Ivan’s Technical Blog

Currently if you search a Joomla site using default search module and component, “Food Hamburgers” will return all pages with either “Food” or “Hamburgers”.

This isn’t particularly useful because people would prefer to see pages with both. Zorro, a regular and wise commenter on this blog has come up with a neat little hack available here at www.nitsche.org. Download it, save it as mod_search.php, backup your existing mod_search.php and upload this instead. Now, when people search your site, Joomla will use the “all words” search by default.

It has no official use at all in Joomla 1.0. Its basically Joomla’s appendix – something that was useful many moons ago but is now just an evolutionary hangover. Yes, you can happily leave it blank. You can also take advantage of quite a large number of components, modules, plugins and hacks that do use the Title Alias.

So Who Uses the Title Alias Now?

1. Some Search Engine Friendly URL components such as SEF Advance, sh404SEF and Artio SEF. They allow you to use it for the URL. That way to can have a long, interesting page title with lots of odd characters (? – ! ‘ ) and filler words (and, or, the) but still have a short, keyword packed URL. This feature is actually going to become part of the core in Joomla 1.5.
2. Some modules such as JooFox Content Titles and the Alias for Page Title Plugin (for 1.5). These allos you to use the Title Alias as an HTML Title – an SEO feature sorely lacking in Joomla.
3. Plugins such as Titlelink. This allows you to easily link to other content items on your site.
4. Assorted design hacks. At the last Joomla South East meeting, Steven from Intownwebdesign.com showed us a very neat trick that he used to design Schroederslater.com. Many of the pages needed a unique background image so he gave each image the title alias of the page it was going to be used on. He then used PHP and CSS to automatically load the correct titlealias.jpg on each page. Joseph LeBlanc show you how to call the title alias here.
5. Assorted coding hacks. One example is Phil Braddock’s hack to allow the HTML title to created from the page title – very similar to the modules in #2.

It looks like you cannot customize the default content ordering in Joomla.  What you can do is to edit the “Menu Item” linked to the category or section and set “Order By” parameter on the right.

If you choose the option to be “ordering”, then the content will be sorted according to the order set in admin panel.

How this is done?

Embedding a module inside a content page is a Joomla “feature”. You do not need the DirectPHP plugin to enable this.

Ssnobben has rightfully pointed out you need to use something like “{loadmodule mod_fpslideshow}”. So below are the complete steps to achieve this.

Note that the steps below applies to Joomla 1.0.x only. For Joomla 1.5.x, please refer to How to include modules in Content item (for Joomla 1.5.x).

Step 1: Create a new module position

First, we need to create a new module position where this module will be placed.

1. From the “Site” menu, select “Template Manager” then “Module Positions” as shown below:



2. Add a new module position “user201″. You could give it any name. I named it “user201″ in this example.



3. Click “Save” to save the new module position.

Step 2: Create the content page

We will now create a content page for containing the module.

1. Go to Content Manager and create a new article (static or dynamic).
2. In the article, enter the following:

This is a test to include a module inside a content item.

{mosloadposition user201}

3. Note that the module name after mosloadposition has to match the module position you have created in Step 1.

Step 3: Set up the module

In this step, we need to do some setting so that the module will appear in the module position.

1. Let’s first create a module for testing purpose. Go to “Modules – Site Modules”. Look for the module “Main Menu”. Check the box besides the title, and choose “Copy” from the menu.



2. You will see a new module called “Copy of Main Menu” appearing below the original “Main Meu”.



3. Click on “Copy of Main Menu”.
   • Set “Show Title” to “No”
   • Select “user201″ for Position
   • Set “Published” to “Yes”



4. Go to “Page / Items” on the right-hand side and make sure “All” is selected:



5. That’s it! Save the module. We’re all set!

Step 4: Let’s test it

Now load the article. Did you see the “Main Menu” appearing inside that article similar to the following?

Note: If you wish to put this as the front page, go to Menu Item Manager – Main Menu, create a menu item linked to this content page, then move it to the first item. The content page with the embedded module (for example, it could be a slideshow module) will become the front page.

Source: php-gtk2

Joomla works great with templates, but sometimes you install a new template and you have to check were the new modules positions are.

There are two way to see were each position is:

One is using the code index.php?tp=1 right after your domain URL
For example http://www.sgmoneymatters.com/index.php?tp=1

The second one is by using the function of Joomla in your administor panel that says:

Site -> Preview -> Inline with Positions

You then get a screen with all the Module positions layed out as a screen overlay with the Module numbers and names.

Once you have the positons figured out, you can start placing the modules on the positions you want them to be, moving them around until they fit your needs…