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Step by Step guide

Under construction

Joomla installation

Joomla getting started

The site starts with a plain straitforward installation of joomla 3.5

As final step URL rewriting has been enabled in the joomla global configuration ( moving .htaccess into place).

Com datafeeds installation

download page

installing a joomla extension

After installing the component their should be a thick red line telling you to import the feeds. Let's do it.

Klik here to start/try importing feeds
You can't click on the line above, click after installing the component.

If everything goes well after clicking the link you should see some information about the feed import. If not, one problem might be a writeable cache directory. please ensure .../administrator/cache is writeable for the webserver.

Quick peak at feed configuration

Head over to the datafeeds component (menu components->datafeeds). Their are some pre installed feeds. Open the 'sunweb' feed.

On the upper left is the 'Feed configuration'. This depicts what to fetch (feed url) How to fetch/preprocess (the parser class) and how to postprocess ( the callback/filter).

On the right their is the example feed data,  (if not visible click the 'fetch feed' button)

The lower left is the important section, here you will map 'feed fields', basicly what you see in the example feed data to the database fields.

Before you start your own feed it's important to make a plan and decided what informtion is important and into which of the database fields (Select0-Selectn) fields the information goes. For this feed, travel related, the fields are used like

  • Select1 - county
  • Select2 - region
  • Select3 - city
  • Select7 - hotel rating
  • Select8 - travel duration
  • Select9 - departure date

For other topics the Select fields will have a different purpose, for example fashion then Select1-Gender, Select8-Color etc.

Adding a menu

Now we can start building a site.

Head over the menu's>Main menu->add new menu.

In Menu Item type pick datafeeds->menu to display feed items

Add a title to the menu, this one should be travel related so it's called 'Vakantie Overzicht'.

(their might be another pre-installed menu item called 'shop' reuse it or trash it as you like)

Leave the rest untouched save and head over to the front and visit the newly created menu. You should see the items from the feed now, it might be messy with travel and flowers from both feeds mixed up. We will get to that later. Now let's add a navigation menu first.

Adding a navigation menu

You can't navigate the items using joomla menu's you will need a module for that.

head over to extensions->module manager. 

(You might wan't to trash the existing datamenu module)

Add a new module type 'mod datamenu', give it a title and assign it to module position-7, save it leaving all the settings untouched

Now their should be a navigation menu to the right on the site.

The categories will be messed up, mixing country's with flowers, so we have to add a filter to the menu

Basic menu configuration: filters and strings

Head back to the menu item created earlier. Switch to the tab 'Advanced options'

The first section shows the structure of the menu including the headings used in the navigation module. Let's change that a bit.

For now the menu should show the country,region and departure date. From the feed configuration we recall that there are the fields Select1,Select2 and Select9

Saving the menu will show a different structure in the navigation menu.Their are some more strings under string options' alter as you like.

Now to remove the flowers.

In 'Advanced options' open the 'filter options', this allows to filter parts from the dataitems based on the Select fields. For the travel related sunweb feed the Select0 field has the value 'Travel' so we can filter on that one.

 

 

 To repeat this for the flowers

  • add new menu
  • use Select9  as first menu level and Select1 as second
  • use Select0 = flowers as filter

 And the flowers are ready to go

In general I would not recommend to sell very different product categories on a single site, neither to create to many menu's. Most sites can run using a single menu item.

Basic Display Options

The second section of the advanced menu options in the menu configuration allows to select some display options like the layout to use number of items etc.

 

There are two parts, one for the first page of the menu item , and one for all other.

On the first page

the sort is on 'added' 'highest' first, so the page will show the newest items first.

the page will show 20 items using the mcol layout, we will come to modifying the layout later

the page will group on 'Select2', this ensures that for every value of Select2 ( that's the region ) only one item is shown.

The is no page navigation

Other pages

here the sort is on hits, most clicked first, 80 items using the mcol  and no page navigation.