Lonnie Knows Everything

The Joomla Mass Content component is something I’ve used for a long time to help make the creation of sections, categories and articles much easier because it enables the developer to create all of these items on a single screen without having to jump back and forth in the control panel. This handy tool can eliminate hours of unnecessary development time by consolidating several screens into one.

In a previous blog entry (please refer to Joomla and K2, a True Romance Story), I mentioned some of the advantages of the Joomla K2 component. The obvious question is how can the K2 component and the Mass Content component work together when the Mass Content component creates standard Joomla content and the K2 component creates content that is managed outside of core system?

Fortunately, there is a solution that allows you to incorporate both components and reap the benefits of each. The K2 component has a very nifty feature that lets you import content. So, when developing a new website, as long as you follow these steps in the proper sequence, you should be fine.

1. Install the Mass Content component
2. Create your sections, categories and content items within the Mass Content component
3. When everything is set up as you like it, run the K2 article import

With step #3, the K2 system will turn Joomla sections into top level K2 categories and the standard Joomla categories into K2 sub-categories. In my experience with this, everything has gone without a hitch.

You can now start building your navigational structure in the K2 system and delete all of the items, categories and sections from within the core Joomla content system. With this approach, I hope you will find as I did, that despite using two additional components – K2 and Mass Content – you will save quite a bit of development time.

Related Links:
Mass Content Component – Download Link
K2 for Joomla – Download Link

As a professional developer, I’ve had quite a bit of experience working with the Joomla content management system and I can honestly say I’m very pleased with how versatile it can be in developing a broad range of website solutions. Where Joomla really shines is in its ability to be extended by way of modules, components and plugins that provide useful features that the core system doesn’t include.

Meet K2

The component “K2″ is an alternate content system for Joomla that provides many additional features, the most notable features that have proven to be invaluable are:

1. Nested categories
2. The capability to assign templates to categories
3. Improved Access Control List (ACL)
4. Article comments

There is far more to K2 than the features listed above, but these features have made an already powerful content management solution a much more robust package to say the least.

Utilizing nested categories and custom templates, TDH developers have been able to create a feature-rich product catalog, for example. The possibilities are endless and I’m excited to see what other magic can be conjured up with this powerful tool set.

Joomla can be found at http://www.joomla.org, and you can check out the free K2 component at http://getk2.org.

OK I won’t lie, this was cobbled together quickly .. and it will only delete so many at a time so you’ll need to run it a few times if you’ve got a lot of posts, I could make it so that it loops and deletes everything but I wanted to put it out there.

Use it at your own risk! if you get banned from facebook for automating something then that’s your own fault.. this is purely for educational purposes only and all that jazz =) *wink wink*
Continue on reading!..

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One of my clients had recently came to me looking for a clean shopping cart that could be ran mostly via CSV… they had a “product matrix” in excel that had categories, sub categories, item name, skew and price…

I evaluated VirtueMart which I decided was just too bulky and buggy to work with .. then I checked out dozens of others, but none were suited to our needs..  I’ve run into this issue before and decided to roll my own cart using existing tools.. I opted to use K2 (since Joomla can’t do subcategories), Simplecaddy (k2 is not a cart) and some custom tweaks..

Read on for more info!

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Hey gang!

Today I’ve released the latest version of the Oneduality Dynamic Header Images Joomla module (say that 5 times fast) ..  there are a number of enhancements that increase the usefulness and possibilities of the module, primarily, a modification that will allow you the ability to load more than one instance of the module on a page, as well as change the type of images you’re using .. for full details and to download it, click here!