Technical Stuff

Interesting cases, do read!

Now and than you run into questions or situations which are worth writing about so others don't spend ages looking for answers or trying to find out what's going on. Below a list of some of those situations.

Form2Content Security

A while ago we got someone saying that Form2Content wasn't secure. An interesting statement because the access is done through Joomla!, not F2C. A closer look revealed that the menu link to the Form2Content front-end Article Manager wasn't set to 'registered' users. Just setting the module which displays the menu to 'registered' users isn't enough.

Create a new Template, don't just edit the Default Template

The default template is overwritten when new custom fields are added to your Content Type. To prevent things going wrong and losing your custom templating please refrain from editing your default template, instead simply create a copy of it, rename it and have fun adding your custom code.

Don't include scripts in your F2C Template

When you are making your templates it can be convenient to add scripts into the code. This all goes well as long as you don't use the Joomla Article Editor. If you do and you save your article your script will automaticaly be removed from the code by Joomla!. The only way to prevent this is not to use a WYSIWYG editor or not to include scripts in your F2C Template.

Make use of Global Settings (Article parameters)

Form2Content 'submits' the Articles into the Joomla article manager and into the pre-defined section/category location. After creating a menu link to the category you will be able to see your articles created by F2C. If you want to for instance show or hide your intro text or any of the other article parameters it is best to set them in the global settings. This way anyone submitting articles (through the fron-end) will have the correct settings!

Hiding Read More & Page Break buttons in the input form

One of the field types you can use for generating your custom input form is the Multiline field with (html) Editor. This field loads the Joomla set WYSIWYG Editor and also displays the Insert Pagebreak, Read More and Image Button.

Since all these aspects of the article design are placed into the F2C Templates you don't want users to be able to add extra page breaks etc. In order to switch them off you could go to the plugin manager and unpublish them but than they won't work anywhere.

The easy way is to hide the buttons using the following bit of CSS in your template css file.

div#f2c_form div#editor-xtd-buttons{ display:none;}

SEF and Form2Content Front-end

The Form2Content Front-end is accessible by a menu link to the component. Please remember that it is most unlikely that you need SEF URLs for the F2C Front-end Article Manager since it is most often used for registered users.

Joomla!1.5 SEF

Form2Content Front-end works with the Joomla1!.5.x native SEF enabled. (with and without mod_rewrite).

sh404sef

Form2Content Front-end works with sh404sef when the component is skipped in the sh404sef configuration.