Monday, May 25, 2009

Joomla! 1.5 Fixing the Tabs for IE

The basic tabs style does not really display properly in Internet Explorer. See my tutorial on how to create tabs through the Joomla! framework.

In Internet Explorer the dd and dt tags does not stack properly while it display properly in Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.

To fix this issue, an IE only style is created and included in the site template's  index.php file, or the existing ieonly.css file in the template/css directory can be used, if there is such a file.
E.g.
<!--[if IE]>
<link href="<?=$this->baseurl?>/templates/<?=$this->template?>/css/ieonly.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->

In this css file the following code is added.
div.current { overflow:auto; }
div.current dd  { float:left; }

And the display issue is fixed!

Credits: I would like to credit alexwai for figuring out a solution for this. See thie forum thread.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Joomla! 1.5 Adding to the Breadcrumb/PathWay through the Joomla Framework

Joomla's JPathway class allows you to add a new item to the pathway to be displayed in the Breadcrumb.

The first thing to do is to access the global JApplication object, then get a reference to the JPathway object.

<?php 
global $mainframe;
$breadcrumbs = &$mainframe->getPathWay();
?>
Adding a breadcrumb is now as simple as calling the JPathway::addItem() method. The addItem method takes a name as the first parameter and a link as the second parameter.
<?php 
$breadcrumbs->addItem( 'My Crumb!', JRoute::_('index.php?option=com_mycrumb') );
?>

If your Item is the last item on the breadcrumb the link will be ignored.