Meta Matters

The latest version of MetaMod (v2.6) for Joomla was released today, 29 November 2010.

All the changes are in the included JomGenius support. There are a few bugfixes and a few new features. The official release notes can be found here.

There are a couple of notable new features, in VirtueMart support:

1 - You can now check for a page type of "shop.registration" which is the page that people are sent to from the VirtueMart module, for new user registrations.

e.g.:

if ( $vm->check("pagetype = shop.registration" ) ) echo "On the registration page";

2 - You can now check to see if the product or category list being displayed descend from a particular category; i.e. whether a given category is an ancestor of the current product or category list.

This is useful if you want to use a different template (using MetaTemplate) or module (using MetaMod) for all products/categories that are in a top-level category.

Let’s say you have VM categories like this:

• Instruments (id 1)
  
  • Woodwind (id 2)
  • Brass (id 3)
    
    • Orchestral (id 4)
    • Brass Band (id 5)
  • Strings (id 6)
    
    • Orchestral (id 7)
    • Guitars (id 8)
      
      • Electric (id 9)
      • Acoustic (id 10)
• Audio Equipment (id 11)
  
  • Studio (id 12)
  • Live (id 13)

Now, I want to display a certain module on every shop.browse page and shop.product_details page in the Strings section:

$vm = JomGenius( "virtuemart" );
if ( $vm->check("pagetype = shop.browse, shop.product_details" )
  and $vm->check( "ancestor_category_ids = 6" ) ) return XXX;
// replace XXX with module ID to include on those pages.