The Techjoomla Blog

Zoo is one of the most versatile CCK extensions available in Joomla. It's flexible & at the same time easy to use for end users. In spite of these positive points, there are times when you have to dive into development & Zoo APIs to develop your own custom views.

In this particular case, we wanted to develop a List/Grid view with Zoo ( of a particular Content Type)  which showed all Zoo attributes in a table view for easier data viewing on the frontend for content managers. In this blog, we will tell you just how to go about doing that

Zoo is one of the best CCK extensions available for Joomla. It's a flexible and powerful application builder to manage your content. Especially if you are having huge data sets, Zoo can be an awesome way to manage & present it all. However with large data sets, manually adding all the data might not be practical. This is where the inbuilt Zoo import tool can help you in a big way.

In this blog, we will show you how it works & also how we solve a problem that it presents if you have data with lots & lots of fields. When this happens during the import you need to manually Map the fields in your Import CSV/JSON file to the fields in Zoo so that the import can proceed. However when you have lots of fields it a huge chore to map them all manually. However, with our solution, you can do it in a single Click! 

Lets how the existing Zoo Data Import Works ( Just in case you didn't know ! ) 

Data import done in following 3 stages. Zoo allows you to import data in JSON or CSV format. 

1. Upload CSV/JSON file.

This blog is going to be mostly about the thought process behind creating the extensions we currently have & ones that are planned & how these can help your Social Networks grow & sustain. It will also talk about Social Networks in general & how you can make them more effective.

We have worked on the 'Social Network' concept before the first of them were born. It was just not called Social Networking then! Well, a lot of the pieces were there.. but still it wasn't what a Social Network is now. Launched in August 2003, MySpace was one of the forerunners. This was followed by Orkut in Jan 2004 & Facebook in February 2004. Only mentioning a few biggies here. These were the ones that brought about the Web's latest revolution. With such personalized connections, the web suddenly got viral & revolutionized almost all aspects of our life. There's a lot more you can read about the history of Social Networks on Wikipedia.

And then suddenly creating Social Networks became the most in-demand thing & everyone wanted one of their own! In our own Joomla community, a lot of players emerged making it pretty easy to get started with your own network.

Read on to know how you can make your Social Networks more effective..

I might end up starting another Social Extensions debate here but I haven't come across a blog or article that addresses a large cross-section of them. I wish this turns out to be more of a bloggy discussion than just a blog. With the web landscape littered with a lot of software to create your Social network both in & outside the Joomla Commun...

I have been doing some Magento related development recently & came across a twitter community they have around a Hashtag. Anyone with questions about Magento can post them with this hashtag & someone is quick to answer. I guess it could help as a lot of people already use this media for short QA sessions & it's more easily accessible th...

Over the years we've been using various methods to deploy websites to servers. FTP is everyone's first love and hot favourite. But when GIT came along and we started using that our VCS of choice it became increasingly evident that we can use it for deployment too. The biggest challenge here was managing the database.  Because of the way new table c...

Chatbots are a great new way to engage with clients. A chatbot allows for a more "conversational" style of interaction as opposed to the traditional "transactional" way of interacting with web applications. A well-designed conversation experience can keep users hooked and increase the time spent with your applications. In this blog, we write about how we used FlowXO to create a quizzing bot for Shika

Why have plugin triggers?

The ability to add Plugin Triggers in your Joomla extensions, is a great asset to developers which is not always used to the fullest extent.. Having various Plugin events in your extension means that you give other developers the ability to extend your extension, or modify it to suit their requirements without having to hack core files. The same logic that is used by Joomla content plugins or JomSocial plugins etc can also be applied to your extensions.

Use of Plugin triggers when hacking/ modifying extensions

At Tekdi Web Solutions we do a lot of Joomla Service & get client needs to modify extensions left & right. Where possible this is always done using Plugins & overrides. But the time comes when a hack has to be made. To reduce the impact, instead of modifying the whole extension, we just add plugin triggers where needed & usually send back the modifications to the original developer where possible. This serves two purposes. One is that the code maintenance is way easier & its very easy to document & identify these small hacks. Secondly, there is always a chance that if the main dev accepts your patch, these "hacks" might become regularised in the future.  Even if they aren't, it's still much easier to re-patch the extension with plugin triggers.

So in order to share this knowledge, I asked one of our Developers, Shantanu to write a small blog about how you can go about adding triggers. Shantanu is just one of the new bloggers I shall be introducing to this blog in the next few weeks. So stay tuned for more!
Over to Shantanu for the same! Read on to read the full blog!

Parth Lawate

Note: This Blog is targeted towards Developers! We will be going through a detailed step by step process of writing a JMailAlerts Plugin. Extending JMailAlerts needs you to create special plugins of the type 'emailalerts' Before we Proceed: Replace your new plugin name “myplugin” The code required adding a custom xml parameter is skipped A. File St...

There has been a growing trend to start offering RESTful services for any web product, and Joomla is no exception. With Joomla, however, there is no "preferred" way of writing RESTful services so everyone (that includes us) is trying to build their own component and plugin to enable RESTful services in Joomla. We did the very first REST implementat...

We recently had a special case scenario where we had to develop a Quick2Cart plugin to sell Joomla Categories.  We were consistently hitting a wall trying to show our custom fieldset for Quick2Cart in the Joomla Category Add/Edit view. We already have a content plugin for this which shows Quick2Cart in Joomla content items. But it simply wasn't wor...

While doing some R & D work while working on J!MailAlert plugins, we realized that majority of extensions were not using the right way. This resulted in broken image links, especially when using Amazon S3. So here's some easy to use code snippets to fetch JomSocial Photo thumbnails, Video thumbnails, Group Avatar thumbnails etc..This is missing...

Once in a while, all of us come across a site that still feels a bit laggy even after doing all the caching & gzipping. Adding appropriate indexes to Joomla's tables can improve query times, effectively decreasing page load times. Depending on your table structure and the amount of data, indexing could mean massive to a slight performance impro...

When developing a new Joomla extension or making changes to existing extension, you might need to access plugin parameters of a Joomla plugin outside the plugin code. There can be cases where you want to access plugin parameters in some Joomla module or component. Now the question is - How to get plugin parameters outside the plugin code? Here is a...

Reliable email delivery is key in web applications, you don't want your customers to miss that order confirmation email or skip that very important Social Network notification. When using a service like Amazon SES, that additionally helps you improve your email sending quota if your web host gives you a rather small quota. It's fairly easy to get u...