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

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.

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!

1. K2 is an amazing content organization system (link) that offers a far more flexible way to manage your categories/sub categories…  it’s not a shopping cart, but it makes a very effective catalog .. it’s capable of acting as a blog, an event calendar, a catalog (with no ecom functionality) and many other things… built in content voting, comments and social sharing options.. it can be everything, or it can be minimal depending on what you turn on and off.

2. Simple Caddy (link) is a basic cart system, but it lacks a catalog … it’s designed for you to be able to build your own product pages within Joomla and slap on “add to cart” button and then it provides a method to check out via paypal (only paypal is supported).

3. My own code to import a CSV into the system.. it’s job is to create the category hierarchy, add the products to simplecaddy, create the items in K2 and apply the simplecaddy tag for “add to cart” .. this CSV also adds to another database with additional information that is used to create a product selector, or I guess a better word would be a drill down search.

In addition to the three main ingredients above, I made a series of tweeks to both components to suit my needs.. some of the things I’ve done.

1. I gutted the K2 item image system, I wanted to keep it automated and simple so I have K2 looking for category images by category name and product images by product ID… this gives easy ability to just properly name some files and bulk upload them.. this was done entirely in K2 templates.

2. I added an option in Simplecaddy to disable ecom, which simply means it doesn’t appear even with the tag in place.. the reason being is that for phase one, we’re just building the catalog and leaving the cart disabled.. if the tag is in place and the simplecaddy plugin is disabled, the tag shows.. we wanted to be able to enable ecom without needing to import again, just a flip of a switch.

3. An additional payment option for simplecaddy (authorized.net)

The result is a fully functioning shopping cart solution powered off of a simple CSV file

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!

The module has also been converted to donationware, and there are two upcoming releases!

Roadmap

1. Support fort Virtuemart (custom header images per department) (1.5.2)
2. A re-write of the logic, this will allow you to have a default image by section and category rather than having to have an image for every article. (1.6)

If you use Joomla 1.0.x you could just simply changed $mosConfig_livesite to your https URL, but this won’t solve the issue of someone coming in on a non https link from a search engine or bookmark, yes it will change to https if they click a link, but that landing page will be insecure, what can we do about this? read on!

I encountered this issue on a Joomla site that had a small store for purchasing supplies for equipment this company was selling.. The issue is that before, the page was just static content without any online ordering capabilities at all .. search engines had picked it up long ago and they didn’t want to change the links.

I wrote up a very simple snippet of code that rests at the top of your template..

// if https isn’t on, we need to fix that!
if ( $_SERVER["HTTPS"] != “on” ) {
 $newurl = “https://” . $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"] . $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
 header(“Location: $newurl”);
 exit();
}

This block of code will detect if they came in via https or not, and if they didn’t, it will redirect them to the https version of the page they were on.

Easy as 123 .. 4

If you found this helpful, please consider a donation!

If you have a question you’d like me to try to solve, go ahead and ask it :)

This article covers how to do that right in your template!

THIS ARTICLE IS NO LONGER RELEVANT .. because I wrote a module that does the same thing, check out this Joomla 1.5 module

Well this aims to give you a quick, easy solution!

The first thing you’ll want to do is open up your configuration.php file in your editor of choice.

Look for the variable “$mosConfig_live_site”, this is no doubt configured to your current web site address! and this is what is causing your problem.  We’ll be changing it to this:

$mosConfig_live_site = “http://” . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];

This will pull the site’s URL out of an environment variable on the server! This means that no matter what URL is used to get to your site, Joomla will automatically set $mosConfig_live_site to match.

This solution works in the world of Linux and Apache, if you’re running Joomla in a windows environment and this doesn’t work, I suggest going to your Joomla control panel and looking at System info -> php info … You’re trying to find a variable that contains the website name without http:// in front of it .. once you find something, adjust the code above! if you find one that has http:// in front of it, then you can further adjust the code to suit your needs.

Have fun!