[SOLVED] Drop down field choices and "Other"

Quite frankly I don't know how you do it all, answering all our daft questions, keeping up with the technological changes, integrating bootstrap, keeping it all working across all Joomla versions, etc., etc.

Over the years we've become quite efficient and better at managing time. Truthfully 80% of my day is purely support, which is why incubator project releases typically take a week. We try our best to progress as quickly as possible, but the bottom line is our users will always come first as that's what we believe in.

I'm thinking/hoping CB 2.0 will bring a lot of those things together in a more cohesive way that makes things like updating seamless, bootstrap/css/less more centralised and my biggest hope; simplified interfaces with less tabbed pages of all the settings to go through.

Absolutely. All that you listed is planned to be basically completely redone. We've major plans for CB 2.0. I'm also slowly rewriting our current out of date plugins as well. For example CB Privacy was completely rewritten from the ground up and CB AntiSpam is our official CB Captcha replacement.

I appreciate the simplicity that tabbed interfaces can sometimes bring, but in some cases it's overkill when there are just a few settings on each tab/screen that might be better taking up a lot less space by some well laid out radio buttons (for example), and keeping the more related things together on related pages. Things would sometimes just be easier to comprehend if they could all be seen together on the same page/panel for comparison and with less having to flick backwards and forwards between things trying to remember what was what.

The problem we ran into, or dug our selves into, is we started adding parameters to control strictly visual items (GJ configuration is a shining example of parameters overload). The truth is visual items should be adjusted through a template only, but most who use CB lack coding experience so that wouldn't work either. So with that said we're looking into a drag+drop GUI interface template system to kill 2 birds with 1 stone so to speak. This should eliminate a TON of parameters as so many of them are just template changes.

There are so many panels and settings in CB, CBGJ, etc., that just to get them all straight in my head I had to screen grab them all, lay them out in DTP and then print them all out on large sheets which I now have all over my office walls with colour coding and sticky notes all over them. Trying to do all that on screen, page by page, tab by tab is just a nightmare as I try to figure out what all the things do and how they are related, and I've been CB'ing for months (years!).

I completely agree and understand your frustration with it. To be honest I don't know how to improve it at its current state without losing features. People keep asking for a parameter to do this and a parameter to do that I just drew a line in the sand eventually and said "no, no more parameters.. ever" as it was getting absurd, which isn't fun to say as truly I understand the need for quick parameters to adjust things. Half of GJ parameters are there just to do IF/ELSE statements in the PHP based templates. With CB 2.0 I hope to eliminate about half of the parameters needed by GJ if not more.

Well done to you and all at Joomlapolis for all the hard work over the years.

I really can't tell you how much we appreciate comments like this, thank you!

Well done to you and all at Joomlapolis for all the hard work over the years.

My sentiments exactly. This is why I keep staying with CB for projects; the dedication and support.

I completely agree and understand your frustration with it. To be honest I don't know how to improve it at its current state without losing features.

I think if I could ask for one improvement and one only, it would be to make the lists (fields, tabs, users, plugins) follow the J! item list conventions; namely the ability to filter the list by type or enabled/disabled, etc. as well as sort the lists by the selected headings. This (for me) is the biggest time suck when trying to do simple things like establish an order because it's difficult when you are overwhelmed by all the items you're not even using. If there was one thing I could hope for in a pre-2.0 point release, that would be it. :whistle:

But in the meantime, thanks for all you have given us already!

I know what you mean about days disappearing on things like support emails and other stuff before one actually can get down to work. It was mid evening when I started this message and all I've done so far today is sort out other things rather than get on with the main job at hand. Another late night's work coming up then!

I've been noticing the reworking of each plugin, definitely progressing, slowly and surely.

I don't think it was a mistake to take on the task of controlling the visual items, that's important too, but perhaps needs, as you say, to be a separate plug-in part of CB (now there's an idea - the CB styling plugin!). A Drag+drop GUI interface sounds very intriguing, not quite sure what that might entail but nonetheless something to look forward to I'm sure?

