3 questions

Our church site is about ready to go live, but, layout aside which I'm having someone else look at, I have 3 things I need resolved.

We have 3 different services on a Sunday, often with all different sermons and speakers, plus bible study. So, potentially, 4 different recordings.

1. On the first screen a user sees ( ckdev.info/fopc/listen ) I want to be able to display a text area which says which service/study this related to. I tried using custom fields. Turned them on, typed some stuff in them, but cannot see them displaying. That would be the way round it if they displayed on this screen.
2. Sort of related to above. I want to be able to create 2 links, one that loads all sermons, and the other that loads only the bible studies.
3. I added a test file (in the 3rd attachment slot). Our pastors want this to be a file that has further study ideas based on that sermon (not sermon notes, which, BTW, display horribly on the template I've used). However, the problem I have it that this button show up at the top of the 3 - Digging Deeper, Listen, Watch. Ideally, it should come down the bottom as it the less important of the 3. How do I change this?
4. I would like to add a different class to the heading of the sermon other than H2 which is what it displays as now. I can do the CSS I think, but what do I alter elsewhere to make them display with the new class?

Thanks. Really starting to get into SS now and enjoying it - great component!!

1. & 2.
You want to have a look at the categories. I think they should allow you to achieve what you like.
Let's say you create categories in a tree like this:

• Sermons
  • Service 1
  • Service 2
  • Service 3
• Bible Study

Now you can create a link to the "Sermons" category and one link to the "Bible Study" category. In the SermonSpeaker options, "Category" tab you set "Include Subcategories" to "All" and in the "Columns" tab you choose to show the category for the sermons list. This makes sure the "Sermons" link includes also the sermons in the subcategories "Service 1", "Service 2" and "Service 3" and the categories will be shown in the list.

3.
You can freely change the layout. Basics are explained here: www.sermonspeaker.net/documentation/layouting.html
The file in question is:

/components/com_sermonspeaker/views/sermons/tmpl/columns.php

Best make a copy of the layout or override it in your template. Otherwise your changes may be overwritten in a future version of the layout.

4.
One way would be to edit the layout like described above. Only the file is now in .../views/sermon/tmpl/... instead of /views/sermons/tmpl/...
Another way would be to just reformat the existing <h2> with CSS so it looks like <h3>. Like this: This would only apply the changes to the sermon detailpage, and leave anything else untouched

Thanks Thomas - as usual, a great response! DOH! Should have thought about categories - no brainer there!

Will go and fiddle now! Thanks again.

Actually, spoke too soon! I'm not sure what the details page is for. In the way I have it set up now the details page actually shows less information. What you see by clicking Listen is more of a "details" page than by clicking the title.

I just want to style the title on that first page/screen a user gets to. At the moment it seems to be picking up the H3 class. What I did was change the H6 in the template to what I wanted, then changed the code in columns.php to say H6 rather than H3. That worked!

Now to tackle the order of buttons!

EDIT: They're proving harder for a cut n paster like me. I can get the button to move OK, but then it links to the same file on every sermon so I figure the code just above the href has something to do with it. I think that's one for my coder to walk me through.

I am still having problems with a couple of things. I have set up categories as you suggested and the linking is great. However, I cannot get the categories to display on the sermons list entries. I have everything checked in the Columns tab in the backend for Categories but it won't show. I put the service in Custom 1 (which I renamed to Service) and that displays on the detail page (I figured out how the detail page should work, but decided I didn't need it so removed the href to it). However, the categories and Custom fields will not display in the sermons list at all.

The other issue is the date. It shows as Sunday, 10 February 2013, and in very small, and light, text. Now the size and color I can deal with in the CSS (when I find that!), but I don't understand why it's displaying like that. I have the date set in the backend as 10 February 2013 (no day, as it took up too much space). Ideally, I would like it to be:

Sunday
10 February 2013

But that's way more than I can deal with! I am just confused as to where it's picking its layout from when it isn't set that way.

Cheers

The detailpage shows what you set it to show in the "Columns" tab in the SermonSpeaker options. But it's optional to show it as you already figured out

For the buttons it's usually best to move the whole section inside a given "if (in_array('sermons:addfile', $this->columns) ... ". That's the part where it checks if you have this info enabled in the "Columns" tab. The addfile button code goes from line #168 to #194: It does some checking for an icon and tries to read a description with fallback to the filename. However I'm not sure anymore why I didn't just use the helperfunction here

Apparently the columns layout did not feel the love when I added categories to the list layouts. You could add them using this code:
The custom fields are not supported by any list layout. But the data would be present, so you can add it wherever you like using
The date in this layout is set fixed and doesn't take into account the parameter. However it's easy to change when you know where to look
On line #223 it says: The DATE_FORMAT_LC1 is a language string taken from the global Joomla language file. There are 5 predefined strings you can use here. They're also the options you see in the parameter:

• DATE_FORMAT_LC
• DATE_FORMAT_LC1
• DATE_FORMAT_LC2
• DATE_FORMAT_LC3
• DATE_FORMAT_LC4

If none of this fits your needs, you can always use the PHP format values directly. I didn't test it but in theory this should echo what you like: For the CSS look at the class "create".

I have sorted everything now except the button ordering - just cannot get that to work. Either get syntax errors or a messed display. Going to have my friendly coder do it - I'ce tried dozens of combos w/o success - even with your great explanation.

The category now shows, thanks. However, I really want it to say "Service" rather than "Category". Where do I make this change?

For the date issue, Joomla 2.5 allows you to add new date strings (Extensions -->Language Manage --> Overrides). I made 2 new ones, 1 for just the day in full (eg. Wednesday) and a 2nd for the date (eg. Feb 13, 2013). Then I used the existing date code in the template file and copied it into a new line using a <br/> between the 2 and changed the date string to reflect the 2 new date formats I'd set up, and now I have what I want.

I've been so impressed with the product and your support (given that SS is free) that I made a donation this morning and I encourage all others who use SS to do the same.