Q: How do I set up the groups? I don't want anyone to be able to publish without preapproval except for the super admin.
A: Go to the component backend and check the following tabs accourding to your requirements:
Since of version 1.7.0, Article Manager Factory has a opened it's gates to Community Builder integration. There are several aspects that can be integrated:
1). Resource Box as a CB profile field
2). Author image as a CB Profile field (standard CB Avatar or any other field)
3). Several CB plugins that can display in CB Tabs Article Manager related information
Here is a quick tutorial on how to integrate the resource Box as a CB field:
a). go to Components/Community Builder/Field Management
b). click New Field
c). create a new field as Text Area and publish it in the Tab you need
d). go to Article manager settings, click on the CB Integration Tab
choose the Field you just created as "Resource Box"
then press Save.
e). in CB you can see in the fields list in witch tab the Resource box is published on the profile
f). the Community Builder Tab can be configured in CB Tab Management and displayed in the position you need
Quick & Dirty Template Tutorial for Ads Factory.
Ads Factory includes a very powerful template engine - smarty. We will try to cover in this tutorial the essentials of building a template for Ads Factory using this Template Engine. By far this cannot cover the extensive manual of smarty. Making use of smarty, the ads engine will provide to this engine some pre-filled objects and arrays of objects that are relevant to the current page displayed. Also all language constants defined in Ads Factory can be accessed in the template. We advice against writing hard coded text into the Templates, since this would render the multi language concept useless. If you do not care about the ability to translate your site, then you can do as needed.
This tutorial is addressed to the HTML savvy webmaster that need to change the default appearance of Joomla's Ads Factory Component. For most users the default template should contain all the necessary information.
First of all what is a template engine. A (web) template engine is software that is designed to process web templates and content information to produce output web documents. It runs in the context of a template system. It is practically a php script that interprets some kind of pseudo HTML pages containing placeholders for specific variable content. In our case most are auction related.
In order to update much easier, we recommend that you note all the changes made on the templates, then apply them on each update in order to avoid any issues!
1. Where are the files and what can be changed?
All template files are in the components/com_adsman/templates folder.
The components/com_adsman/templates/cache folder contains the pre-processed files and normally you should not have to edit or delete something in it. We recommend that this folder has writing rights for PHP scripts, so the engine can improve the speed by caching the templates.
2. Basic smarty knowledge.
All smarty templates are pure HTML. What the template engine needs to interpret must be put in accolades { }, a so called smarty tag. If the smarty contains a variable or a constant, then smarty just replaces it with its value. for instance this tag {$task} will be replaced with the current Joomla task (for instance with "newadd" - without the quotation marks).
Smarty also allows IF clauses, so you an branch out two different displays depending on a condition. So for example {if $task=='newadd'}You are creating a new ads{else}You are editing an existing ad{/if} will display one of the two texts depending on the current task. Another useful smarty command is {include file='xxxxx'} - this includes another smarty template file. For instance it is useful for us in the matter of including the necessary Javascript for the ads. Since most pages use the same Javascript codebase we can have just a single page containing these statements. For assigning a value to a variable (if the variable does not exist, it will be created) you have to use {assign var=variablename value='VALUE'} in this way you may use smarty for advanced templating techniques that resembles more with programming.
3. Custom defined smarty functions for Ads Factory.
Since Smarty is a very powerful tool for templates, we can create custom functions that can be called out from templates. Functions that are not in the standard distribution of smarty. We created following functions that can be used especially for our purpose (Ads).
4. Variables that are ALWAYS initialized by the auction system.
5. Ads Variables initialized in specific pages.
5.1. Variables initialized in Ads Details and Ads listings.
For ads detail the main object is called $add, in ads listings will be a similar object called $item. The properties of $add from detail page and $add from list are similar.
5.2. Listing Pages.
Favorites listings, my ads are including listing template. For custom templating you can just copy the content from listing template into favorites and modify it.
{$item}
5.3. Category Page.
Display listing of categories as tree. Array {$categories} contains objects of categories with subcategories with same structure. Array () of
Revised "Ads Factory" version 1.3.5.
How to turn off Notices in a Joomla Driven site (Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5).
If a component (extension) does generate for some reason Notices, then you can safely turn this off in Joomla Configuration.
Notices are not real errors, they are merley information for developers in order to help them either improve the performance or tvoid bugs andd issues, due to some unitialized variables.
There is no real need for a Joomla running website to have notices turned on, but some hostings have this by default.
To turn notices off, check the following steps...
for Joomla 1.5.x
for Joomla 1.0.x
Read more: Auction Factory - API for 3rd party Payment Gateways integration.