As a precaution I have removed this Tips & Tricks because it causes weird tricks on my site which has become a real pain in the &%$&.

I removed the EZ Site Affiliates module today completely from my site install as I experienced a real weird error 2 times since yesterday.

I am not certain but it could be that two instances of the EZ Site Affiliates module conflict with iJoomla News Portal and Joomlaworks Frontpage or some other code on my site front page, and my whole FrontPage News Portal was blown away.

I had to reinstall iJoomla News Portal component again to correct it and if it happens again, with the EZ Site Affiliates completely removed from my site then I have another issue to track down. This is a weird one.

If you installed the EZ Site Affiliates modules I suggest being very cautionary, as more investigation needs to go into this. I WOULD NOT WANT ANYONE to follow the suggestion I made yesterday and experience the same error.

RandyMac - West Kootenay Unplugged

VERY IMPORTANT if you read this thread on Sunday March 16th, 2008.

PLEASE READ THIS CAUTIONARY NOTICE about the TIP and Trick I suggested yesterday.

Smootdude11 and others that looked at my suugestion of adding the EZ Site Affiliates module to act as icon headers to iJoomla NP front page.

I REMOVED the EZ Site Affiliates modules from my front page of my site, as I experienced a very strange error (TWO TIMES since yesterday after install EZ Site Affiliates above the module positions because my iJoomla NewsPortal was completely blown away.

I had to reinstall the FP News Component and reset everything. The only thing I added yesterday besides images to my images folder was the EZ Affiliates module above iJoomla News, so when the error happened for the 2nd time, I felt that there must be some major conflict between iJoomla News Portal and the EZ Site Affiliates modules code on my site.

I most certainly do not want anyone to go through a similar experience, so if you have installed the EZ Site Affiliates modules as per my Tips and Tricks suggestion, I suggest removing it so the same thing doesn't happen.

It could be something all together different, or just exclusive to my site, and my template and the module and iJoomla NP but I don't want to take a chance, so I am taking the precautionary approach to this one by warning people what happened to my site last night.

My apologies if anyone else experiences the same error by following what I suggested on Sunday with install of the EZ Site Affiliates module to show icon headers above the iJoomla News Portal page.

RandyMac - West Kootenay Unplugged

Smoothdude11,

I have a number of installs of iJoomla NP and want to make sure that the sites have the best look and feel that can be made.

I'm sure that we can figure out how to add images through the CSS.

I appreciate your response on this and await for your further feedback on what you are able to come up with. If I manage to get to it this week, I will post what I have come up with.

RandyMac

Ricardo,

Thank you very much for the feedback. I'm sure there must be a way to hack in some code to display two images above the two zones. I was looking into using a module to do just that, and will post if I get it to work they way I want it to look.

I have been up all night working and will check things on the br or p for spacing when I get up in a few hours.

Thanks again.

RandyMac

I have used iJoomla products to make my sites easier to manage and to give them that extra professional touch ever since iJoomla made iJoomla News Portal available.

I started West Kootenay UNPLUGGED in December 2006 and shortly thereafter added the iJoomla Newsportal capabilities to it as soon as it was made available. And I am so pleased it did.

My regional focused News Portal Site in BC Canada: http://www.westkootenayunplugged.com

In 2007, West Kootenay UNPLUGGED was reaching over 9,500 visitors per month. I decided to turn WKU offline in October 2007 so as to not compete directly with my client's new site that I developed. WKU was updated and turned back online 7 days ago.

Trail Chamber news portal site: http://www.trailchamber.com

The Trail & District Chamber of Commerce news portal (also developed using iJoomla News Portal and Sidebars) has become an established Chamber web site in Western Canada and British Columbia. And my client is very pleased at the increase in visitor traffic results and they largely  attribute this success to the easy to navigate news portal look and feel of the Trail Chamber web site. Naomi (ex assistant and site administrator)and Carol Anne (executive director) also appreciate being able to manage the news portal completely in house, rather than pay a web designer to manage everything.

