More things you need to know about JomSocial 4

Last week I mentioned that there were a few things you should know about JomSocial 4 before you upgrade. We added a few last minute changes...

14. Select The Default Tab On Profiles, Groups And Events

Now you can select Stream or Details as the default tab when visiting profiles, groups or events pages.

To set the tab, go to:

Theme Designer -> Profile

Theme Designer -> Events

Theme Designer -> Groups

Select the default tab, and press Save.

15. App Titles Can Now Be Changed On Language Overrides

To make it easier to change the titles of profile apps, we’ve added all the title language strings to the main language files. They can now be found on Joomla’s language overrides.

To change any language string in JomSocial, go to:

Extensions -> Language Manager -> Overrides -> New

1. Search for the language string.

2. Select the string you’d like to change.

3. Enter the new string on the left.

Backend:

16. Events Zones Are Now Modules

Previous versions of JomSocial had two event zones:

1. Nearby search

2. Event calendar

To allow a wider and more attractive layout and to allow more flexibility with location, we removed both zones from the event page. The Nearby Search is now a module that you can put anywhere on your Joomla site. The Event Calendar will be converted to a module in our next version — it’s a lot more complex and wasn’t ready for JomSocial 4.0.

 

17. Tabbed Modules Can Look Crammed

Because modules on the front page don’t pile on top of each other as they did before, if you upgrade to JomSocial 4 and you have many module positions in the same default module position ejlxm_side_frontpage, they will look crammed in that position and will look like this:

STEP 1

To quickly eliminate this problem if you’re on live site, first un-publish all the module positions in that position:

• Go to extensions -> Modules
• Filter by position: ejlxm_side_frontpage
• Un-publish all modules

Now that the modules not showing badly on front page, you can start correcting this.

First, you should know we added 2 more module positions on the front page:

• ejlxm_side_frontpage_top
• ejlxm_side_frontpage_bottom

STEP 2

Decide which modules you actually want to show on the front page. It’s not a good idea to show all of them, just select the ones that you think are essential. Modules that are on the same position will be displayed in tabs, based on their order on the Modules Manager.

STEP 3

Decide where each of the modules go: top, middle, bottom

STEP 4

Open each module and, change the module position to one of the available positions:

ejlxm_side_frontpage_top - show at the top of the sidebar
ejlxm_side_frontpage - show at the middle of the sidebar
ejlxm_side_frontpage_bottom - shows at the bottom of the sidebar

Or change the position to ANY position available on your template, sidebar-1, sidebar-2, top-1, bottom-1, etc. Whatever you want! JomSocial also have lots of other module positions throughout, you can find a full list here.

STEP 5

Now change the title of the module to be shorter, we used to add the word “community” and now we add the word “JS” just so that you can easily find the module, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t change it to something more reasonable that fits your needs. For example, replace “JS Recent Photos Module” with “Recent Photos”.

Save the changes.

Do this with every module and then publish them.

The Result:

A clean sidebar with tabbed modules.



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