I'm new to FLEXIcontent but I'm starting to get the hang of of it. I think it's a very impressive piece of work, with a lot of possibilities and even more potential. I very much like to thank Emmanuel for creating it and making it available to the Joomla! community.
Having said that, I'm somewhat confused by certain design decisions, such as moving a lot of parameters from menu items to category and content type definitions. I can see why it's useful to set certain defaults there, but it's a loss that it's no longer possible to set those parameters on a per menu item basis.
Some of the parameters I miss entirely, are the settings for display of category titles and category ordering. I'm not sure if the first omission can be solved by developing a custom template, but the second shortcoming certainly isn't, because it is a flaw in the ordering logic of the category model.
The problem occurs when setting category parameter "Display subcategories" items" to "Yes" and "Primary Order" of articles to "Order". When you do, articles get ordered only by article order but not by category order, which is undesirable. So what we need, is the possibility to set category ordering independent of item ordering.
The quick & dirty workaround for this problem is this:
In function _buildItemOrderBy() of class FlexicontentModelCategory in file web_root/components/com_flexicontent/models/category.php change the line (near) 242 containing
Code:
$filter_order = 'rel.ordering';
into
Code:
$filter_order = 'c.ordering, rel.ordering';
Like I said it's a quick & dirty workaround but it will work as expected in most cases. It would be nice if a more robust way of specifying category ordering were implemented in the next version.
Once again I like to thank Emmanuel for this useful extension and I;m looking forward to th enext version.
