Hi there,

I've been going back and forth on whether to work with a shopping cart or not. Right now I'm just an affiliate of other vendors (i.e. Amazon) and my site is to have their products (books) posted on my site that link back to their page. My future goal is to have my own books and products posted but for right now that isn't a reality.

That being said, I thought I'd just post the images with the links to the affiliate embedded, maybe a price and/or title below the image all on an article. But it doesn't have the look I was hoping it would. I'd like to have a number of book images on one page like you might see in a shopping cart, but Joomla (2.5) doesn't seem to have that option as is.

Any suggestions?

Hi FreeFormVentures

Certainly adding your own shopping cart can add quite a bit of overhead and maintenance to your site. To be honest, it's not worth doing until you have you own products.

That can certainly be done with some design work. You'd like to show the book images in a grid? Give this a try: www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/creating-...ide-joomla-articles/

Thanks Steve! I will give it a try.

Hi
Just another thought. Have you had a look at K2
www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/k2/
www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/k2-part2/
I only suggest this because it is easy to add extra fields for price etc, simple; to set out in a grid using category menu options plus there is a simple cart as an addon at a later stage such you wish.
Regards

Thanks Mark! I read through each of the tutorials and they are definitely options I will explore.

Thanks FreeFormVentures

Let us know if you have any follow-up questions while working through that.

Thanks Steve, I decided to go with creating tables within the articles and so far with a lot of playing around it's looking better. One thing though, I'd like to get rid of the borders around each of the products I've placed in the cells as well as the entire outside border. I don't see a way to do that at this time...
Any advanced tutorials on creating and editing tables?

Thanks!

Nevermind...I figured it out. :) I just put all of my products in one cell and that eliminated 99.9% of the problem.

Hi FreeFormVentures,

Glad you got things sorted out! :-D

I did for the most part, thanks Tessa. One more thing, I notice that when I have my screen at restore down or basically if the browser isn't a full screen the table that holds my products doesn't adjust, it overlaps with the template. Is there an easy way to fix that? Or am I going to have to do some php...oh boy.

Thanks.

Also, I'm looking to add a text box plug-in that I can use in my articles. any suggestions? I've looked at the plug-in and extensions at J! but sadly found nothing that would be of use to me.

Thank you!

Hi FreeFormVentures,

Do you have a link to your site?

And for new questions, could you open up a new topic? :-)

Because I assumed this thread was finished, I didn't bother to check it again. I just happened to run across it now though. :-)

Thank you.

Sorry Tessa. My site isn't live yet so a link won't really help. I will post in a new topic as per your instructions. Thanks!

Hey Freeform,
Sorry I didn't read your post earlier, you've probably got your stuff sorted out by now.
I have a site I own where I sell Amazon books, and I tidied it up so that it doesn't even look like it has anything to do with Amazon.
Click Here
Feel free to ask me any questions if you want.
- Scott

Hi Scott, your site looks fantastic! Thank you so much for your offer, I do have a number of questions that seem to pop up daily.

I will definitely reach out to you in the future. Thanks!

Wow, that's a great site indeed, Scott! I hope the sales are going well! :)

Kind regards,
Nick

Actually that was my first website... and I'm not sure they've gotten any better since then. lol
Actually it was an extremely easy build.
I tell people that RocketTheme are responsible for making what I do look good.
There's is the good parts, mine is the crap parts. lol
I used a RocketTheme Reflex Template.

The whole site centres around this code here on the homepage ->*Note that some of the classes used here are standard RocketTheme classes.

The main articles are just a bigger version of the same thing.
Had to play around with the Amazon links to get rid of all the extra crap and make sure they still work (so I still get paid)
I added the bookshelf images to give it a book feel.
Used the Addthis buttons - which I placed in custom html module in a fake module position 'addthis' and used the {loadposition addthis} command in articles to display them wherever I wanted.
(Remember to turn code editor off when using Javascript)
Used the extension 'Extravote' to improve the look of 'voting' and the RocketTheme extension RokComments for comments (I'm going to change this)
Not sure what comments I like better - theres this, Slicomments (good, simple), JA comments, Facebook social plug-in or native comments in K2 and Yootheme - so a big choice.
RocketTheme provide a tutorial to modify the logo with Fireworks.
Added a Fox Contact Form in as well.
Then the last thing was grouping my child menu-items (which I may also have to change because theres too many in one of the menus) Thinking about what to do here.
Thats all there was to it, with a couple of css changes.
This was before I started using custom.css so one day I'll go to this site after an update and it will all be a mess.

