A loveletter and a question...

First of all - I LOVE FLEXICONTENT!!! I can't believe how awesome it is. After developing Joomla sites for years, this changes everything. I am going to use it for every site from now on.

I have been contacted by a few people privately here on the forum with questions and I'm happy to share anything I've learned, so don't hesitate to ask. And I also want to mention a few things I've been doing with Flexicontent that might be of interest to the group:

1) I have long hated installing separate components like Mosets Tree, Sobi2, Eventlist and so on. They're great, mature, well supported components with lots of great modules and integrations. However, there is always the process of customizing the look and feel of each one to match the overall site, and each one has it's own design with regards to the way the PHP files and templates work, so it's a headache. But with Flexicontent, you simply create an item type (like "events") then design a template for it, create a menu link, and voila - your own Eventlist area. Why is the Eventlist component so venue specific? I've always hated that, so my Flexicontent home-brewed eventlist doesn't even include it, and I think it's better. It's not just events and directories, it's really up to your imagination what you use it for, and once you understand the templating system it's quite fast to develop things.

2) If you're not using MetaMod Pro with Flexicontent, you're missing out. Combining these gives you all the things people say they love about Drupal, with the ease of use of Joomla. Now I'm sure that will start a horrifying debate, but give it a try. The guy at MetaMod has "recipes" to use with different components, but I didn't really understand it. I've been doing this a long time, but I'm not a programmer. So I post the question on his board with a link to a site I'm developing and about 6 hours later he sends me back one line of code that I can insert in the MetaMod module from right inside Joomla and boom - certain modules based on certain subjects show up on only the first page of results for any Flexicontent category, as well as certain modules based on certain tag content lists. It's AMAZING. I really had no idea that something like MetaMod could be so effortlessly combined with Flexicontent and just work right out of the box.

3) The final piece of the puzzle for most sites will be content/subscription control with Flexicontent. Maybe you want people to pay to post on your Flexicontent directory as well as pay for different membership levels for different Flexicontent areas on your site. I've been testing AEC and it seems to be the answer. I have used Mighty extensions for this, and they're pretty good, but I'm falling in love with AEC. I would give it serious consideration if you're creating a Flexicontent centered site.

So now that I've raved about loving Flexicontent, given you a few ideas about what I've been able to do with it on a "whole site" level, here's my question:

For my next trick, I'd really, really, really love to create a "hot topics" page like they have on Oprah.com that is a list of the 3 newest or most popular tags listed by category, followed by an alpha-selector list of all tags. Check it out:

www.oprah.com/homepage_index.html

That's totally awesome, right? Again, I've been doing this a long time, but I'm not a genius and I'm having a little trouble creating that - can any of your smarter people help me with that? It seems like the kind of thing that only Flexicontent can do with Joomla, but I'm just not able to figure it out...

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Please share your MetaMod recipe mentioned above.
MetaMod was the answer to a number of Sobi2 issues.
So I had collected a number of MetaMod recipes for that component.

Many FLEXIcontent users will also be using MetaMod.
So please share.
Thanks!


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You bet! Here's what's been the most successful so far, and I can't take credit for it - I just asked metamodguy for it in the MetaMod forum and he instantly sent them to me. I wasn't used to people saying, "Sure, Flexicontent, no problem - what do you want to do?" I was ready for, "We don't support that." HA!

Now this recipe is brilliant:

if ($option == 'com_flexicontent' and $view == 'category' and JRequest::getInt('limitstart',0) == 0) return "89,78";

(89 and 78 should be changed to your module numbers) What it does is place appropriate modules on a particular category list view, and unlike so many sites, if you go to page 2 or 3 or so on of results, they're not displayed, so you don't have to scroll down past the "featured content" over and over and over. You could remove the limitstart to have it appear on every page of a category, in the event that you were using it with a side module and not a featured news thing or something above the component content. So it works just like Oprah.com - only much, much cooler.

So I was like, okay, but how do you make it do the same thing if someone selects a tag and we display a tag list? Boom, here's the recipe for that:

if ($option == 'com_flexicontent' and $view == 'taglist' and $id == '2:featured' ) return XXX; if ($option == 'com_flexicontent' and $view == 'taglist' and $id == '3:whatever' ) return YYY; if ($option == 'com_flexicontent' and $view == 'taglist' and $id == '4:something' ) return ZZZ; // etc...

I'm going to collect and post here all the other recipes I come up with as I also want to do flexicontent display based on IP, country, member type and a few other things. But seriously, if you're a MetaMod user and you come up with recipes paste them here too - and if you need some - go to their forum and ask and post the good ones here as well - they'll give you any you need.

It's truly awesome, using MetaMod with Flexicontent.