Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Gantry 5 Flyout 2nd Level Submenu

In working with a Gantry 5 template my main menu has “Services” as the top level, “IT Support Services” as the dropdown submenu item, and “Networking” as the third level down. Gantry has it so the user must click the arrow on the submenu item “IT Support Services” to set the second submenu item “Networking”. Here is what it looks like.

I wasted a lot of time trying to get the third item to flyout, but it won’t. Gantry won’t go to the third level without a click. The Gantry folks determined that “touch screens” can’t “hover“, so flyouts won’t work. I found the information here.

https://github.com/gantry/gantry5/issues/2583

I hope this helps someone else out there….

Network Solutions Worst Email Provider

Purchasing a “Professional” email product for a customer, and found it to be the worst email set up I have ever dealt with. Almost impossible to purchase it yourself and had to call customer support to get it done. After I set up the account the password wasn’t working. I logged in and reset it, but this took several attempts. After being on hold for 40 minutes the account finally showed up in my products.

While on a chat one of the options was to chat with someone. I am in the middle of a chat, so chat shouldn’t be an option.

Once the account showed up after logging in and out a few times I still couldn’t get the password reset to take. I used a password generator, and that still didn’t help. Back onto another phone call with them. This whole process took over 2.5 hours. When I had my third call with tech support they told me their password system was down with a known issue.

The worst email set up I have ever been through. Their products are junk and should be avoided.

I hope this helps someone else out there….

SPELLSCAN.com Catching Spell Errors on Website.

I had someone write regarding a spelling error on a website I maintain. Its was a small one in a menu item, but in some way all errors look bad. They suggested SpellScan.com. I used it on a couple of sites and found a couple of other legitimate errors.

After the scan scroll down to find the spelling errors as well as other errors.

I hope this helps someone else out there…

Joomla Change Email Text To New User

I wanted to redirect the new user sign up to a specific page and not the main site URL. I was frustrated in the process at first; however, really enjoyed the flexibility of Language Overrides in Joomla. I read a couple of articles and just didn’t get it till I read this post and went through the process.

https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=953986

Of course Joomla documentation on this is a good read as well.

https://docs.joomla.org/J3.x:Language_Overrides_in_Joomla

I was using a Gantry template and in order to get the process to look the way I wanted it I needed to revise my .yaml file for the home page, and move the default “Message” and “Content” particles to a new layout.

When the user got to the screen where they needed to change their password, and changed it I wanted to redirect them back the employee portal page. The following article helped me figure this out.

https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=813714

I ended up changing the “<joomla-root>/components/com_users/controllers/profile.php” line 225. I set the URL to the NON-Search Engine friendly link. The line ended up changing from
“$redirect = ‘index.php?option=com_users&view=profile&user_id=’ . $return;”

to

“$redirect = ‘index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19&Itemid=149’;”, which was the page for the portal.

I hope this helps someone else out there…

Tassos Marinos Joomla Developer

I have come across this developer’s stuff a couple of times, but never really appreciated his contributions to the community. He has a plug-in called EngageBox that is so much fun to put on a site. Check it out here.

https://www.tassos.gr/joomla-extensions/engagebox

He also gives in depth process for Google’s Structured Data that is overwhelming at first but very informative. Check that out here.

https://www.tassos.gr/joomla-extensions/google-structured-data-markup/docs/how-to-add-structured-data-to-pages

I hope this helps someone else out there…

To ensure seemless working with Virtuemart

I wanted to test out using Virtuemart on a Joomla install as a inventory program. When I tried to install from the web from within Joomla I got the following error.

I tried to just download and install that way, but I got the same error. If I actually read the error I would have figured out the the fix.

  • Go to System >> Global Configuration
  • Go to the Server tab and in the “Database Setting” change the “Database Type” to “MySQLi”.

I hope this helps someone else out there….