I used this same format to create my second site too.Here

-Scott

Hi Scott,
Scott wrote:Sounds like a lot of work to me :)

It really came together very well. You should consider submitting it in the Joomla Community Showcase: community.joomla.org/showcase/sites.html

Kind regards,
Nick

Nah, I'd like to get heaps better yet, I've got tonnes of things to learn.
I suppose there was a few little complicated things to it, but I really only used single article menu-items and no modules - in that respect its very basic.
I actually added the addthis links and voting when I learned them later on.
I mainly added all that info to help freeform, and especially to show him how to modify his amazon links, if he wants to. - It took me a little while to figure that out.
-Scott

Cheers, Scott!

Hi Scott, I agree with Nick, it sounds like a lot of work to me too. But it looks fantastic. I don't think I'm there yet with CSS but I'm certainly on the path so thanks for that helpful script. Right now, I'm a little stumped and perhaps you could help me. On my pages I intend to have the Author's of the books listed. You know, photo, brief bio, link to their site. One of the buttons per Author will be a "browse" button so that if a reader enjoys that particular author's work they can click and see all of their books. I don't want a separate menu on the side or anything, I want them to be able to access these books through the browse button for each author listed. I can't quite seem to work out how to do that. I know a link is involved but how I can set up a page without a visible menu...I don't know. Any thoughts?

Nick I'm also posting this as a separate topic just in case the OS team prefers that. :)

Hey Freeform,
Dont worry mate - I don't think I'm there yet with css either. lol
How's your site coming along?
Yes, it is possible to link to published articles that aren't linked directly to menu items. I guess you're looking at those read more links - with the article and menu id's and wondering how you're supposed to do it without a menu id.
This was a big thing (important) for me too, and I'm still getting my head around it. Ed, one of the support staff on this forum put me on to JCE - Joomla Content Editor. You can use the linking function inside JCE ( it's just like the link button in this forums text editor but has more options when you click it) - to link to any published article. It doesn't have to be an article linked to a menu item.
- You can even select article images and add links to them in the same way.
Maybe support staff can add a bit more info about the actual structure of the link.

Once you get done working that out, the next thing your gonna want to ask is how to place modules only on these new pages (and not on the menu item / page that you linked from - because native joomla functionality only lets you assign modules to menu items.) To do this, you might want to check out Advanced Module Manager.
Hope this helps,
- Scott

Ha! Thanks Scott. That's exactly what I wanted to know. I was on last night looking at Module tutorials and they just didn't quite answer exactly what I needed to know. I created a "button" using the tables option and inserted a link into the text I typed within the table to intended page, then reassigned the menu for that page and the menu stopped showing up on my site. However, I'm not convinced the way I did it was the best way, so I'll check out that Advanced Module Manager today. Thanks so much again for your help. I'm sure I'll call upon you again. :)

By the way, we have a tutorial on Advanced Module Manager :)
www.ostraining.com/blog/joomla/advanced-...le-manager-tutorial/

Kind regards,
Nick

Yeah some tutorials you find around the net seem way too geeky and don't really explain things in the way average joes like me need to learn it, or explain it in a way that exactly applies to your situation. I'm fairly new like you so I kinda know where you're headed and what you're going to need to know next.
I'd like to see this site structured in a way that they know what I need to learn next and have it all laid out waiting for me.(This is just the perfectionist in me) Also if they do it that way it would alleviate most of the time wasted answering questions that have already been asked. I've asked all of these questions you're asking here before. So I'd click on the link that says I need to learn Advanced Module Manager next, for instance, and the first thing it would tell me is - WHY I NEED IT and WHAT IT CAN DO FOR MY JOOMLA SITES.
In any case, I ain't complaining, this site is a great source for help and information to keep me learning, I'm glad I came here. I've got the RocketTheme forum too I'm a member of as well so I can be asking questions/learning on 2 fronts now.
I use buttons that have already been created with my templates by using the read-on class - I think thats how it works. I can't remember if Joomla has roundish looking buttons in the standard beez templates for this -I havent played with a joomla site that wasn't a RocketLauncher install for ages, so I can't remember.
If you get real desperate - and this is definately not the recommended way I don't think, use your snipping tool (if on pc) to steal the image of a button you want, upload the image, insert it and use JCE to add a link to it.
This is for desperation only.
I'm sure Nick will tell us both how its done properly. lol
Anyhow this threads getting long and they'll probably want you to start a new topic. I don't know if this site has messaging or not and I don't check through all the discussions - I only have a quick flick through the list sometimes - I'll try to find your posts and keep up.
- Scott

Hi Freeform ventures and Scott,

Scott is correct. This one is getting pretty long. I was just looking at it and I can't really tell where the questions are anymore :)

Thanks,
Ed