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Here at OSTraining, we're huge fans of Hikashop. We have an in-depth video class on Hikashop[1] and cover it regularly on this blog.
We think Hikashop is the best way to build a Joomla e-commerce store.
We're delighted to have hosted a webinar with Nicolas Claverie, the lead developer of Hikashop. Nicolas showed us to power up our Hikashop sites and get them ready for the holiday season.
Here is a complete replay of the webinar:
About the author
Steve is the founder of OSTraining. Originally from the UK, he now lives in Sarasota in the USA. He was a teacher for many years before starting OSTraining. Steve wrote the best-selling Drupal and Joomla books.
Adventurers, globetrotters, and outdoor friends, check out Finch, our November 2015 release. This sophisticated theme provides tons of custom options and additional features to make browsing through your website a true experience. Its rich, textured widescreen layout makes it perfect for any kind of travel blog or magazine.
Finch comes with our own content builder Widgetkit 2, including three exclusive new custom widgets. The Popover widget allows you to position items through coordinates on top of a main image, which is chosen through the widget settings. Content will be displayed inside a dropdown triggered by each item. The custom Slider provides a special layout, placing the item's title outside the overlay and the custom Slideshow couples the navigation to its content.
With Finch we allow you to say goodbye to simplistic, flat
designs and bring graphical richness and depth back into your
layouts. You can add background images or textures to each module
position. Even border images will be added to your textured blocks.
Widgets/modules have additional options, like opacity and
alignment. And as a neat little feature, you can add background
textures to your text elements. Just add the
.tm-text-clip
class and a background image via inline
style to the element.
This theme includes 6 dark, light and colored styles. An additional Socialbar position lets you toggle social icons through a button that sticks to the side of the browser window. And of course, the adaptive navbar provides different sticky and transparency options. You can see all these features and more on a number of custom pages we’ve created to help you as a starting point for your own layouts.
Read more https://yootheme.com/component/blog/2015/11/02/finch-theme
Widgetkit is a very powerful tool provided by the YOOtheme template club.
Actually Widgetkit is not just one tool: it provides a whole set of extensions, bundled into one.
Widgetkit provides photo galleries, slideshows, maps, accordions and much more in one single extension.
Widgetkit 2 was released in January 2015 and is the successor to the original Widgetkit extension, released back in early 2012.
Widgetkit 2 is coded very efficiently, so where some other multimedia extensions tend to slow down your site, this one hardly does. This is no surprise, as YOOtheme is also known to provide extremely lightweight templates.
It only takes a little getting used to the extension, but once you grasp the logic, you will quickly learn how to create new widgets, and if you're creative you can build extremely good-looking modules.
The best way to learn the extension is to download the Widgetkit 2 demo package, which contains examples of all the widgets. You can then easily see how the individual widgets are built.
Here's an example of the many different tools that Widgetkit 2 provides:
Although I will not discuss in detail each of the tools, I will go into more depth on these in future blog posts.
Next to the default set of widgets, most YOOtheme templates also ship with one or two additional widgets, specifically useful for the particular template.
Of course YOOtheme takes care that Widgetkit combines very well with YOOtheme templates, but this is not a requirement. You can use Widgetkit perfectly well as a stand-alone extension and install it in any template, either one you built yourself or a framework like Gantry or T3.
If you like programming, you can even build your own widgets. YOOtheme has some documentation[1] about this.
Widgetkit uses it's own workflow, which means that the actual Widgets are maintained separate from where they are used. Often you would expect a widget to be used as a module, but you can just as easily use it directly inside in your content. So, first you create a widget, and then you put it somewhere.
Widgets are maintained in the Widgetkit Component, accessed via Components > Widgetkit. If you already have widgets you will see them listed here, plus a New button:
The easiest way to display an already created widget is as a module. If you have installed Widgetkit, it will also have created an unpublished Widgetkit module:
Either use this one to display your first widget, or create a new module of the type Widgetkit to create it. The module is very simple, and only has one option: select the widget you want to display here:
The second way to display widgets is directly in your content. This will usually be your articles, but it can also be a Custom HTML module. Implementation is very simple, just remember the Widget ID from the list in the component and use a tag to incorporate it in the required place, like this:
[widgetkit id="43"]
Luckily, there is also an easier way to add widgets: you will see a button at the bottom of the editor that allows you to select your widget from a list of existing ones. You can even create a new widget directly using this button.
What is very nice is that Widgetkit supports multiple data-sources, including these:
You can also learn how to build your own content types, though this requires some programming skills.
This allows you to not just use images in a slider or gallery, but you can also feed this from your Joomla or Zoo articles! We will see this in action in an example in a following post.
So, if you want to create a new widget, you first indicate the Content Type and then the Widget type. Then, you can fill in the details of the configuration.
In the next blogpost I will give you some simpler examples of creating new widgets.
Then in the third post I will show you some more advanced widgets, including using an RSS feed of Joomla content.
About the author
Simon Kloostra works as a webdesigner for his own company SK-Web in Utrecht, the Netherlands, specializing in Joomla and SEO. Also he is the author of Joomlaseo.com, a popular blog about optimizing Joomla for search engines and fast performance.
Phoca Download component[1], Phoca Download Content plugin[2], Phoca Download Button plugin[3], Phoca Download Search plugin[4] , Phoca Download Finder plugin[5] (files and categories), Phoca Download Tree module[6], Phoca Download Chart Statistics module[7] version 3.1.0 (Joomla! 3) have been released.
Download: Phoca Download component and plugins download[8] site.
Documentation: Phoca Download documentation[9] site.
Demo: Phoca Download demo[10] site
Changelog:
If you find any bug, please report it in Phoca Forum[11], thank you.
Read more https://www.phoca.cz/news/864-phoca-download-3-1-0-released
One of our members asked how to display the user group in the Joomla frontend by using PHP.
In this short tutorial, we'll share the snippet that solves the request.
The code below prints the user group from current logged in user. It's a database query that looks for the title values in the prefix_usergroups table:
<?php
// Get user group
$user_ = JFactory::getUser();
$db = JFactory::getDBO();
foreach($user_->groups as $group){
$query = 'SELECT title FROM #__usergroups';
$query .= ' WHERE id = ' . $group;
$db->setQuery( $query );
echo 'User Group: ' . $db->loadResult();
}
?>
To display the group from an specific user, include the user id in JFactory::getUser() method.
For example:
$user_ = JFactory::getUser(101);
Go to your public site and log in to confirm the user group is actually being printed.
Note, if the logged in user belongs to more than one group, the code still will work.
About the author
Valentín creates beautiful designs from amongst the tequila plants of Jalisco, Mexico. You can see Valentín's design work all over this site and you can often find him helping members in our support forum.