Please bookmark this page if you are purchasing this module, as this page constitutes the documentation as well.

To purchase this or any software on this site, simply create an account and then select the "Purchase" menu item at the top of the screen. After going through the PayPal process, you will find that the software you have purchased is available for you to download via the "Download" link, also in the main menu. Typically, PayPal takes 2 or 3 minutes to process your payment and automatically notify the download system to make the link available.

JSApp is a Joomla native 1.5 module that will load any well-behaved JomSocial application into a module, suitable for including in any page. When we say well-behaved, we mean that the application is reasonably self-contained and requires no additional includes other than the standard JomSocial framework or, if it does, that it includes them itself.

(Image 1: Plugins Manager)

Before going into to how to configure and use JSApp, let's take a quick look at the Joomla Plugin Manager. Note the second-to-last column, the one marked "File." This is the name of the plugin that will be needed by JSApp when configuring it for use. Here we've highlighted those plugins of type "community." Those are the JomSocial applications that you have installed on your system. On our system, you can see walls, kunena (the forum), myblog, jomcomment and twitter. With the exception of walls, these are all well-behaved applications.

Installing JSApp

You install JSApp as you would any other module, through the Extensions->Install/Uninstall manager in Joomla's back-end. Once you've done this, you can create and publish as many modules of type "jsapp" as you wish through the module manager. You may have as many on a page as you like and publish them to any module position, though you should note that the application will emit its display code however it wants. That is, if you try to publish the JomComment application to the "search" module position, you likely won't like how the output looks!

(Image 2: The Module Manager)

You will see in image 2 (the Joomla Module Manager) that we have published a number of modules of type mod_jsapp. The module names for these are somewhat descriptive of what they do. For example, "First: My Tweets (Guest View Off)" is a module that contains the twitter application and the title notes that it has the option set to not display if the user is a guest. These are available to see on our demo and download site at http://www.AmblerMedia.com.

(Image 3: Module Configuration)

Okay, now the fun starts! Once you've created a module, you need to configure it. The first thing you will do is enter the application name you wish to display in the module. In the example in image 3 (Module Configuration, above), you can see that the application is "kunena," which is a free forum for Joomla. It's the forum we use for support, in fact.

There are two Yes/No options available. The first, "Show If Guest" determines if this module should display if the viewer is a guest. That is, if they are not logged in to your site. In many cases, the output of an application will only make sense if the user is logged in as it will show information related to the logged-in user. The second, "Hide If Unused" will, if "Yes" is selected, cause the module to not display if the application is not installed for the current profile. If this option is set to "No," an error message will be displayed.

"Force UID" is designed to allow an application to run as if you were viewing the profile of a specific user. This can be a tricky concept, so let's go over it in a bit more detail, with an example. Normally, for an application like "kunena," the idea is that a user would install the application and it would show up when you view their profile. The application shows those posts that the user has made in the forum. If you were to install the JSApp module, perhaps on some other page of your site, it would display the forum posts of whatever the current profile happens to be. For JomSocial, this would be the profile you last viewed. This might make no sense at all, and you might ask, "why would anyone install this anywhere other than the profile?" Consider, though, creating a page with an article about your top three forum users. You might write some interesting things about them, and then perhaps publish this module three times on that page, once for each user. You would set the application to "kunena," but each module would have a different "Force UID" value, one for each of the three users. You would then find that each module showed the forum posts for each user as they would appear if you were viewing their profile! I hope this has given you some great and useful ideas. Remember, if you use this feature, you'll almost surely want "Show If Guest" to be "Yes," as the whole idea is that everyone gets to see the output.

"Pre-Text" and "Post-Text" simply output whatever is placed in them before and after the application's output. Yo ucan wrap things in a div tag if you want, put some kind of announcement, or just leave these blank.

The "Module CSS file" is important! Normally, the output of applications is expected to be on the JomSocial "frontpage," so the default CSS presumes that they will be wrapped in the appropriate CSS path. To make applications render properly, we need to include our own CSS. In this case, JSApp comes with a cloned copy of the default style.css, with the ID #community-wrap removed to allow the elements to render in any ID. This allows them to render for module display. Yes, it also duplicates much of style.css that need not be duplicated. It is included it as an example, but I would expect anyone doing any serious work with this to make their own CSS. You can completely re-style any application in this way!

Finally, the module allows for up to 10 parameter overrides. You can specify the name of the parameter and its new value. If that parameter is found for the application, it will be overridden. For example, the JomComment application has a parameter called "limit" that determines the maximum number of characters displayed. For one of the demo modules, I increased it to 100, since there's more room in the module published than on the profile page. This affects only the module, not the application, itself. Figuring out what the parameter names are can be tricky. You can go into the configuration for any application, but often the name of the field is not the same as the name of the parameter. Unfortunately, there's no quick and easy way to pre-determine the parameter names, so if you don't know, you can look at the code for the application to find out. If you get completely stuck, you can ask in our support forums or in the JomSocial support forums and someone can likely take a quick look and tell you.

NOTE: This is a 1.0, of course. It works on my sites and with the applications I use. It's entirely possible (indeed, likely) that there are things I overlooked and applications that don't play nicely. Walls, for example, don't play nicely. I'm working on figuring out how to make them do so. If you purchase this and run into any problems, let me know! I'll hunt them down and treat them like the annoying things they are (read: I'll fix 'em!).