Question How do I get the content to appear?

[MaxLiao]

This is a two parter ...

PART 1

I'm not able to get the slider to display how we desire. I need to know if this is working as intended, if I misconfigured something, or if there is another issue involved.

Testing conditions:

• One Custom content.
• One Article with one category.
• One Article with three categories.
• One Article promoted from a forum post.

Test 1: “All Sections” & “All Categories”

• Custom Content: Appears as expected.
• Single Category Article: Does not appear.
• Triple Category Article: Does not appear.
• Article Promoted from Forum Post: Does not appear.

Test 2: Select each section individually & “All Categories”

• Custom Content: Appears as expected.
• Single Category Article: Does not appear.
• Triple Category Article: Does not appear.
• Article Promoted from Forum Post: Does not appear.

Test 3: “All Sections” & Select each category individually

• Custom Content: Appears as expected.
• Single Category Article: Appears as expected.
• Triple Category Article: Appears three times.
• Article Promoted from Forum Post: Does not appear.

Test 4: Select each section individually & Select each category individually

• Custom Content: Appears as expected.
• Single Category Article: Appears as expected.
• Triple Category Article: Appears three times.
• Article Promoted from Forum Post: Does not appear.

How do I get everything to appear, and to appear only once?

What I am looking for is to select all sections (either via the All Sections option or by selecting each one individually, I don't care which method), and no categories. Frankly, I don't care what category the articles are in, or how many categories they are in, it's the section that matters. As soon as a new article is posted in a section is needs to hit the slider.

PART 2:

How (specifically) would I be able to set up the CMS widget(s) to appear as such.

The homepage shows the 'main' widget that collects from all sections.
The page for section 'one' only collects only from that particular section.
The page for section 'two' only collects only from that particular section.
And so on ...

The idea is that when someone goes to the homepage they are given everything. When they drill down into a particular section they only see info for that section - including via the slider.

I created a test instance, but I failed miserably at getting this to work as intended.

Is this even possible? If so, cure me o' mah ignorance, oh masters of the DBT code!

Thank you for the assistance.

 

[bszopi]

Ok, I'll try to give you a couple answers, but I will have to look into some of the items as well and get back with you.

Part 1
There is a know issue with the All Categories selection. Not sure why it doesn't work, but it doesn't, and I just haven't had the time to get into it and figure it out. So, the work around it to select all categories individually. The issue with an article with 3 categories appearing 3 times is new to me, but I think I know a potential fix. I'll just have to try it out and see. The issue with an article promoted to a post is also new, but its not something I probably tested now that I think back. I'll take a look into that as well and see what the deal is. To answer your last part, you don't actually have to select any Categories. You can just hit one category, so it is highlighted, and then SHIFT (or CTRL, can't remember which) click it and it will unselect it and leave none selected. This should solve the 3 category issue, but its still a bug...

Part 2
As of right now, there isn't an easy way to go about this on the CMS unfortunately. I started messing around with the idea, but wasn't successful in my initial testing. You can do it, but it would require template editing and a bunch of conditional statements with the way its currently set up, as well as a bunch of instances of sliders, 1 for each different configuration you'd want. If you only have a couple sections, it probably wouldn't be too bad, but with a lot of different sections it would become a nightmare.

 

[Fillip H.]

You can try re-downloading and re-uploading /dbtech/vbslider/actions/widget.php - a couple days ago I made a hotfix to it that may resolve some of the category display issues.

 

[MaxLiao]

Regarding Part 2:

Thank you for the clarification. Knowing that it's not possible – without crazy effort – will at least let me move on to other things. It would be a cool feature request, but I'm perfectly fine with what I have now (once the below issue is resolved).

Back to Part 1:

As always, thank you for the assistance and suggestions.

I downloaded the product and uploaded the new widget.php. I certainly have different results than before, but still not the results I was hoping for. Since all of the outcomes were the same, I'm just going to type of my test parameters.

• To unselect I used [Ctrl + Click] to make the highlight disappear.
• I performed the [Maintenance >> Clear System Cache] and the [DBTech -vBSlider >> Repair Cache] option between each test. Probably unnecessary, but I wanted as clean of a slate as possible.

Select “All Sections” & Select “All Categories”
Select “All Sections” & Select each category individually
Select “All Sections” & Unselect all categories

Select each section individually & Select “All Categories”
Select each section individually & Select each category individually
Select each section individually & unselect all categories

Unselect all sections & Select “All Categories”
Unselect all sections & Select each category individually
Unselect all sections & Unselect all categories

In every test:

• Custom Content: Appears as expected.
• Single Category Article: Appears as expected.
• Triple Category Article: Appears three times.
• Article Promoted from Forum Post: Does not appear.

If promoted forum (blog?) posts can't appear that's kind of disappointing, but something I can deal with - and will request for a future product update. The category issue is something I have to have corrected; whether I messed up a configuration or something else is causing the issue.

I understand that the simple solution is just to select one category, but I'm dealing with a lot of people who are not Internet savvy – they use sentences for tags, try to vomit information in every venue they can, and unlink items from the database (leaving 'unique' entries), and so on. I can tell them to only select one category, but that'll last all of … never. That's why I'm hoping just to use Section content, then it's forced into a single use.

 

[Fillip H.]

I've made an additional change to widget.php to hopefully ensure only one copy of each article shows up

 

[MaxLiao]

Absolutely perfect!

​

I would still hope to see promoted articles working in the near future, but for now I am happy.

Thank you! You guys are 2 for 2 in the amazing customer service and tech support arena.

 

[Fillip H.]

No problem at all

It's quite rare to see this level of detail in a bug report, everything tested and laid out perfectly so I could immediately reproduce it. As a developer it's the kinda report that warms my heart