Is joomla enough capable? Anybody can help me to achieve these things?

PHP
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I need to make a website with being managed on joomla. It has two domains and both needs to be managed on a single administration.

* I need users to be able to login via gmail account and LDAP
* Have to show login form where user is accessing member's content (articles thats it)
* Needs to have different banner on header according to the category of article.
* Admin have ability to post articles having jquery image galleries.
* Different homepage as compared to other pages
* Content approval by admin before article appears on frontend.
* Content versioning (about the changes made in arcles).

for eg : you can see these websites http://aud.edu/ http://engr.aud.edu/

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Hi salmanrsi,

Please find my replies within your questions below:

To my knowledge there are not any plugins for this; however you can override the default authenticaiton and hook into php logic that will handle the LDAP authentication. You just have to make sure that you pass the correct parameters back to Joomla so that the permission structure is linked to the correct users. This is quite a bit of work, but possible.

This is possible to do directly from the Joomla permissions.

You can customize your template to display other banners based on article ids, so this is possible

There are plugins already that have similar functionaility to jQuery’s image galleries. If you must use jQuery’s then you could write a plugin that does what you need.

Yes you can design your page based on the category or article to present a different layout for the home versus other pages. It has been a long time since i worked with jQuery, but I did this 4 -5 years ago, so there now might be an easier way.

Yes you can do this.

I am not sure if this is possible; however Joomla uses a MySQL database there is no reason that you could not develop a trigger or php function that copies previous versions upon someone submitting changes so I think it is possible.

Why Joomla and not Wordpress or Drupal?

Regards,
Steve

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Thanks ServerStorm for being helpful. I went through some tutorials and played with joomla code aswell which made something possible for me.

Different homepage as compared to other pages

M still playing on it to show new, events and spotlight widgets on homepage. Seems like i will surely achieve this.

Needs to have different banner on header according to the category of article.

Handled this with a bit joomla programming and was able to do that successfully.

Regarding rest of the thing, I have been through extensions and plugins available on internet with no luck. As am using joomla 2.5 and most of the plugins are old or either paid. Have been playing on its default theme (beez20) which do not have such functionality that i require, so I m searching on it. I was expecting some code snippets or extension/plugins to do these things. Things you have mentioned against my points are :

Admin have ability to post articles having jquery image galleries.

There are plugins already that have similar functionaility to jQuery’s image galleries. If you must use jQuery’s then you could write a plugin that does what you need.

I have installed JCEDITOR as default editor do not have any attractive thing. JCEDITOR has jquery accordion kind of functionality that makes it a bit interesting but still I am looking for gallery stuff.

Content approval by admin before article appears on frontend.

Yes you can do this.

I tried out some plugins, but most of them doesnt work for version I am using , and other seemed worthless when they have same functionality that joomla is providing by default. Let me explain a bit about this :
I will give publisher right to some users so they can post articles in joomla (that i know joomla already does). But I dont want them to appear on front end untill Super Admin approves them. They must remain unpublished until that. I know wordpress has these by default for post-comments but m stuck with joomla because of client requirement. (he just wants joomla)

Have to show login form where user is accessing member’s content (articles thats it)

This is possible to do directly from the Joomla permissions.

Yes, but that shows an error when user tries to access restricted content. I want a login form alongwith it. (I guess I will be able to do that with few research on joomla programming)

I need users to be able to login via gmail account and LDAP
Even I wonder why joomla has given these plugins by default (LDAP and gmail) though I dont find gmail working (It says we need to make user register with their gmail email and password - then whats the difference between joomla authentication and gmail authentication when user still needs to register?). :stuck_out_tongue:

Content versioning (about the changes made in arcles).
Even I doubt if joomla or other CMS has such stuff (version history means it should highlight changes that are made in content)

Last and very important thing is that I need TWO portals being managed with ONE joomla administration like if i want http://aud.edu/ and http://engr.aud.edu/ shall be managed via one joomla administration.

Have you done these stuff with joomla before? May be if you provide me some extensions references so I can try them also.
Thank you once again.

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Hi salmanrsi,

Ok, so you have to use Joomla, then the simplest way (although nothing about this is really simple) you need to add an additional field to the content or mapping content tables where Joomla links the articles to users. You set a boolean value to 0 or 1 with 0 being not approved and 1 publishing. Then you need to modify the article php files to set this flag (an probably to email the admin) when an article is in this state. You then modify the article editing php file(s) so an administrator, when logged into the admin console and under edit posts can see which articles are yet to be published and can click each one to review -> maybe edit -> maybe delete -> or publish (which sets the flag to 1. You front end pages never show article content that is set to 0. Obviously this involves modifying a fair amount to the underpinnings of Joomla, which frankly diminishes its’ value of ‘ease of use’, but it is what you are likely going to have to do.

Yes this will require you to plan this in your template. You can either use the default template and then edit it or you can find a free template to edit. You also can convert a static site to a joomla template. I did this a couple of times and it is not that hard once you learn how the templates are put together and what the database requirement are. You can learn a lot from studying other template that you like.

Yes if I where you I would not embark on this. It is very complicated at the best of times and would require a tremendous amount of restructuring the way Joomla stores its comments.

However the only hope would modify the edits template so that when posted you have a before and after comparision like a dif function in GIT or Linux and have the editor insert <spans class’one’>This is some edited comments</span> then when parsed in the adimin side the css would have classes for ‘one, two, three’ or some sort of convention and you would set the background colors to highlight these spanned contents. You would not have these classes in the presentation CSS so it wouldn’t show there. Still a lot to do and to me it still sounds ugly.

Like I tried to get across, you would need to build the logic of both sites into one Joomla template. Your content for each site would be driven by their categories. Your php script would parse the host and route the user to the parts of your template that either display aud.edu or engr.aud.edu. The good news as these sites are both quite similar so this should be fairly easy. In the end you would have a group of articles for aud.edu and other articles for engr.aud.edu. People would know which to edit by their category in the admin console.

I also mentioned that I have not worked with Joomla for 4-5 years so I currently don’t have examples or reference material. I just did a lot of customization, and like I said, I created my own templates so this is how I know that you can do these things. You are going to have to learn your php and mysql as well as html, css, and javascript. You will use all of these technologies when creating or editing Joomla templates.

I don’t know how easy it will be to convince your client the value of using a different CMS, but many of these things would be simpler if you were not using Joomla.

Regards,
Steve

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