I first started using CB (and Joomla) about three years ago and certainly then CB style and layout was pretty fixed, now with the new Bootstrap and other advances things are much better and more flexible. However, then and now, one problem I've found with CB stuff is that it has it's particular way of styling things which don't necessarily get picked up or altered by a site's template styling. So, for instance, where I have my CSS/LESS template styling h1 to h3 in a large orange light-weight non-serif Google font, CB's overriding style makes them small bold Arial in it's controlled areas, or buttons aren't styled like the rest of the site etc. I spend a bit of time tweaking the css/less to get things to match but it's a bit of a chore particularly as each plugin seems to have its own styling css. You've told me before that will all be better in CB 2.0, so I hope you can manage to succeed in also separating/isolating the two parts in a productive way. i.e. positioning/visuals and code/function while keeping them closely integrated and not forgetting the old designer's phrase "Form follows function"!

I think it would be true to say we rely on you and all at Joomlapolis mainly for the coding expertise to make the functions work in a cool and clever way; giving us the parts that clip together so to speak. It's also nice that you can add some visual cohesiveness such as a iconic metaphors, Bootstrap, themes, etc. But for me, when it comes to modern third party templates that I can tweak to my own taste and needs, it's then I find the problems with CB's styling overriding the main template.

There are so many panels and settings in CB, CBGJ, etc., that just to get them all straight in my head I had to screen grab them all, lay them out in DTP and then print them all out on large sheets which I now have all over my office walls with colour coding and sticky notes all over them. Trying to do all that on screen, page by page, tab by tab is just a nightmare as I try to figure out what all the things do and how they are related, and I've been CB'ing for months (years!).

I completely agree and understand your frustration with it. To be honest I don't know how to improve it at its current state without losing features. People keep asking for a parameter to do this and a parameter to do that I just drew a line in the sand eventually and said "no, no more parameters.. ever" as it was getting absurd, which isn't fun to say as truly I understand the need for quick parameters to adjust things. Half of GJ parameters are there just to do IF/ELSE statements in the PHP based templates. With CB 2.0 I hope to eliminate about half of the parameters needed by GJ if not more.

Don't give up on the parameters, we need them (I think!), but it's often difficult for us to know what they all do, and where, and why, and what for!

I think half your battle could be won by keeping the graphic and layout parts of CB, GJ, etc. as separate entities (as you've already identified), half of the other half of the battle could be won by really condensing many of those tabs into a more compact and aligned set of grids with all data in one place/screen - tables if you like - much of the field and descriptive data in things like GJ is often repeated from tab to tab and by switching partially back to tabular view would do much to ease the strain and brain. I don't hate tabs and I'm not the regimental sort that needs everything in straight lines, but when I'm constantly drilling down, across and up again, going in and out of tabs within tabs within tabs, that get repeated across just one plugin or many, then things are getting a bit silly I think.

For instance. looking at the printouts on my wall, GJ's Configuration is a logistics nightmare, but let's just look at the Tabs tab (no irony intended!). Couldn't this just be summarised into one simple clickable table instead of repeating things so much. I say clickable because not just the tabs can be got rid of but also all those drop-down selectors that say 'Enable/Disable'. A simple radio button would suffice for all those areas, even the drop-downs with multiple entries such as 'Order by'. In fact radio buttons in place of drop-downs saves so much in effort too, instead of click-drop-think-select-check result, it's just one click. Also there's the added benefit that all the options can be seen without so much as a click-drop-review-think-compare - i.e. I have to click on each drop to discover what might be there! Radio buttons and tickable boxes, simple all round. I dare say this could be done in lots of other places.

And I wonder if maybe the best place for tabs would actually just be on the top level of anything only, avoid layers of sub-sub tabs, any subsequent sections simply divided by an <hr> or just a row title (the odd extra tab here and there is fine though!). UI-wise, scrolling down long pages is fine (for website developers maybe),... tabbing lots of panels?... Nah!... Having to actively click to something else is always more difficult, just look at the statistics for people that never go past page one of Google searches. I like my Google and eBay searches long, I hate reviews and articles where I have to keep clicking 'Next' to see the next bit and then 'Back-Back-Back' to find and review something mentioned much earlier. Maybe it's just me, but scrolling through miles of data is so much easier than clicking page after page all the time?

