artTree is a module for Joomla! 1.5 that allow you to show your existing articles in a hierarchical way. It is based on the work by JoniJnm but extends his work further expanding significantly its functionalities.
After deciding to insert a new blog like section into my page and as time went on I found that the mechanism that Joomla provided to paginate the articles though valid were less than optimal and as the number of articles grew we ended up with along listing of page numbers at the bottom that direct you to another page unknowing what articles we will found there.
I wanted, needed, a module that presented, in an easy and intuitive way, all articles created up to date for the visitor to be able to easily select the one she liked without the need to walk through all the existing pages. I know that I could have inserted a section listing and may be someday I'll do that but, for now, I was after a more elegant, less intrusive, method.
After a loooong search through the Joomla extensions repository I found the 'mod LCA' module by JoniJnm that contained basically the elements that I was after. But after installing it I noticed that it has two shortcomings that made it difficult to meet my needs:
- It only was able to present the live articles, this is, those that were not archived
- You only could have one instance of the module in each page
The first shortcoming was less relevant; it probably would be enough to send the developer a request for enhancement just to get it done but, after having a look at the code I saw that the second one were not going to be so easy. The developer had built its code thinking in a single-instance model so requesting this kind of change would have meant that he had to rebuild the module nearly in its entirety.
So artTree was born. Instead of asking another one to work to satisfy OUR needs we have done it ourselves. As a side effect we have rebuilt the CSS file so that it can live along with the ja-purity template, one of the most used ones and the one we are using, without killing each other.
Enjoy it!
Version 0.2 is out
Version 0.1 uses the code from the module it forks from. We had limited ourselves to add the functionalities that WE needed for our site and few else. But the original code required a lot of resources in the server that serves the page and that means that you probably will start having problems at the moment that the number of articles start to grow. That is the reason that this version is released few days after releasing the first one. Version 0.2 include this changes:
- Rewrite of the main loop so that the articles list is now built in a single pass and that is something that will mainly notice those sites that hold a large number of articles. If the number of years to show is limited too then an early termination of the procedure will allow the module to be fully operative no matter the number or articles you have in your database.
- (Experimental) You can limit the number of articles presented each month. If you have 300+ articles a month you may want to show only the first 50 to avoid showing an endless list when the user expand it. The counter of articles nevertheless will keep showing the real number of articles of that month. This effect is experimental because this may shock users more that help them so it is subject to comments. If you use 0 as the number, all articles will be shown.
- New CSS style structure that allow you to go down to the item when defining the visual style of the table. You can, for instance make entries of a live articles table one colour and entries of a archived ones another colour.
Version 0.4 is out
At least one out of those that have downloaded this module has a lot to say. Or at least he has a lot to write because the number of articles he needs to manage is above 600. And it happens that when you reach a given number of items suddenly your page turns blank. Everything dissapears, menus, other modules, contents, everything. All. TODO.
We were working out version 0.3 when we received this user´s complaint. We were making our tests with a normal database (100, 200 articles?) as we suppose most of you have but as we started to increase the number of articles we could see that after some 700 entries the page got blank. Working to solve this problem version 0.3 got out (not published) and now we arrive at this 0.4 that we expect will solve definitively the problem with the high number of entries. Or that is what we expect. We depend on you to know if we have achieved that.
And by the way it also have the features that were to be part of version 0.3. The down side of this update is that the CSS selectors got modified to adapt to the new structure so that if you had modified the former ones you will have to save the css file before installing this new one and you will have to pass the changes to the new selector structure afterwards.
Versión 0.6 is ready
R. Rajoz noticed that articles listed included those articles that were not being able to be accessed when users clicked in their links because their higher level of security . This fact expressed an incoherence and a bad practice as the user is going to get an error window when following the link and we know it in advance.
Thanks to the changes proposed by himself and that are included in this version these articles appear no more in the list of available ones being the list now coherent with the security level of the contents.
Version 0.7 is out
Jeffery Brown detected that, if the number of elements to show was limited, two bad things will happen: the 'more' text was visible even when the month element was collapsed and the text was not conveniently translated to the front end language. Both problems are fixed in this version that uses the mootools $ operator to interact with the list of hidden items in excess so that you require it to be active. I have used it both to disconnect this module from the browser version you are using and to simplify the code because, you already usually have one of the frameworks that define this function active (and sometimes you even have more than one at once).
