Joomla! 1.6.   This one will be yellow with a yellow iris in the corners.

If you'd like a sneak peak, or to be a proofreader of the new one -- before I go to print -- email me and I'll send you a pdf.    I'll have a limited edition of the new sheet for Joomla Day New England, which is April 2, 2011.     I'll also have both 1.5 and 1.6 Cheat Sheets for my presentations at CMS Expo May 2-4 in Evanston, IL.

My purple Template Cheat Sheet 2 handed out at Joomla! events in New England and the CMS Expo 2010 has a typo in the section called "Making Beez Better"

The sheet reads:
$this>escape

but should have said this:
$this->escape

A question was posted in the Joomla! New England  forum about getting rid of the titles from the read more links generated by the Beez template overrides.  Here is how I responded:

The Beez template was designed for accessibility.

It is an accessibility No-No  to have multiple links on the same page with the same text that point to different urls -- so...
the Beez template overrides  pull in the article title, creating unique links to the various articles.

At the CMS Expo I shared a site I had developed for the University of Massachusetts:  New England Greenhouse Up-dates  http://negreenhouseupdate.info.  I've gotten several emails from Expo attendees asking about the extensions used, so here's that info.

Note:  I had to edit this blog entry in order to save it --  all references to up-dates would normallly not have the hyphen, but my host has great security and will not allow certain database terms to be used in an article or blog.   I will need to ask them to make an exception for this site and will edit the blog post once that is done.

The site features a blog of “up-dates” about all the things that can go wrong in greenhouses – and best practices to avoid them.  Some articles are just text, while a photo library provides a visual database organized in categories.  When we began the conversion to Joomla! we considered various photo gallery extensions, but ended up using regular Jooma! articles and two separate category blog displays.