Hi Guys, I have just had the amember script insstalled with the Joomla plugin included. I need some help please. I dont understand how this script integrates with Joomla. I was hoping it would be in the form of an extension, mambot, component or similar. At the moment it is an ugly signup form outside of the joomla site. Does it truly integrate in the site like a signup form within the Joomla home page framework or is it really outside of it. I hope I have made this easy to understand. This is my first time with amember and I want to get it right. Thank you Ed
I believe the Joomla plugin for aMember comes with a single login mambot you need to install, and also a single login module that replaces the joomla login. David
Not exactly... The "mambot" or simply "plugin" as it is called in the new Joomla 1.5 version, redirects the login & register requests to the aMember signup / login etc. page. It does not "replace" it. This is an important difference if someone wants to have a matching design / template for Joomla & for aMember. Design-wise, it really is a problem, it will confuse the users quite a lot if the aMember & Joomla design differs significantly. I have been thinking about a solution to this problem and believe I found at least a partial one. I had to hack the default Joomla 1.5 template (milkyway) so that you can force it to display only the header and footer part of the template. Than you can, in the aMember header.html & footer.html include these parts. You can take a look at how it looks on my "work in progress" website. Main URL: http://www.identitycloaker.com/cms/ aMember login page: https://www.identitycloaker.com/amember/login.php aMember signup page: https://www.identitycloaker.com/amember/signup.php This is just the Joomla template header: http://www.identitycloaker.com/cms/index.php?onlyheader ....and the Joomla template footer: http://www.identitycloaker.com/cms/index.php?onlyfooter The integration is not perfect yet though. It works great for the login & signup pages but is somewhat more complicated when it comes to the member.php & profile.php pages after you are logged in. You will need to use the Joomla wrapper for those if you want an almost flawless integration. The Joomla-aMember integration, if you want a perfectly matching design for both is really not "plug and play". The aMember plugin takes care of the technical part and does a good job, but the design match is a different issue. I will post the modified Joomla 1.5 template if anyone's ineterested. I have only the default one but once you see what I have done with it, it should be pretty simple for almost anyone to do the same with any other template. It's just a simple hack anyway. Tomas
I use the joomla plugin to modify the group the subscriber belongs to, then based on the group that the subscriber belongs too, they are allowed to view certain content on my site.
Nice job Tomfra...I was considering doing the exact same thing you are doing. I want/need a unified "look and feel" for my site, and if all possible I do NOT want to remind the user every single time he/she logs in how much he/she is paying for it.
Does anyone know about the integration with Joomla pre-1.5 versions (I'm using 1.0.13)? Like the previous poster I was under the impression that this would just be a mod/com/bot or such.
I know with 1.0.13 you can make it all seemless- check out my demo site http://www.joomlamember.com It uses 1.0.13 with aMember. I'll be testing out 1.5 this week and will let you know how it goes. David
Thanks for the reply David. Looks like it works great and good to know that there are others here running 1.0.13!
I've actually created an external page through Joomla to pull the information from amember. I did this because I wanted to show the profile info without the input boxes. So the can see all of their amember info and then click on the link to update or change their info. It works ok for what I want.
Tomas- I too am looking for seamless integration of aMember. I am using the aMember login mambot so I can display the login form on the left side of my site. But I ran into a few problems while trying to use wrappers. 1.) I set up a new "Membership Info" that is actually the user details... I used a wrapper and sent it to: http://www.domain.com/index.php?option=com_user&task=UserDetails This forwards to the details part in aMember, which is fine. It drops me back in the "user area". But if a user clicks the text "Logout" link there, then it loads in the index page of the Joomla site, which is really ugly. Did you find a way around that?
Edit /amember/templates/header.html and add this before the </head> tag: <base target="_parent"> If you place it in the header, all templates using the header will be affected but it shouldn't cause any problem I guess. I do it a bit differently but this should work too. Tomas
profile.html issue Hi Thomas, That works for the logout, but I am having difficulty with the profile data staying in the wrapper. I tried to look in the /amember/templates/profile.html file to see if I could put <base target="_parent"> in there, but there are no head tags so I am not sure if this would work. I have created a video so you can see the issue live. link removed Thanks for your time and help on this issue
Using a wrapper is a quick way to get amember into your joomla site, but its cleaner just to make amember match your joomla. Quick way to customize your amember: Most of the editing is in the header and footer. Find a clean joomla page, like an article,do a view source. Locate the header, sidebar, middle and footer areas. Then place the header and sidebar and start of the middle area in the amember header template, and the middle closing tag, and footer in the amember footer template. The rest of the templates should fall into place. David
The profile.html and redirect.html file needs to be slightly modified, I forgot about it. You can use the ones I attached to this post. You will need to open profile.html and edit the $main_member_url variable in it. Simply set it to the Joomla member-only page. Tomas
Also, as for the template suggestion from David - that would work but would be quite inflexible as everything would need to be hardcoded. If you do it this way and then you will be unable to switch templates without editing everything again in the amember header & footer files. I have a more elegant solution that I used for example for blending the Joomla template with aMember, phpbb3 and Trellis Desk (and it will work for anything else in fact). You can see my post at http://www.rocketwerx.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=368&p=2036#p2036 which describes the process for phpbb3 but is similar for aMember. The modification is template based - I used the default Joomla 1.5 Milkyway template but once you see the source code, you should be able to use the trick for your template as well. Tomas
Tomas- Thank you for this helpful information. I will give it a shot tonight. What is the Joomla member only page name? What .php is it? Thanks!
It's different for everyone. You simply create a Joomla page and set it to be accessible to registered Joomla members only. You can choose any name for it, naturally. For example, it could be something like http://www.yourdomain.com/joomla/member-area . Tomas
David- I believe you are right... to get it seamless I really must edit the header and footer. I've been trying to do that, but there is a lot of code and I'm not sure what bits to grab. I'm using a Rocket Theme template. What do I do in case of the modules? I have modules published in the left side (navigation etc). I see the part that says <div id="masthead">... would I start there and then end at the end of the part that says <!-- end footer -->? I'm also trying to figure out where the sidebar and middle are. I'm a bit confused as to what to grab. There's javascript and a bunch of other stuff also and I'm not sure if I need that? I'm attaching a .txt of the template in case you would have any time to point me in the right direction. I had to grab source in offline mode as the site is not live yet. Is that not good or will the code be OK? Thanks for any assistance you can provide.
Almost There, Just one Problem Area Remaining Hi Tomas, Hope your weekend was great. I tried to integrate the template as David suggested, but made a mess of things, and as you said, if the template changes, it's all hard coded and that's not ideal for this site. So, I have tired to do as you suggested. I have run into a snag tho. Things work fine for the Profile info, but when I try to look at the Membership Info, and I save something, it puts me outside the joomla template. Here is a video so you can see what I did: remove link What shall I do now to get this all working so it stays in the template? Thank you all so much for your help!
You just need to apply the same tricks to member.html as to profile.html. Download the attached member.html file and edit the $redirect_to_url value in it - just like you did with profile.html. It can be simply the main member url (as in the previous case) or the wrapper URL for the /amember/member.php page depending on where you want to have the user redirected. I renamed the variable name to make it obvious what it is actually used for. I used the original member.html template and made some necessary modifications to it. Because my Joomla + aMember integration is a bit more complex & different, I do not use and can't easily test this file so please report back any errors you find. And also let me know if the JavaScript field validation does not work, although it still should... Tomas