News Show Pro - Module

The News Show Pro GK4 module is best described as a news module on steroids. It's capable of more complex styling and configuration than the the core Latest News module.

There are a lot of "Latest News" modules available, but this one really is the crown jewel of them all and we'd feel cheap giving you anything else. We hope you appreciate it as much as we do.

There's a link at the end of this tutorial to the PDF documentation provided with module by the developer. The developers of this module are from Poland and while their programming skills are impressive, their English is not perfect and can be a bit confusing. Never the less it's pretty thorough.

Bear in mind that this module is extremely versatile, but with that comes a certain level of complexity. It's easy to get lost and end up with undesirable results. We've provided screen shots below and if you follow those screen shots you can get back to the original settings.

We'll cover the main points here.

Go to the News Show Pro GK4 module from the Module Manager and click on its link to open it. You can find it in the type column as mod_news_pro_gk4.

This module is set to appear on the Home Page

In the Parameters area you'll see a menu of 10 sub-sections.

We'll go over how the module is currently setup in each sub-section and what the pertinent settings mean.

Basic Settings

  1. Sets the width of the module in the page position.
  2. Sets the size of the font in respect to other fonts on the page.

Source of Articles

  1. Unless you have the K2 component leave this as Joomla! sections.
  2. Choose the sections you want to display.
  3. Select the order in which you want to show your articles.
  4. Select the sort order for the articles.
  5. You can choose to select articles only published after a certain date.
  6. Show/don't show articles already designated for the front page.
  7. Offset the latest articles to display.

Article Layout Part 1

  1. Set the amount of pages you want displayed within the module.
  2. Set the amount of rows and columns.
  3. This is the blank space around the article blocks.
  4. This controls the alignment of the header for each article.
  5. Choose whether or not you want the header to link to the original article.
  6. Choose the text limit for the header in the module in words or by characters.
  7. Choose the layout of the image within the article intro.
  8. choose whether or not you want the image to link to the original article.

Article Layout Part 2

  1. Choose how you want to layout the main body text.
  2. Set the text limit for the main text in words or characters.
  3. Choose how you want the information bar to appear. See product doc for an in-depth explanation.
  4. Choose whether or not you want to link to the main categories.
  5. Select a date you want a module to use. The date the article was created or the date it was published.
  6. Choose how you want the author info to display.
  7. Choose how you want comments to display.
  8. These five settings will arrange how all of the elements in the module are arranged.
  9. Select the layout for the "read more…" link.

Links Layout

  1. Select the amount of pages of additional links to display within the module.
  2. The amount of links to display per page.
  3. The amount of columns.
  4. The position of the additional links in respect to the main article layout.
  5. Show/don't show the article description, i.e. introductory text.
  6. Set the text limit in words or characters for the title text and description text.

Thumbnails

  1. If set to on the module will create independent thumbnails.
  2. If set to on images will adhere to the width and height set below.
  3. Set the width and height of the thumbnails.
  4. Set the margin in pixels around the image (clockwise starting with the top).
  5. Set thumbnail background with a hexadecimal value.
  6. Set whether or not you want the thumbnail to stretch based on the width and height settings above.
  7. If create thumbnails is set "ON" specify the quality of the thumbnail here.
  8. Set how often you want a module to re-create the thumbnail.

Additional Settings

  1. Select the icons you want displayed for the pagination in the top and bottom sections.
  2. Turn animation (slide show) on or off.
  3. Set whether you want the animation to stop on a mouse over.
  4. Set the animation speed in milliseconds. And the interval between slides also in milliseconds.
  5. Only adjust this setting if you are having problems.
  6. The text you want to display at the end of the main body of the text.
  7. leave these settings off.

The remaining sections of the parameters such as K2 Store, Virtuemart, and External Files are not relevant to your particular site. Feel free to explore these on your own in the product documentation here: HelpFileNewsShowProGK4.pdf.

  • Sunday, 11 September 2011