Oracle of ONE1

Module ggis-tabnews is a module developed for Joomla 1.5. Basically, it takes all articles in a category or section and outputs them to a tabbed box. It depends on the Joomla Works Tabs & Slides plugin for the tabbing javascript. A future release may remove that dependency.

Where to get it?

This is currently not a public release but if you are interested in it, please drop a comment on this article.

Expected Usage

This module was developed for a very specific usage and has not been developed or tested beyond that. I do however, see a wide variety of applications for this module. A client wished to display offsite class locations by county in a tabbed box. Additionally; the person editing the locations, while familiar with the basic editor interface on the front-end, was not expected to handle much complexity in layout.

Structural setup

1. Create a section named Section Locations
2. Create categories under Section Locations for each class type, ie.
   • Category Lifeguarding Locations
   • Category Lifeguarding Instructor Locations
   • Category Water Safety Instructor Locations
3. Under each category, create an article for each county listing that county’s offsite class locations, ie.
   • Article Dane County
   • Article Dodge County
   • Article Milwaukee County
   • Article Waukesha County
4. Control the display of the county articles by setting the publish flag

The outline of the above should be similar to:

1. Section Locations
   1. Category Lifeguarding Locations
      1. Article Dane County
      2. Article Dodge County
      3. Article Milwaukee County
      4. Article Waukesha County
   2. Category Lifeguarding Instructor Locations
      1. Article Dane County
      2. Article Dodge County
      3. Article Milwaukee County
      4. Article Waukesha County
   3. Category Water Safety Instructor Locations
      1. Article Dane County
      2. Article Dodge County
      3. Article Milwaukee County
      4. Article Waukesha County

Make it easy for the editor

1. Add a menu item to the user’s menu that links directly to Section Locations
   • This gives the editor easy access to the offsite class locations articles

Using the module

1. Use the mod_ggis-tabnews module that pulls all articles in a category and properly formats and outputs them
2. Make a copy of the module for each category
   • For the example’s case, 3 copies
3. Rename the copies
   • Tabbed Lifeguarding
   • Tabbed Lifeguard Instructor
   • Tabbed Water Safety Instructor
4. Assign each copy a unique position. This is easily done by typing your unique position into the Postion dropdown when editing the module.
   • lifeguard_locations
   • lifeguardinstructor_locations
   • watersafetyinstructor_locations
5. Set the module’s parameters as appropriate. Especially set either the Section ID or the Category ID.

Displaying the module

For the example, the module is intended to display in an article. That is why a unique, non-templated position was used in step 4 above. Modules may displaye
d in any article using Joomla’s loadposition plugin. In our example, there are 3 descriptive articles titled;

• Lifeguarding
• Lifeguard Instructor
• Water Safety Instructor

To display the module in the Lifeguarding article, include the plugin text where you wish the module to appear.

• (loadposition lifeguard_locations}