It does occur to me as well, that maybe tabs could be implemented in one place that they seem to be missing from altogether. I dunno, maybe it's too resource intensive or something but I've seen VirtueMart (from a couple of years ago) do something similar. It seems that an ideal place for tabs would be the actual very top-level of CB itself on things like CB Tab Manger, CB Plugins, CB Fields, etc.? I assume a lot of the server and local computer resources (and time taken) are used for just gathering and drawing these elements on screen, most of which are virtually identical. It seems it would then be a simple task to fill them in with the database's CB data on each as I go (if not all at once or holding those used in cache?), just tabbing my way across all my fields to tweak their settings easily instead of loading each one singly, checking it, making notes, closing it, opening another, change something, close it again to check something else, and then reopen it to tweak yet again?

The remaining quarter of your battle is of course keeping it all going and coding away to your heart's content. Once you get those first three-quarters sorted (the graphics and logistics) then your main battle can become your principle cause as well as leaving more time for reading and answering long daft posts like this one!

Well done to you and all at Joomlapolis for all the hard work over the years.

I really can't tell you how much we appreciate comments like this, thank you!

I certainly appreciate the hard work you do, you obviously have a good head for code. I know we users can't all be happy all of the time and there are many things that we wish were better or easier and we might grumble too much sometimes. Ever since starting with Joomla I can't begin to tell you how many times I've felt like chucking my computers into a skip and becoming a gardener or something simple where I don't have to keep sitting at my desk for hours on end working into the wee-hours with bleary eyes only to find whatever I was doing didn't work properly or isn't quite how I intended... Hang on, I'm still here, something must be keeping me going at it...?

rpitera wrote: ...I think if I could ask for one improvement and one only, it would be to make the lists (fields, tabs, users, plugins) follow the J! item list conventions; namely the ability to filter the list by type or enabled/disabled, etc. as well as sort the lists by the selected headings. This (for me) is the biggest time suck when trying to do simple things like establish an order because it's difficult when you are overwhelmed by all the items you're not even using. If there was one thing I could hope for in a pre-2.0 point release, that would be it. :whistle: ....

Yes, I've alwaays missed that and was wishing for it so much yesterday as I kept spending ages hunting through the long lists.

Also, and it's probably going to be resolved with suggestions of an updater, but whenever I want to see what versions of a plugin I've got, I have to go into each one and verify it manually against the version on Joomlapolis's download section (which isn't easy to use either because of the way it's split into membership levels) - BTW - The way I now search for latest updates is not to go into each member section, just go to Downloads>Single Items and click on the search button at the top, enter in the search box "." or "CB" or something like the letter "e" (something that'll always be present in any item), check it's sorting by date and all the new stuff floats to the top. Still, life would be much easier if the Plugin Management page of my site would actually show the version number and I can never remember the date of when I last did a check so a lot of manual checking in plugins is always required. (Hope I haven't been missing something obvious elsewhere all this time!)

I think if I could ask for one improvement and one only, it would be to make the lists (fields, tabs, users, plugins) follow the J! item list conventions; namely the ability to filter the list by type or enabled/disabled, etc. as well as sort the lists by the selected headings. This (for me) is the biggest time suck when trying to do simple things like establish an order because it's difficult when you are overwhelmed by all the items you're not even using. If there was one thing I could hope for in a pre-2.0 point release, that would be it.

We definitely will be improving this, but it won't be until CB 2.0. We're completely redoing our backend for CB 2.0 so it'll be much more intuitive. We're also discussing the possibility of multiple display modes (Basic and Expert) so those new to CB won't be overwhelmed with too many options up front.

A Drag+drop GUI interface sounds very intriguing, not quite sure what that might entail but nonetheless something to look forward to I'm sure?

Without giving too much away the idea is to have a GUI in backend to drag and drop together template elements. This basically allows you to easily change GUI elements without any code and without any parameters with zero coding knowledge through a nice jQuery powered drag and drop interface. I don't know the design specifics, but it's something we really would like to do. It's too early to say ATM how specifically this will look/work.

