Written by Landis Arnold on . Joomla

Multiple Domain Resolution in Joomla

It seems sad to write this at Joomla 3.92 expecting Joomla 4 to change everything, but still, here we go.

Joomla is a fantastic system.  That said, it is a fair bit of work to maintain and there is an attraction to getting one system setup and capable of hosting Multiple Domains on the one Joomla system.

It is pretty easy to have one system show the same information on a variety of domains.  This is done primarily in DNS and pointing correctly.  That said, why do it?  Better to have it resolve to one domain, give one SSL and one set of information.

But with multiple domains you want different SSL,  Different Menu Navigation and Different Content.

The advantage of having it in one system still is that you can generally maintain one system.

The negative is that you have to make sure you don't trip over yourself.  

I have been testing "Virtual Domains" on this system. 

  • I can get different templates to resolve to different host name calls. 
  • I can get different menus to resolve
  • I should be able to get SSL to respond to different Host Name calls in Apache (To Do)
  • Module need to be controlled as well
    • What I find is that the Module needs to not show on "All" first and foremost
    • I can get content from another domain to show in certain calls:  IE WidgetKit can put Accorians in that give a full Category of information.
      • That works until you go click on something like "Read More" when all goes into 404 Page not found land  (should work shouldn't it?)

I have a second system I have tested that is much more complicated called Chameleon.  I will likely test it more but it is a whole bunch to get your head around

Other systems are also out there but lets see about getting Virtual Domains working.

Virtual Domains basically ends up "Filtering" Menus.  As such, in order to have consistent control you want to add all of your Different Domain Menus to the Menu Position.

You can sort them in case you want some menu aspects to show up on multiple Domains.  Generally though only the content for the filtered Domain will show itself.

There are several ways to get at the Menu Assignment and this is in fact an important part of Joomla.  One can work through the Menu Administrative Panel,  Virtual Domains (and Chameleon), as well as through one of my favorite tools,  JSN PowerAdmin

It is important with all of this to have a Checklist, lets call it "1,2,3".  Menu, Content, Filter.  Technically it is also important to say "1,2,3"  for every set of that  as in Main Page, Menu Filter, Publishing SEO" being set for each piece of content  (including this one).

Related to these subjects are DNS and SSL control and having these also be working well.  This article has information on those subjects.

Turnkey and Apache SSL configurations

 

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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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