Fixing problems
User X-Bit found a problem when more than one section or category were selected. Version 0.5 fixes this.
| mod_arttree_0_7 Version:0.7 | |
artTree is a module that allow to show a structured listing of articles sorting and grouping them by date. This version fixes a problem where the text shown when the items limit was active was shown even if the corresponding month entry was collapsed and the shown text were not conveniently translated. NOTICE: It now *REQUIRES* mootools to be active |
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 GNU/GPL    2011-03-20  Multilanguage  Joomla 1.5  13.08 KB  2121 |
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2012 (1)
Comments
I just downloaded the 0.4 version but when I istall it it says it is 0.4 and yes the bug with articles not accessible to everyone being referred by the tree is still there
Anyway I do not understand what you mean with “the bug with articles not accessible to everyone being referred by the tree”.
If you mean that there is no article filtering based on user level well, that is fixed in 0.6 so it is expected that 0.4 already has this problem.
If you mean anything else please explain it so we can fix it.
Regards
im developer of joomla
this 0.6 trans to persian lang
may be send for you ? you can insert file lang in to modul
thank
I have a little problem thou. My joomla is in polish (well partially, I'm trying to change all modules to be in my native language). Names of the months in the art tree are in polish, but they are not correct gramatically :(. They are like in date, with "a" in the end, december = grudzień, 1 december = 1 grudnia). Is there any way to define correct names inside art tree files? What should I do? :C
But you are telling me that, in your case, you are NOT getting the right names. To achieve what I have exposed Joomla is using the country code (es-ES for me, en-UK for the default lang) of the selected language and extracting its data from the corresponding .ini file located at /languages/lang-ID/ folder. So you should go to the language folder for your language and check if what is written there is correct or not.
If this does not solve your issue then tell me and I will study to include a switch to allow you to use your own STATIC descriptions for the month (this mean, they will not be able to adapt to a multi-language site). Anyway using the standard way is normally better as it implies less effort for you to maintain you site.
I need this module to be shown in only one menu, when I select the specific menu element it doesn't show this module, if I choose the module to be shown in all menu items, the module works perfectly.
Am I doing something wrong?
Yes, you must be doing something wrong. As a proof of concept you only have to take a look at my own site: the artTree modules only display in the blog section (defined in an specific menu element) and does not display in any other part of the site.
So you should be able to achieve the same behaviour. You will have to recheck your config. Which modules are shown in which pages is something that the Joomla! Framework provides by itself. It does not depend on the module.
Installed ArtTree v0.6 module on Joomla 1.5.22 it works well except when I set the max articles per group. The code does not translate y to and, or mas... to more... It renders as shown below. Can you provide me with the fix for this bug.
> February (19)
y 14 mas...
> January (10)
y 5 mas...
Repaired in version 0.7.
The only problem i have is that the module shows in 2 menus, not in one. And thats weird because i chose just one menu from the list. In the menu where its not supposed to be it just says the month. Not a list of articles. what have i done wrong?
Year>> Month>> category?
Congratulations for your work!
In the module parameters you state the desired ordering you want that in any case is year->month->article name (sections are not taken into account here)
I have more, than 38 articles in that catagory but it shows only 38
Got the same problem :)
For an article to be shown in the listing it MUST be active, that is, it must be published, it's finish publishing date must be greater that the actual date and it's start publishing date must be lower or equal that the actual date.
Besides, the security level of the user must allow her to see it and it must belong to one of the filtered sections and categories if applied (and all categories and sections used must be published in turn).
Do you mean that all these conditions are met by your articles and still they do not show up in the list?
Regards.
Put inside this new style whatever you want the appearance to be when hovered.
For what you say it may look like that there exist a timezone offset problem but the final location of an article in the list is given by the month number returned by a call to MySQL function MONTH (using the created field of the article record from the database as reference). So that in the database your article will probably figure as created on September 1st.
To check this for that articles in particular you should look directly at the database field that hold the created date and check if it is as you expected. May be you started writing the article late at August 31st but the first save of it was on September 1st and that was the date that was saved in the database.
Please look at the database itself and report the results if you are so kind.
Regards.
The code itself has no limit. The actual limit depends on the ammount of resources that the computer where the page load has.
By reducing the ammount of elements in the module we were able to present more than 1000 items so I do not know why you are breaking at 400.
If you can supply a database with such ammount of articles we may be able to test it and see if there is something to fix.
Regards.
I wanted to ask if you thought about the functionality a little simpler than what it is. I'm looking for module to present archival articles. Something in the way of your module, but without the presentation of the articles in the tree. After clicking on year, months act as a link, which shows in the main window filtered articles from that time range.
Regards.
Regards.
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