Written by Landis Arnold on . Joomla

Category Tree - Articles - Outlines and Logic

Joomla "Articles and Categories" first of all should be called "Categories and Articles" or "Menus, Categories, Articles and Tags".  Needless to say there is a lot to get your head around and you need to watch the flowlines more than you might expect.

I am watching them more than I have in the past.

On a certain level it is important to think first that Categories via Menus create your fundamental Outline Tree.  Articles get stuffed in to Categories and have a tendency to avalanche over them.  Categories by themselves, also have content.  The main Tree of a Info Structure is the Category Tree.  With Menus, there become multiple trees, and if they are stacked in certain ways they can indeed come to seem to be one tree.  

Complication in presentation comes when Content is put into each Category.  That is the goal, but once there, it becomes difficult to find the structure for the "trees" (that is a joke".

Today, I did find a nice way to modify this.  I used Easy Layouts (that is a Joomla extension) to place Sub-Categories BEFORE the Articles that are listed in a Category blog.  Doing that it is easier to drill down further, and use breadcrumbs to work back up.  I combine this with showing the Main Menu Structure also in an "Accordion Menu" to the sidebar.  Do notice that that Accordion Menu is only of one of the Menus, not all of them, but since most of the content is there and there is still primary menu structures above, the site (I hope and want to believe) can be navigated better that in the past.

All this being said, I have some ideas I would like to pursue to make this all easier and more natural.  More on that later.

Send me a note if you have any comments or questions. 

Happy Holidays everyone.

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Magento - Odoo - OCA Connector

Magento - Odoo - OCA Connector

This was a very functional system which brings the ability to work the "backend" of Magento by actually building and purchasing items you sell,

We used this system marrying first OpenERP 7, then  Odoo 8 to Magento 1.x.  It was very very effective.

(old bullet points next)

  • Functionally you get all of the aspects of Odoo, including CRM, Product Management and more
  • You also get the great E-Commerce capabilities of Magento, and its increditble extensability.

Sadly, systems moved on.  Adobe took over Magento,  Odoo started becoming closed source and upgrading very very fast.  From what I can see, the Odoo/Magento Connector which was part of OCA (Odoo Community Association) stalled out at Odoo 10-11 View on Github  .  Moreover, it only supported Magento 1.x implementations which became almost impossible to maintain for security reasons because of Adobe's decisions to leave 1.x and its architecture behind.

The OCA/PrestaShop connector is quite active, and probably the best way to proceed now.  PrestaShop is easy to install and should be easy to maintain (unlike Magento in my experience from some years ago now).

The fact is that Odoo has effective E-Commerce built in and from a maintenance point of view it may be easiest just to stick with that.  But other reasons point to maintaining a separate E-Commerce system, and simply supporting it through Odoo on the back end.

Check out the OCA/PrestaShop connector here.  https://github.com/OCA/connector-prestashop

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Organizing your culled information stream

Organizing your culled information stream

It is tremendously complicated these days keeping track of what you are learning.

As an example,  I am diving into the realm of dropping pre-built Drive Images into Cloud Instances.  I need to keep track of the difference between a bzip2 and tar file, and how to decompress them.  Very nice people have commented their answers in various places.  Answers like:

bzip2 -d filename.bz2

tar cvjf myfile.tar.bz *.txt

Certainly there are many more of these as well.  I likely have 20 Tabs open talking about all the various approaches, but that is not the point now.

The point now is simply, how to "keep track" and if possible, how to perhaps help other people in similar quests.

