Thursday, November 25, 2010

Joomla & com-property.com Bugs and their solutions - Part 1

So this is my first post on website's I have designed.

The last website I designed (LifeLong Real Estate Concepts) brought with it a couple of bugs, some of which I solved myself and others I solved by looking for help on com-property.com.

Amongst the more difficult bugs to solve, were:
  1. Enabling the agents on the front end, to enter new locations 
  2. in the last properties and carrousel modules, showing the wrong property image
  3. getting the agents name and contact information on the list pages
  4. changing the default property image on the map - not solved yet.


To Start - the Platforms & Modules:
Joomla 1.5.20
Com-Property 3.1.0624
mod_prop_search_js
mod_prop_last
mod_prop_location
mod_prop_cat_type
mod_prop_sellers
mod_prop_carrousel

The bugs and their solutions:
  1. Enabling the agents to enter new locations on the front end

Now on the back end it may look simple - you just login to your administrator panel, go to components & Properties & Configuration, locate "Users can add Localities" and "Use Locality", and set them both to yes. Then save the configuration. You might think that's all there is to it, but that's not all.


To enable front end users to add a locality: 
  1. you have to locate [Your Website's Root Folder]/components/com_properties/views/panel/tmpl/default_addproperty.php
  2. Open that file in a text editor or html code editor
  3. locate around line 506 to 538 the lines mentioned in http://www.com-property.com/en/forum-v3/11-last-properties/4068-localities.html#4909
  4. remove the <!-- and the -->
  5. Save your file (use the same file name, do not rename it as renaming it will not help you at all)
  6. Upload your file to the server where the website is being hosted (make sure it is uploaded to the correct directory on the server)


You should be good to go from there.


You should now see in the agent's "My Panel" (required for agents to upload and edit their own properties on the front end) a link next to the "Location" box saying "Add Location", which, when you click on it, will open a window asking you to enter the name of the location and with buttons to save the location, close it, etc.


If you did like me, and used a template with a dark background, and put your link styling in template.css as set to white, you will then have to change the highslide.css file (components/com-properties/includes/highslide/highslide.css) so that the background of the add location pop up window is changed. 


To do this, I could not figure out which specific line to change, so I changed all of the following:
line 375 color: white;
line 220 background-color: white;
line 79 background-color: white;
line 52 background: white;


Then save your highslide.css file and upload it to the correct directory on your server.


Part two will be coming soon

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog!

This blog was started as means of accomplishing a couple things:
  1. to market my merchandise on cafepress.com and on zazzle.com,
  2. to provide documentation and information for my website design clients,
  3. to provide guidance and assistance to other website designers
This blog is currently still under construction, but, hopefully within the next few days I should have most of it sorted out, so please come back soon!

In the mean time, please feel free to check out my latest merchandise which can be viewed to the right and on the Merchandise for Sale page!

Thank You!