Hi there (121Books), I have used aMember before and I now plan to use it on another site with Joomla! but I'm not sure on a couple of points which I hope you may be able to help with. 1. My other sites template was a pretty basic structure of html/css file for the formatting. So, it was a simple task to make the aMember template very similar to maintain a consistent look and feel to my site when a user was signing up etc. I noticed on your site (nice site by the way ) that the signup form does not have the URL of www.yoursite.com/amember/signup.php for example like mine does, but a Joomla! style URL. This can be seen at: http://www.121books.org/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,32/ Can I ask how you get the aMember pages to show up in your Joomla! template? Is the aMember page loaded in a frame or something? Have you specified any code in the aMember header and footer template sections, or did you not have to bother with this? If you have the template chooser module active, does your site swap between templates seamlessly or is their customisation anywhere that you have to do. I would love a scenario where I could just install new templates into Joomla, and not have to change the header and footer code for aMember, this is what I am hoping is the case with your site. 2. Regarding the forum on your site, did you install this as a Joomla! component or as a aMember plugin? I was wondering if you were put off somehow by installing a forum directly into Joomla! then adding aMember plugin. I am looking at using phpBB and need to know whether to install aMember and Joomla! and the forum plugin from Alex (aMember) or whether to install the forum as a component in Joomla! Any other hints and tips you have would be most welcome.
It's loaded with a Joomla page wrapper, not as a frame. This way I, or anyone, may still link to a wrapped page url. The wrapper "wraps" your Joomla/Mambo headers & footers around a standard web page. This has the look of a frame without the user headaches of frames. You won't need to make any code changes either. Our vBulletin Forum was installed normally, it is displayed with a Joomla wrapper, and we use an aMember plugin to handle the logging in/out. If you do use my suggestions, make sure all of links pointing to your wrapped pages actually point to the wrapped page url and not the direct url (eg www.forum.domain.com). We are using the aMember's Joomla and vBulletin plug-ins. There are a few Joomla wrappers available. Just do a search on the Net and find one. The one we use is free but not fully compatible with the latest release of Joomla (I think). For this you may need to spend a few $$ for a different app (I forget the name of it right now). We also chose to use vBulletin ONLY because it has the best compatibility with aMember's forum plug-ins. Otherwise, the free Forums out there (phpbb, SMF, and others) are just as good for most people. But notice how vBulletin's search tool doesn't go to a new screen, personally I like this too, but that alone doesn't justify its price. Hopefully the newest aMember version integrates with free Forums better, but I haven't looked into it. There's also alot of discussion here about how to log in/out. Our log in link points to the wrapped aMember log in page, and our log out link is linked to the aMember log out link (maybe if I say link a few more times I can really confuse you about what link is linked to what linked link ) Be sure to periodically check this thread, or subscribe to it, in case other forum members offer different suggestions. I'll also keep watching in case you have any follow up ??s. Happy to help and good luck.