Joomla - Articles Generator

With this dynamic slide generator you can show the contents of your Joomla articles.

Tutorial

1

Creating a new dynamic slide

To get started, go to any Slider Settings page and add a new dynamic slide. Select Joomla Articles and then pick Article.

2

Configuring the generator

Set up your generator. Choose the settings you want. Popular options you probably want to configure: category where your articles will be pulled, the number of slides you want to have, the ordering of the articles.

You can also click on the View Records button to see the data you'll be creating your slide with.

When you're done, click on Add.

3

Editing the dynamic slide

After you saved your generator, you'll be redirected to the Slide Editor to set up the look of your slide. You can create your content by using variables.

Not sure what are the variables or how to use them? Learn how to work with variables.

Configuration

You can use these options to set what you want your generator to show.

Filter

Category

You can select the categories from where you want the articles.

Tags

You can select tags to filter your articles from the selected categories.

Access level

You can choose the access level of the articles you want to appear in the slider.

Featured

You can choose to show only the featured, not featured or all articles.

User ID

You can write one user's id in here, and only those articles will be in your slider, which were created by them.

Included Article IDs

You can write article ids there (separated by comma) and these articles will be added to the slider.

Excluded Article IDs

You can write article ids there (separated by comma) and these articles will not be added to the slider even if they're in the selected category.

Language

You can filter out the articles based on the language. You can find a language filter list in here. If you separate them by comma, you can filter multiple languages. Not sure what language filter to use? Check out the language filter list.

Fields

You can create variables from custom fields.

Tags

Makes the tags available as variables.

Remove shortcodes 3.5.1.9

You can remove 3rd party shortcodes from the slider in the given formats.

• {shortcode}example{/shortcode} / [shortcode]example[/shortcode]: Removes the content between two content marked by curly brackets ({}) or square brackets ([]).
  Example: the following text Lorem ipsum {code}3rd party code{/code} will result: Lorem ipsum
• {shortcode} / [shortcode]: Removes the curly brackets ({}) or square brackets ([]) and the text inside them.
  Example: the following text Lorem ipsum {code}3rd party code{/code} will result: Lorem ipsum 3rd party code

Date format, Time format

You can use the format options, which are available for the PHP date function.

Translate date and time

Simple text replacing, which will go through the date and time variables. You will see three examples in the default value, how you can use this. It should be from->to and separate the multiple text translations using || signs, for example: January->Január||February->Február||Monday->Hétfő||Tuesday->Kedd

Order

Field

The field which decides the ordering of your articles.

• Title
• Category title
• User name
• Featured
• Ordering
• Hits
• Creation time
• Modification time

Order

The order direction.

• Ascending
• Descending

Generator Settings

Learn about the Generator Settings at the Generator Settings documentation.

Variables

These are the available variables you can use to build your dynamic slide content in the Slide Editor.

• title The title of the article.
• description The intro text of the article.
• fulltext The full content of the article
• image, thumbnail The Intro Image of the article.
• url Url to the article.

• category_list_url Category List url to the category of the article.
• category_blog_url Category Blog url to the category of the article.
• fulltext_image The Full Article Image of the article.
• category_title The title of the category of the article.
• created_by The name of the user, who created the article.
• id The id of the article.

Common issues

1

URL variable returns a wrong URL

If your URL looks like this: http://example.com/?id=123:myarticle&catid=456:catalias and it leads you to either to the homepage or to a 404 page, the problem can be that your article is not accessible. Go Menus → select one of your menus, which is visible on the frontend → Add a new menu item to it → select Articles - Single Article and select the article, which suppose to be within the slider. Save it down and take a look, if you can access the article from your own menu. If you can't, make sure, that the article is published and also check out its category, if it is published and accessible for every user role.

Once the article is accessible, clear the slider cache and the url variable will be fine!

2

The generator links to a different place than the menu

There are two types of pages in Joomla. One of them are the content pages, like Joomla articles, webshop pages, K2 item pages, etc.. The other pages are the Menu Manager pages, including the menu points, what you have created for your menu. You can create for example a category page, and go to your article from there. You can also create a latest articles page. So there are a lot of options to reach an article, and there is no way to know which one you want. For this reason, our generators just links to the default simple content page.