I first started using CB (and Joomla) about three years ago and certainly then CB style and layout was pretty fixed, now with the new Bootstrap and other advances things are much better and more flexible. However, then and now, one problem I've found with CB stuff is that it has it's particular way of styling things which don't necessarily get picked up or altered by a site's template styling. So, for instance, where I have my CSS/LESS template styling h1 to h3 in a large orange light-weight non-serif Google font, CB's overriding style makes them small bold Arial in it's controlled areas, or buttons aren't styled like the rest of the site etc. I spend a bit of time tweaking the css/less to get things to match but it's a bit of a chore particularly as each plugin seems to have its own styling css. You've told me before that will all be better in CB 2.0, so I hope you can manage to succeed in also separating/isolating the two parts in a productive way. i.e. positioning/visuals and code/function while keeping them closely integrated and not forgetting the old designer's phrase "Form follows function"!

The major problem for us in following Joomla styling is Joomla styling is not consistent. Template developers tend to do whatever they want and even provide frameworks. So CB can't possibly respect those. With CB 2.0 we'll be using LESS and Bootstrap entirely so the HTML markup will be in bootstrap and hopefully allow CB to follow other bootstrap styling properly. It's also worth noting that CB doesn't style outside of it self in all my projects. So for example CB Blogs styling only affects CB Blogs; this has inherit drawbacks, but there's not much else we can do without styling affecting everything on your site which wouldn't be good. Hopefully with CB 2.0 and its correct Bootstrap HTML markup we can eliminate some of these styling conflicts. We'd also be happy to work with template developers so they can style CB properly now, but none have come forward that I am aware of.

You bring up some great points for the parameter layout. I'm thinking something a long the lines of getting rid of sub-tabs and instead using collapsible sections. The problem with putting say all of GJ > Config > Groups on 1 tab is that the tab could scroll on for a very long time so the idea would be to collapse them into sections and clicking on the collapsed section would expand it for example. I'm not sure at this point and will be waiting for after CB 2.0 to redesign it as we'll be doing massive backend redesign at that point so will think through the best way to structure it. In addition to that a lot of the parameters will go away and move to the GUI editor as they make most sense there.

Also, and it's probably going to be resolved with suggestions of an updater, but whenever I want to see what versions of a plugin I've got, I have to go into each one and verify it manually against the version on Joomlapolis's download section (which isn't easy to use either because of the way it's split into membership levels) - BTW - The way I now search for latest updates is not to go into each member section, just go to Downloads>Single Items and click on the search button at the top, enter in the search box "." or "CB" or something like the letter "e" (something that'll always be present in any item), check it's sorting by date and all the new stuff floats to the top. Still, life would be much easier if the Plugin Management page of my site would actually show the version number and I can never remember the date of when I last did a check so a lot of manual checking in plugins is always required. (Hope I haven't been missing something obvious elsewhere all this time!)

My next task after the current CB Auto Actions release I'm working on is to implement version checker into plugin management so you'll immediately know when a new version is available. Currently the best way to check for versions is use our package builder under Downloads > Package Builder as it shows versions in a dropdown for each download all on 1 page.

Back to the subject of this question. I just can't get it to substitute the "Other" text entry into the field value for "Title" drop down in the profiles.

It's appearing correctly in the delimiter's field (when set to view in profile) using the code you specified:
[cb:if cb_title!="Other"][cb_title][/cb:if]
[cb:if cb_title="Other"][cb_other][/cb:if]

(I take it the "!" means "NOT")

Facts:
The name I have used for the text entry box required for Drop-down option "Other" is "Please Specify" (cb_other). I have named the delimiter "OtherController"

Settings:
For the "Title" drop down I have set "Field conditional other", Operator=Equal To, Value=Other, Fields>Show="Please Specify", Fields>Required="Please Specify"

Result:
It just isn't showing the result in the "Title" under profile no matter what I do elsewhere, it always shows "Other" yet I can see it recorded correctly in the delimiter and the text box.

I have literally tried "millions" of variations and exhausted all possibilities it seems for hours now. I have tried various other conditionals for the text box entry and delimiter and secondary ones in the drop-down, but nothing works.

It seems like the IF/NOT code above should actually be in the drop-down settings, not the delimiter, I tried that but it just partially shows in the tool-tip and of course doesn't work

Please help!