Some questions for the Pro's

[tj.baker]

Hello All.......

I work for a non-profit school for developmentally disabled adults.  I am in the process of building our very first website and am very excited about the possibilities that Joomla has opened for us.

I have a couple of questions regarding mods/component usage for our site.  There are a couple of features that I would like to have available as soon as I go live with the site, but can't quite figure out what my best option is.

1. I would like to have an events calendar for visitors and for our staff.  I would like to have a mini calendar available, and, depending on who is logged in, have certain events, meetings, etc. shown according to the users access level (does this make any sense??? , if not, I can try to explain again)

I have the extcal mod/com installed, and like it alot, it just doesn't have the ability to have different calendar events listed depending on access level. 

Is there anything out there that anyone knows of to do this?  I'm sure I could convince our executive director to pay for such an app if it were not outrageously expensive.  It's a feature that I know he wants to have!!! 

2.  I want have a gallery to show our artists work, a place to showcase original music and clips from our plays.  And I want to make all of this available to purchase.  What do I use to do this?

Do I need two separate mod/com's?  One for the gallery, and one for an online store?? 


Again, free is great, but if there is an easy to use solution (key, easy to use) to these needs that is not too expensive, and integrates with Joomla, I would gladly seek the money to get it going!

Thanks for taking time to help me out with this.  I am still learning CMS, PHP, SQL etc., and so any help I can get is greatly appreciated!!!

Oh, and here's a link to what I have got going so far.  I took the easy way out with using a template (something I want to create for myself in the future) just to get us up and going......

Let me know what you think!

http://thecreativecenter-visalia.org/82286421/

I've got alot of content to add before I go live with it. 
My first website, and I'm having a blast with it!!! 

peace

tj

[tj.baker]

Just curious.....did I ask the wrong questions, or is there nobody that can contribute to my questions?  OR..... did I actually write this in jibberish thinking that I was writing in English??? 

peace

[rmd]

I don't know much about calendars, but you might look at this thread: http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,35431.0.html

And as for galleries, it seems to me when I was looking the other day that there is a component that will some or most of what you are lookng for. Here are some search results for "gallery" at from JoomlaForge: http://forge.joomla.org/sf/search/do/re ... ED/Project

Good luck!

[mcsmom]

Have you looked at whats available on either the forge or joomlaya or another sie? There are several galleries and calendar components and modules. Virtue mart seems to be emerging as the leading commerce solution but there are others as well (or in some cases you could make it even easier and use cafe press or a similar operation).  The other thing is that there are some commercial calendars that will give you a lot more flexibility, I use ezphpcalendar  http://ezphpcalendar.com/ and also think that Thyme is very promising (http://www.extrosoft.com/)--but that's the problem with buying, once you go with one you are kind of stuck.

[tj.baker]

Thanks for the replies!

I checked out Thyme when I first got started and it seems a bit too much for me at the time.  I'm sure I would get the hang of it, but on top of learning all this Joomla!, PHP, SQL, CSS, etc., I don't have the time, or the want, to learn yet another app.

I will look into exphpcalendar and see what it's about.

Thanks again for the input!

peace

[phlux0r]

1.  I would like to have an events calendar for visitors and for our staff.  I would like to have a mini calendar available, and, depending on who is logged in, have certain events, meetings, etc. shown according to the users access level (does this make any sense??? Tongue, if not, I can try to explain again)

I think Joomla is quite weak at this stage as far as access levels go. Apart from the unregistered/registered and special, there is no way to utilise the built in access security to do what you want. No wonder that there are no calendar (or other) components that will allow you that. The only thing (and I'm on shaky legs here) that I think could be useful in your case is to look at Community Builder http://www.joomlapolis.com. This at least provides you with a framework that has the potential to do what you're after, if I understand it correctly.
After posting this, I came across another thread mentioning JACLPlus which is a Joomla 1.0.8 hack to allow creation of more groups and access level so you might want to look into that here: http://www.byostech.com/

2.  I want have a gallery to show our artists work, a place to showcase original music and clips from our plays.  And I want to make all of this available to purchase.  What do I use to do this? Do I need two separate mod/com's?  One for the gallery, and one for an online store?? 

I think VirtueMart http://virtuemart.net could be your one-stop-shop. It can feature both as a product gallery and as an online shop. No need to mix two separate components even though some of the dedicated gallery components are very nice. Still, it might be possible to modify a gallery component to integrate it with your online shop. Maybe a few google searches could give clues.

HTH