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[pjed Friend pjedJoin date: May 2008Posts: 10Downloads:0Uploads:2 Thanks: 2]

#129068

Hi guys,
Complete newbie at this.
This is my situation. I am working on a small (for now) travel guide for Vietnam.
We will focus on travel information for 2 coastal resort towns, let’s say town A and town B.
Each town will have information on: accommodations (with subsections ie: luxury, superior, midrange, budget), activities also with subsections, restaurants (you guessed it! with subsections) and nightlife.
I would like my mainpage or home page to display a the following menus:
Home | Town A | Town B| News | Travel info | About the guide| Contact US |
This menu would be replicated for all these links except for Town A and Town B where the menu would change and have (example)”:
Home | Accommodations (with subcategories) | Activities (with sub categories) | About Town A (or B depending) | News (sames as main) | About the guide (same as main) | Contact us (same as main |

So I guess the question is, is it possible to create multiple “magazine” menus and apply them to different pages?

Your input and help is greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,

Philip

[ukfraternite Friend ukfraterniteJoin date: May 2008Posts: 294Downloads:0Uploads:44 Thanks: 61 Thanked: 10 times in 1 posts]

#252539

Is it possible?

Hello, anybody ?

[cgc0202 Friend cgc0202Join date: August 2007Posts: 2244Downloads:0Uploads:3 Thanks: 206 Thanked: 262 times in 1 posts]

#252549

<em>@pjed 55987 wrote:</em><blockquote>Hi guys,
Complete newbie at this.
This is my situation. I am working on a small (for now) travel guide for Vietnam.
We will focus on travel information for 2 coastal resort towns, let’s say town A and town B.
Each town will have information on: accommodations (with subsections ie: luxury, superior, midrange, budget), activities also with subsections, restaurants (you guessed it! with subsections) and nightlife.
I would like my mainpage or home page to display a the following menus:
Home | Town A | Town B| News | Travel info | About the guide| Contact US |
This menu would be replicated for all these links except for Town A and Town B where the menu would change and have (example)”:
Home | Accommodations (with subcategories) | Activities (with sub categories) | About Town A (or B depending) | News (sames as main) | About the guide (same as main) | Contact us (same as main |

So I guess the question is, is it possible to create multiple “magazine” menus and apply them to different pages?

Your input and help is greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,

Philip</blockquote>

Hi Philip,

Do you have your own dedicated server or are you hosting your site in a shared-server ISP. If you have your own dedicated server, this should be no problem, There is a way in simple html whereby you can summon the same “packet of file” to appear in different “websites” provided they are in the same location.

This is called the “include” method in straight html scripting. The reason why I asked about whether you are using a dedicated server or shared server ISP is that features like “includes” slows down the completion of the whole page presentation — this might affect CPU utilization also, and your webhosting provider will not be happy if you are using a shared server.

I have not done it yet, because I just did not have the time to study it further, but there are extensions (free also) that allows you to do the same, using php in the case of Joomla (or for that matter any format, html, java, etc.) that are enabled by these Joomla extensions.

It might be easier said than done. If you do not have experience with the arcane aspects of scripting, and you can afford it, you may be able to achieve your goal by seeking the assistance of a more knowledgeable people who may be willing to do the job for a decent fee — assuming they are familiar with some of the powerful Joomla extensions that may be useful for this. It will be faster and cost effective.

Hypothetically, if you believe the schematic diagrams of merav, the founder of iJoomla, she claims it can be done with their iJoomla magazine — you will have a common “magazine site”, and specific sites for your cities or whatever you want to create. While I have seen demo pages using the iJoomla magazine, I have not seen one actually that shows what you outlined above. Someone else here is advocating a different group’s magazine software, but again their Demo does not prove the capibility of their program yet.

I have not gotten it to work myself but it might be because I lack the needed skills to do it yet. However, some of the customer here, who tried it too, had their difficulties.

In a sense, that is the direction of JA Teline II — as a magazine template. But, JA Teline II is not there yet. Also, as a template, I do not think Joomlart may develop a true news-magazine portal as powerful as what iJoomla magazine claims (the latter is licensed $70 per site).

There is another way around to have a semblance of what you want (although not exactly) — set up multiple JA Teline II installations — use hyperlinking to access common sites or those that converge among the various magazine. Have a comnon domain name (and a name) thatt wil unite them. Then create independent pages for each.

This is the direction I am going now, because I have the same goal as yours. A single site for all the ones you envision will run into the max files and CPU usage restrictions of shared servers, when your site grows in the future. Even if you have an economy dedicated server, it might not be powerful enough to deal with data intense sites, especially if you get so many visitors.

I can envision how to do the above using Joomla 1.0.x, but I am flummoxed by the Menu system of Joomla 1.5.x so I did not even try it on the latter yet (plus I consider it not ready yet, since there are many key extensions not yet native to Joomla 1.5.x)

The point is, it can be done and has been done. Some online professional papers do it now (of course not using Joomla or Joomlat templates 🙂 But, in theory, the tools are there, including some Joomla extensions that will help achieve this. The issue would be how much you put into it, to achieve what you want.

Cornelio

1 user says Thank You to cgc0202 for this useful post

1. pjed

[pjed Friend pjedJoin date: May 2008Posts: 10Downloads:0Uploads:2 Thanks: 2]

#253343

Wow Cornelio,
Thanks for that detailed reply. I will be honest, the first part of your answer is somewhat bove my skill set …
I was edging towards your second solution ie: create main website and link cities to subdomain.
The only inconvenience here will be the hassle of having separate admin login for each city which now is not much of an issue as we would only have 2 but might be in future as the number of covered cities is increased.
I guess that the other solution would be to treat the cities as “languages” but that would mean heavy code manipulation that goes way beyond my realm and defeats the purpose of using Joomla and Joomlart.
So all is on standby for now until we actually finalize the print layout of our travel magazine.

But I’m still confident that a “user-friendly” solution can be found to create multiple subsets of the teline magazine menu.

Again, thank you kindly for your response.

Cheers,

Phil

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