Addon to PD with new front-end views

[rogerco]

Hi, since I posted a month ago about improvements to the tagged file list I have moved on and started developing a component which provides some new front-end views for Phocadowload and also a couple of backend additions.

In brief I have been wanting a table view of files in the front end with sorting, searching and filtering capabilities and also a better way of handling tags. Since both of these required changes beyond what you can achieve with layout overrides and tinkering with core PD files I decided the best approach would be to develop a new component to implement the changes without touching the PD core. Maybe one day these can be folded back into PD (but there may be some historical issues to overcome)

Anyway what I have done is pretty specific to my requirements so it will probably not suit many users. There is a lot of functionality in PD that I don't use - on the main site I use PD with I am simply managing a few hundred document files (PDFs) which visitors can download. Providing good ways of categorising, tagging and searching the archive is pretty important and I haven't solved all my issues yet. PD was a very good starting point.

I have not (and probably will not) publish the component on JED (unless Jan wants me to), but if you are interested you can grab it from here: http://www.crosborne.co.uk/pd-addon. There are some more details about what it does on that page.

You can see it in action on the front-end of a site here http://www.green-history.uk/library/doc ... -documents for the table of all documents and here http://www.green-history.uk/library/doc ... ypes-index for a list of tags with links to table of documents carrying a specific tag (whoops - I've just noticed that the column heading for 'Description' says 'Years' - copy paste error.) NB there will be other bugs.

Comments welcome here...

Enjoy
RogerC-O

[Jan]

Hi, great, thank you very much for the info and the component. If the component is public and free to download, I think, it will be good to add it to JED - maybe other users can have similar needs so it can help them when using Phoca Download (I personally would like to see it on JED because the component extends the Phoca Download features).


Thank you,
Jan

[Songague]

You saved my life. I can’t thank you enough.

[rogerco]

There will be an update coming very soon with some key changes as well as some nasty bug fixes - if you are actually using the early proof-of-concept version you will need to uninstall and re-install as some of the changes are not compatible. Hope to get something out in the next day or so - will post here when it is out and also add to JED.

RogerC-O

[Jan]

Ok

[rogerco]

OK there is a new much improved version (probably qualifies as Alpha release rather than proof-of-concept) available http://www.crosborne.co.uk/pd-addon

If you have an earlier version installed, then this time you will need to uninstall it first and also manually remove (using phpMyAdmin for example) the slug column from the phocadownload table and the catid column from the phocadownload_tags table in your database. Sorry about that, combination of some major changes and a bug in the uninstall sql script - or you could just add the missing ; on the second line of the uninstall.mysql.utf8.sql file and then it will uninstall ok) Future versions should work as upgrades correctly.

There are still a few rough edges and you will probably want to edit at least the colours in the css file (in the media folder). Details are on the website http://www.crosborne.co.uk/pd-addon. I'd like to do a bit more work on it before adding it to JED but for now I would love to know if any of you have a use for it and any suggestions you may have - email me at roger at crosborne dot co dot uk

RogerC-O

[Jan]

Ok, great.

Jan