Well I am now able to switch templates based on article ID.

But I would prefer to switch templates based on menu item. 

I assigned certain articles (which required a different template) to a category and then created a menu item that lists articles in its category.  So instead of making the rule work with individual articles I made a rule that it switches templates based on menu item.   I selected the menu item that contains the Category List.

Specifically:

Menu Item Handling  "Include selected items"
Then, in the list I selected the menu items.

However it doesn't work.  Here's what debug says:

Processing rule id 8 ("WIDE Interior Pages dev6.[domain hidden for privacy].ucla.edu")

- Domain name: "dev6.[domain hidden for privacy].ucla.edu" is in the include list - succeeding

- URL: "http://dev6.[domain hidden for privacy].ucla.edu/faculty-2" contains "" ? - succeeding

- Menu handling: currently in menu name: [invalid menu item], Menu id: [invalid menu item: 98]

- Menu items: current menu item is not in list of menu items to include - failing

Started FAIL action for rule id 8

Finished FAIL action: default template style not changed

Finished all rules

Final template style set to "28|music"

So I am not sure why it would be calling the menu item invalid.

I should note that the visitor gets to the page via text link.  However the pages itself is indeed in the menu that contains the category.

Where does Chameleon get the "Menu item" id from?  Since I simply highlighted the menu item I would assume the Menu item id would be correct????

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Hi Rowby,

You're supposed to be able to trigger an action based on the articles from a particular category. One hiccup may be that if you simply specify a category, then the category list/blog page will trigger it as well as the articles it contains triggering it.

So, if you just want the articles in a category to trigger the action, then you can combine 2 things:

1 - select the category
2 - also select the page type: "article".
(both in the same rule)

The invalid menu item is a little strange though – could it be that you used to have a menu item that was a category list/blog, and it had Itemid 98, and somehow the articles are still linked to that menu item? Take a look at your "trashed" menu items and see if #98 is still there? Or perhaps #98 is another live menu item that's "grabbing" the individual articles. Joomla does get a little confused about this sometimes.

Another way that a defunct Itemid can get associated with articles is if you have linked to them directly from the fulltext editor, then your menu items have changed. Sometimes this causes the old Itemid to become embedded in the HTML.

Hope that helps,
Stephen

I went into phpmyadmin and did some screen captures.

Maybe the screen capture will be helpful????


Rowby

To update:

The problem in this case was due to an out-of-date entry in sh404SEF that encoded the wrong category id (catid) into the URL of the page for one of the artcles. Chameleon, via JomGenius, trusts the catid URL parameter if it exists, and considers that the article belongs to that category even if that conflicts with the value in the database. It does this to avoid a database query if there's a URL parameter for the catid.

Once this conflict was resolved, Chameleon was able to correctly determine the category of the article, and operated correctly.

Cheers,
Stephen