At itoctopus, we love to share our Joomla work with our readers. We think that by doing this we do our part to ensure that Joomla remains at the helm when it comes to CMS solutions. Why do we do that, you might be wondering? Well, because we believe, and rightly so, that Joomla’s success is directly proportional to our success!
Today, we are offering our readers, for free, a module that displays a slidebox of a new article when the person reaches the end of the current article he’s reading. We call this module the “PageEnd Slidebox”. (Not to be confused with the “Page End Slidebox” module available on the JED. That one is commercial and is not developed by us.)
The module can be downloaded here.
Quick notes:
- The module is very simple to use. Just install it and assign it to the menu item of your choice (which normally should be a category blog), and it’ll do the rest.
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The module should be assigned to a module position that is immediately below the content position. That module position shouldn’t have any formatting (e.g., it shouldn’t be rounded, xhtml, etc…).
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The module does not alter any content prior to display. It simply adds a div tag at the beginning of its display position (which should be, again, immediately below the content) to know when to display the slidebox.
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The CSS of the slidebox is controlled by the CSS file mod_pageend_slidebox.css in the css folder. If you want to change the colors of the slidebox, you should do it there.
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The Fresh item is retrieved the following way:
- We get the latest 5 articles from the same category of the currently displayed article (of course, we make sure that it’s not the same article that is being displayed).
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We then get a random article from these 5 articles.
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We display that article in the slidebox.
If you wish to change that behavior, then you can do that. The logic is done in the default.php file located under the tmpl folder. (Note: The module can be easily adapted to work in K2.)
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The module has no hidden links or hidden code anywhere. We really condemn these practices and have never used it and we will never use it.
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The module is made for Joomla 2.5, but technically it should be compatible with Joomla 3.x. We haven’t tried it on Joomla 3.x though.
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The module is extremely light. It shouldn’t add even the slightest pressure on the busiest Joomla sites. It just has one simple query to the database.
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The module uses the jQuery JavaScript library and directly includes it from Google’s own site. We have tested this module on many Joomla sites and we didn’t have any conflict between jQuery and MooTools (another JavaScript library) on any site.
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The module is completely free. You don’t have to pay us a penny for using it. We just hope you like it!
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Credit is given where credit is due: We have used this resource to build our Joomla module.
We hope that you find this module useful and that it will increase your visitors’ engagement. If you need help installing/customizing it, then please contact us. We are always available for help, our work is ultra-professional, and our rates are super affordable.