Getting Jommcoments to work with Rokdownloads
17 September 2009
I have a small amount of downloads to manage. The number grows but slowly, still it is a pain to manage and I don't have any statistics I can easily gather without going to my provider and creating custom reports. And every time I add a new item for download there is a fair amount of writing and coding to add that page.
So I installed Rocket Themes "Rokdownloads" to manage that part of the site. I chose RokDownloads because:
- It's free.
- It works really well.
- I like it's interface.
- I've had good luck with their other products.
So the problem I encountered is that I use Jomcomments on my item download pages so that visitors can comment on the product. So now when I create the new Rokdownload page; the comments are gone. Which makes sense, but how do I get them over there? An even bigger problem is there is no way to add Jomcomments to my Rokdownload page because Rokdownloads dosen't belong to a component group that Jomcomment recognizes. So I figured out with a little help from the support guy at Jomcomment how to fix this.
Step OneIn you joomla instalation navigate to ": \components\com_rokdownloads\views\file\tmpl\default.php"
Open the default.php file and go to the bottom of it. Find the following section:
<div class="rd_buttons">
<a href="/" class="rd_button"><span><?php echo Jtext::_("DOWNLOAD");
?></span></a><a href="/component/user/?task=register">Please Register to Download</a>
</div>
This is the "download button" that shows up on the Rokdownload page. Just below this place the following code:
<!-- JomComment -->
<div>
<p></p>
<?php
require_once( JPATH_PLUGINS . DS . 'content' . DS . 'jom_comment_bot.php');
echo jomcomment( $this->file->id,'com_rokdownloads' );
?>
</div>
<!-- End -->
Now this will allow Jomcomments to show up at the bottom of the page. You can remove or add the "P" tags to your liking. You can also place this code higher up but I prefer the button before the comments so that users don't have to go to the bottom of a long page to find the "download button".
Step Two
If you have a lot of comments that you want to move you may want to write a query to handle it. But basically this is the procedure.
- Open your mysql database (I use PHP My Admin) and navigate to the jos_jomcomments table and select it.
- Now browse the contents of it.
- Find the comment you want to move and edit the "contentid" field/column. Change the field data to the id number of the Rokdownload page you want the comments on.
- If you dont know what the id number of the Rokdownload item is you can get that from the Rokdownloads manager or you can scoot over to the table"jos_rockdownloads" and look at the "id" field/colum to identify it as shown in the screen shot below.
- Next scroll over to the "option" field/column and change it from "com_content" (or whatever it is) to "com_rokdownload".
- Now if you open the webpage for the rokdownload you added the comments to you will see them at the bottom of the page.
- If your doing a lot of these open the Jomcomments admin console from your joomla backend and open the "maintenance" screen and run:
- Clear jomcomment cache
- Rebuild table index
All your comments should be in the right place after doing this.
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written by chuck , September 23, 2009
So the Rokdownloads extension is working well with one caveat. It dosent work with SEF turned on, as far as I can tell any kind of SEF, that includes sh404sef. I\'ve tried posting at their site for an answer but no fixes as of yet. So that means I\'ve had to turn off core SEF in Jommla for now. I\'m hope to find a workaround soon.
written by Chuck , September 26, 2009
OK so I upgraded to the latest release which is supposed to fix the SEF issue. It dose not.
I whish Rocket Theme developers would more thorougly test thier products and better document them.
written by german , November 22, 2009
Hi, do you know how to add the name of the article (name of download article/item) into module Latest Comments? The comment appears but not the name of the commented article....
thanx
written by Chuck , November 22, 2009
If you follow my instructions above it should work. If you look on my front (home) page at the "latest comments" on the right side you'll see that the article title appears with the begining text of the comment. This is the result after updating the MYSQL table as described above. Everything related to Jomcomment keys off the "jos_jomcomments" table.
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