Flexicontent Latest News Module

Yes it does and much more. Module itself is finished but I'm now building some templates as sample
Cheers,
Emmanuel.

Any news on this module? I'm eagerly awaiting it to get my new site-styling go online...

is anything like the gavick-modules? where you can choose number of columns, order of info to show, size of the thumbs etc etc...?

when can we expect this product?

and thanks by the way for a fantastic flexicontent-extension...

Hello,

I have written a latest news module that takes in either a whitelist or black list of categories to pull article in using either created or modified date.

I do not think I am formatting the links right, and might need to add in some more options. I will upload the code to my site for others to test in a few days.

You can see it on the demo site I am building:
s89341424.onlinehome.us/testing/bn2/

The latest articles are through this module. The module itself simply create an <ul><li> list, but I wrote a template override to give the proper effect for my own site. Been very busy working with flexi and also write a plugin, very happy with the extensability here, there are lots of bugs, but I am sure they will get worked out soon, and I need to do my part by reporting if now trying to write patches.

Nicely done with the module! I can't wait to see one that is complete...any word on this yet? This is very important to Flexicontent, as I believe Flexicontent is truly the best CCK out there (I've tested ALL of them and this one if by far the best.) Now all we need is a couple more features and the news module is definitely one of them!

Alright, I was working on getting this ready for production. Using SEF URLs it was working great, without SEF problems... why? Well let's look at the code:

Now, I know there is a helper, but I know exactly how the URLS will be, and I am really against using menu items here because it will kill SEF because you will end up have duplicate pages with different urls. This is actually true anytime you use SEF urls, but also even worse because a file can be in multiple categories in flexicontent. This link actually shouldn't work because no view is defined, but in SEF mode it does, more on that in a minute.

So I changed it to this:

but this will complain to so looking at the router.php file for flexicontent, it seems you need to do this:

I should not have to have a menu item to link to an article, this makes no sense

This line is what make no sense to me, actually the entire router file for the most part really confuses me. Wait... no it seems I am confused again with where I was going in this router file, why aren't I developing in my vm with the debugger... Let me regroup my thoughts here.

Here is the problem a url should work whether it is normal or converted to SEF
for example:
index.php?option=com_flexicontent&id=82

is not a valid link, but if you put that into JRoute::_() and have SEF turned on, that link will work (Line 109 in the router.php), there is something really wrong.

I am sadly beginning to notice some really weird coding going on with flexicontent which is driving me nuts, (for example what is the rationale for there being sql in the controller and not as a function in the model?). I am having a really hard time figuring the logic, from a developers stand point this is a real pain to work with.

In less ranty news, I am going to keep working on this and see if I can get it to where it works and makes sense to me and then release it and everyone can just tell me where the bugs are then.

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Edit:
Bug filed: joomlacode.org/gf/project/flexic ... m_id=19609

Maybe someone will explain to me what's going on.

Tried importing and using the helper:

but it gives me the exact same links as I was having problems with...I am not sure what's going on, I should be generating the same links from the output of the helper no?

Again, short rant - clean up the code a bit... this is a simple problem which should not exist.

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Edit 1:

Okay, I see what is happening. These items are categories which are not set to any Itemid.

What is happening with subcategories, is that they reuse the Itemid instead of the category.

So for example I navigate to a page with Itemid=24 which is called "first-menu"

That menu-link points to a category view and when you navigate to the children it keeps the item id! So I click on a subcategory and the SEF url will still show "first-menu" which is probably irrelveant, it doesn't even do something like "first-menu/subcategory"

So if i have item 100 called "foo" in a subcategroy I would really expect

toplevelCategory/subcategory/item

While having the nested categories is nice for organization, it should be reflected in the URLs as well. This lack of knowledge in the hierarchy also is probably the reason that the breadcrumbs fail.

So, even using the built in helper is useless in this case becuase of a needless dependence on Itemid.