So following on from last week's post here are the steps I have taken to improve the appearance of the tags section for articles on the Green-History.uk website.
For this particular site all of the article info - dates, categories, related links, tags, author, and field data - is placed in boxes at the bottom of the article. (see example here). The tags are organised in a hierarchy with the top level being equivalent to a category for the tags beneath it.
Tags for articles in Joomla are a very useful feature, but for me there are several limitations in the way they are currently implemented and displayed. In this sequence of posts I am going to discussing tagging and present my solutions to some of the issues I have found. While some issues can be improved with straightforward template over-rides of view and layout files, many require modification to either model or forms.
Some more or less random notes from developing a component as an extension to the Phoca Download component which I use on a number of sites - most noticeably on the Green-History.uk site where it is used to manage all of the downloadable files.
When I started using it on Green-History I fairly rapidly decided that I needed some major changes to the layout for listing files in a category. PhocaDownload (PD) does allow considerable flexibility built in but this is cumbersome to use, and I suspects pre-dates the availability of simple overrides built in to the Joomla template system.
A note for myself after spending some time working out how to make a top menu bar on a website resize both the menu items (<ul><li> elements) and the font within the menu item as the screen width scaled.
The first bit was easy, istead of using a fixed size (120px) for the width of the <li> elements make the container element a percentage width of its parent - say 95% - and then if there are five menu items at the top (horizontal) level make the <li> width 20% (or whatever is appropriate for the number of entries in the top menu bar).
Page 8 of 11