3 Basic Elements I am finding useful:

  1. Bookmark Organizing
     
    1. "Bookmark Manager and Viewer" a Chrome Extension is particularly valuable.  It takes a bit to get used to with one or two foibles, but nothing better that I have found.  Use this in conjunction with Chromes Bookmarking (they have the same icon) and spread them out so you know which one you are using.
    2. "Tabs Outliner" also a Chrome Extension lets you explore and tab to your hearts content.  You can close whole windows and keep track of the tabs.  Ideally you will move from here to your actual bookmarks, but with this you can see what you have been searching for, reading up upon and in many ways also reflect on what is important
  2. Durable Checklists
    1. Honestly, I am still looking for the ideal version here, but what I do know is that Outlines go a long way.  Lets go there
  3. Outlines and Outliners
    1. Now discontinued Bonsai is very good.  Very Very Good
    2. Android Outliner is VERY VERY VERY GOOD  (number 1 really except that I work in Bonsai more)
    3. Workflowy is the best web outliner I have found so far

There are others.  They all deserve attention, but the point is not the program but the work.

Nothing is perfect and no integrations, yet, are perfect.  I do also use

  • Simple Mind for Outlining and Mind Mapping . 
  • Odoo to keep track of issues and many other details. 
  • Evernote..  must have
  • Dropbox,  for me anyway, must Have

All are also excellent programs:

Like threads in a spider web though, you need to have your own system of reference to keep them together.  Things are getting better, but, there is still you in the middle.

Getting things done..  a book and a mantra.  The program did not work very well unfortunately (may have had another name - written for PC Tablet computers in about 2005 ?).  It should have worked better.  The concept was incredible.  It just had big, in fact large and untenable, memory leaks.

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Key Reference and External Reference

Key Reference and External Reference

These are some of the "lower" list fill in's regarding Joomla Meta information in content.  Still worth some reasearch.  I found the following

https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=844679

Key Reference

This is the reference that is used to pull the correct help information either from help files saved locally or on an online site like help.joomla.org

External Reference

Use this field to add a reference to an external resource that is relevant to this specific article. There is no global value for this field as it must be specific to each particular article.

Dave Huelsmann gives a great answer and he appears to know Joomla very very well.

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Magento Sunset

Magento Sunset

I have been running Magento since about 2012 with 1.3x in my memory bank. Up to 1.9x now and really just using Magento as a repository now.

Magento 2.x (2.3x to be precise) is here.  It does not work, at present, with this CMS system so I have a linkage taking place through Filemaker from J2Store to Magento and by extension to Odoo.

I will quite likely just take the Magento system down.  It will not be supported with updates after this coming June and the time investment of getting 2.x running and keeping it running does not seem available just now).  We will see.

Anyway, for now, I am going to start redirecting the URL's to land into this system.  Lets see what a pain that becomes.  Likely worth the effort but also perhaps now.

Sad, but Magento was aquired by Adobe and like Odoo, they are making it more and more difficult to use it as a Open Source software.  Not that either are impossible, but the reigns are steering the team towards privation.

Somewhat the nature of things these days I will say.

All good software, just a bit too time intensive.

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Turnkeylinux Hosting - volume size changes

Turnkeylinux Hosting - volume size changes

I have hosted Turnkeylinux images in the following ways

  • VMWare Vsphere
  • VirtualBox
  • BareMetal
  • TurnkeyLinux Hub
  • Linode Cloud

At present I am hosting nearly everything on Linode, though for the sake of speed and the ability to "turnoff" (and not be charged when not running) I am running a few servers also on the AWS based TKL Hub.

A few caveats.  Linode, if using their Kernel, will resize Drive Image sizes along with FileSystem Sizes very well.

It takes some work to do this on the TKL Hub - this is the current HOW To:

https://www.turnkeylinux.org/docs/expand-existing-root-volume-size

though I would skip the AWS section and just clone bigger, but then still do all of the following in SSH.

To be most specific:  

gdisk /dev/xvda
parted
print
fix
resizepart
resize2fs  /dev/xvda2

Instructions in the link above have "

"gdisk -1 /dev/xvda " and I had just now to skip the -1 to get it to work.
It would be better if everything just "resized" and it might be easiest to use TKLBAM for that just installing a bigger instance.

All things considered, Linode Feels "more like mine". but it is still important to learn different systems from time to time.

Bear Metal is somewhat going away.  So much work and energy to maintain a server these days.

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