testGetting in touch with my Joomla side
I got confirmation that I can discuss the project I was hired for so here goes. The Federal Transit Authority (FTA) is having a company in my area of Virginia do their website, it is based on Joomla. I was hired to finish the project and I have only a couple weeks to get a demo together. Until I took on this project the extend of my Joomla work was installation and initial configuration. I will say this though, now that I am in Joomla, I LOVE IT, the power, the oozing sexiness, and I’m not even into the new version coming out, 1.5. I am looking forward to future Joomla projects and I hope to work with both of these companies again. There are some huge benefits to this project:
- I am working with industry recognized professionals
- I have a project manager and do not have to handle client request directly
- If you do well on a Federal job it can open doors
- If all parties are pleased, I’m sure more work can be expected to come in
- Money
Now the bad news; we are using Docman to handle the massive collection of documents that this site will be holding and I am a little unsure about how much I like it. First off it did not create a way for you to have multiple categories for a document, you must create a document in each category and then link it to the same file. This wouldn’t be so bad if you could click on a file and auto-link documents to it, but can you imaging the management headaches of hundreds of files, maybe thousands and having to have 5 documents link to each file? Screw that shit, I’d rather rewrite Docman, which is actually what I am going to have to do or at least part of it. I will go through the steps in a tutorial so that others can also implement this.
Looking in the window it doesn’t look too bad, but once I get inside things may change. From what I have looked at so far, it is going to require an additional class that right now extends the select box for Docman. This will keep the select box for the categories separate on edit pages, because if you just change the select in the code to allow for multiple it messes things up. Right now when you submit the edited information it is taking the catid and putting that in the database, and by just putting [] after that it does not pull multiple variables right. What is going to have to be done is editing the array of parameters to make the catid a single number so the main table is not modified, and that will then link to a doc number in another table.
Another post will follow this to talk about one of the components since this one was written about a week ago and I am just now posting it.