The old site was almost dead and rarely got updated. This is now been corrected and Chamber Members are extremely pleased with the new site and the huge increase in traffic and visibility for their businesses.

The Trail Chamber site has become such a huge success for my client, and they tell everyone that I developed it for them and also trained them to use Joomla and manage the site with all its features. My client really likes iJoomla News Portal and Sidebars and how easy they are to use to manage their site content.

I now get many requests to develop similar Chamber web sites so I started ChamberVoice.com to focus on Chamber of Commerce focused web sites. I will launch this new subscription service in 2 months and plan to sell a lot of iJoomla extensions. More on this "Build your own Chamber News Portal" member subscription service and business model later.

This past week, I decided it was time to turn West Kootenay UNPLUGGED back online. Within the past 7 days, the traffic to WKU has increased substantially and my sites results in the search engines started to climb again and now I am on page 1 or 2 in Google search results. Soon, WKU will be number 1 or 2 again.

Also, my site members and people in the Greater Trail BC and West Kootenay region are pleased to see WKU back online. The local newspapers are not available or get very limited exposure online, and small businesses find their ad costs to high. As an independent news portal WKU is the favorite alternative for small businesses to gain exposure for their products and services in the West Kootenays.

With the 2010 Winter Olympics coming to British Columbia (Whistler BC) small businesses are wanting to get more visibility online. WKU offers this.

I updated WKU with the latest versions of iJoomla News Portal v and iJoomla Sidebars and changed the WKU web site template and the front page color scheme to reflect a more earth tone look and feel. My goal was to get a similar look and feel to BNet.com, as my goal is to focus on the outdoors and tourism related content to serve it up to visitors looking for information on the West Kootenay region of British Columbia Canada.

I also use Joomlaworks.gr Front Page Slideshow to draw attention to particular articles and site features.

This next few weeks I will be working on optimizing WKU's front page load times and make other changes to increase my sites appeal.

I also spend a lot of time using iJoomla products and have started to make tutorials for my new site (ChamberVoice.com) to show others how easy it is to set up a Chamber web site and my new step by step screencast tutorials will show people how to use Joomla! and extensions such as Ijoomla News Portal and iJoomla Sidebars to turn a site into a heavily visited news portal destination. Look for video screencasts and step by step tutorials for iJoomla NP and SB on WKU in the next few weeks and months. They will be a teaser for more of what is to come on ChamberVoice.com.

Thanks to iJoomla! for making such easy to use GREAT extensions for Joomla!

RandyMac McCallum
West Kootenay UNPLUGGED
http://www.westkootenayunplugged.com

Hello,

I have become familiar enough with iJoomla Newsportal but want to add some extended capabilities to a Zone to make things look more professional. I have added a mock up image to show what I want to be able to accomplish.

Q 1:

I would like very much to make my site http://www.westkootenayunplugged.com look very close to http://www.bnet.com and have started to create some header icons images so I can add them to my site to give it that final professional look that is similar to that on the BNet front page and secondary pages.

I can change the attributes in the iJoomla News Portal Zone manager to get the colors and text close to what I see on BNet, but it would be real nice to add a header image at the top of each of the zones for: Top, Leading stories, More news, Most popular and also the Featured Sections, Featured Categories similar to those at BNet site.

There must be a way to add some style sheet code to load an image above each zone?  Anyone with any suggestions or ideas on how and where to add this code to load images in the right location to accomplish this possibility, I would appreciate it very much.

Q 2: Also, I am trying to figure out where in the code to change the space or padding between zones for my Leading Stories zone and Most Popular Zones? Image attached. If you know how to change this spacing to reduce it, it would be appreciated if you could post any suggestions here.

Any suggestions very much appreciated.  I am working on cleaning up my site, and want to really make it shine with iJoomla! News Portal on the front page before I announce the new version of my site. I turned it off last October with just under 10,000 visitors a month coming to it. I am refocusing my efforts to really make this site fly and gain traffic, and have a lot of work to do to get there.

iJoomla News Portal is a fantastic addition that allows me to create a news portal focused site for my local region.

RandyMac - West Kootenay Unplugged