I helped a buddy develop an ecommerce site in joomla using hikashop.  Hikashop's cart module functionality is a bit limited.  You either get a very verbose full cart or a very minimal mini cart. We customized the mini cart to include the ability to expand to the full cart in either a slider or popup. This makes the functionality similar to what you find at amazon, especially when you move the cart to the very top of the page.

The cart hidden initially because it is empty. Add an item (from those below) to the cart to have it appear.  Then click the expansion image beside each to see how they expand.

Here are some demos of the expanding mini cart in action.

• Hikashop Mini Cart with Slider Demo: Mini Cart in right position that uses slider to display the full cart.
• Hikashop Mini Cart with Popup Demo: Mini Cart in right position that uses popup window to display the full cart.
• Hikashop Mini Cart at Top with Popup Demo: Mini Cart at top of the page that uses popup window to display the full cart.

If you would like to add similar functionality to your hikashop, I have packaged up the files.

Joomla is a content management system (CMS) that supports maintaining a website through a browser interface.  It is a free tool and is well-documented on their website.

• http://www.joomla.org

Joomla offers a good balance of power versus ease-of-use. Users with the proper permissions and little technical knowledge can add and update the website's content.  Setting up and administering a website with Joomla requires a fair amount of technical skill.

There are two views of the joomla system:

• user:  http://www.example.com  (front-end)
• admin:  http://www.example.com/administrator (back-end)

Content can be updated through either view. When logged into the front-end, pencil icons show up beside the items the user has permission to edit. Content is added and arranged through the back-end. Unless making a small change to existing content, use the admin interface to manage the website.

Note any changes to the website through the front-end or back-end will be visible immediately on the website.

Printing addresses labels for a list of people or organizations from a database is a pretty common task.  Often the users doing the printing are not technical and using a variety operating systems and software tools.  Therefore, a good goal for a solution is to provide all the pieces without relying on anything pre-existing on the user's computer.  This goal rules out using Word to do a mail merge which is a pain anyway.  Another useful goal is to provide some flexibility so more tech saavy users can create new or modify existing label templates.

There are some web-based label printing solutions available.  These don't require the installation of software, but saving and sharing the label templates is complicated and getting to data into these solutions is non-trivial or impossible.

General Solution

The approach I settled on uses Avery DesignPro client software which is available for free for Windows and OSX.  DesignPro supports laying out and printing labels on any of the gazillion labels Avery sells.  DesignPro will pull data from dbase (.dbf) files or an ODBC source.

RokG2Slideshow is a extension of the RokSlideshow Joomla module that can pull the slideshow images from a Gallery2 installation as shown to the right.

All the original RokSlideshow functionality is preserved with new options for pulling images from a Gallery2 installation.  There are several different ways to integrate Gallery2 and Joomla.  This module is independent of the integration method (currently) and uses direct access to the Gallery2 installation to retrieve the photos.

In addition to enabling the Gallery2 integration,

• specify the physical path to the Gallery2 installation on the server
• specify the URL to access to the gallery via your website
• select the type of images to retrieve from Gallery2 (random, recent, viewed, daily, weekly, monthly)
• specify the number of image to retrieve and include include in the slideshow
• optionally specify the Gallery2 album that you would like to limit the photos to
• specify whether a URL should be associated with the image (none, album, image)
• optionally specify a special URL to use to reach the gallery embedded in Joomla.  For example, gallery integrated with JFusion would have an embedded URL like: index.php?option=com_jfusion&Itemid=19

History

RokSlideshow is a Joomla! module was originally inspired by Slideshow by Aeron Glemann but rewritten from scratch by Olmo Maldonado. Since then it has been updated and modified by Djamil Legato. Most recently Aaron Nauman added the Gallery2 integration and packaged the module as RokG2Slideshow.

Download

Gallery2 Slideshow 1.0 HOT	(0 votes)
G2Slideshow2 is an extension of the Slideshow2! javascipt slideshow to pull images from a Gallery2 installation.
2013-04-04 16:05:26  2.9 KB  1590	Download

Changelog

1.2 - 24-Feb-2010 mtense
# Added support for multiple modules on a single page

1.1 - 17-Feb-2010 mtense
+ Added support for adding URLs to Gallery2 images
+ Added support for URLs to include embedding info for integrations like JFusion

1.0 - 30-Jan-2010 mtense
+ Added Gallery2 support for RokSlideshow 4.1