Questions about tags and adv search

Hi all,

It's been a long since my last project with Flexi, I'm currently trying the last one (V2 RC9) with latest J!25.

Many improvements have been made (backend tabs and separators, mmmmh!!), so thanks a lot for this, especially you ggppdk, I guess this project would be dead without you.

I have three questions though :

a) What's the point of
in admin/defineconstants.php and admin/admin.flexicontent.php ?

It turns on strict errors despite php.ini config. It took me two hours to figure this out, and should be definitly removed.

b) What is the point in using tags ? Since multi-categories are avaible for an item, and tag view can only display 1 tag (so you can do exactly the same with 1 category), I really don't understand.

c) Is the advanced search usable now ? I know you gave information about this but I can find any recent. If so, are custom field included ?
If not, do we have to use the Joomla standard search ? Last question, is there any kind of "predicted search" (suggestions appear along typing) for flexicontent ?

Thanks a lot

First there are many more things, than what you can see there , for developers too,

e.g. voting field now supports multiple voting characteristics,
you can create menu items that override category parameters,
untranslatable fields
form hidden fields
many options for customizing frontend form,
image field is now a image gallery field with very powerful image selection from a folder (latest version r1537+ has corrected some bugs and improve it) and it will have very appealing presentation as soon as we add a couple of more powerful JS galleries to it (currently we only have popup galleries only))

and many many more improvements (i will compile a list)

a) about your question for printing bugs, i have it there to help tracked down bugs,
but since i did not want to enable it for live sites, i added it for people running development sites (localhost websites are almost always developments sites), i understand it may break something in your site e.g. AJAX responses of other extensions because of PHP notices getting printed

b) tags ? we have this as a feature
since
1. we already have it, and we cannot just remove it
2. multi-category assignments is more powerful way but not the best choise in all cases
NOTE: FLEXIcontent supports multiple types of featured items via "featured-behaving" categories (read our FAQ article), we will add support for the featured categories to be selectable by checkboxes in item edit form thus making feature very user-friendly

c) advanced search is now finished, but you need to get latest SVN version, r1537+ , some more work will be added to it e.g. the search filters will be converted to clickable buttons (hidden checkboxes with their labels being the buttons)
NOTE: a filtering module is finished but not in SVN,
as soon as filtering module and search view enhancements are finished this is final version

The standard Joomla search view can also be used if you enable standard FC search plugin instead of FC advanced search plugin,

Just one last thing to do on this is do this via FLEXIcontent global configuration instead of asking user to enable / disable FLEXIcontent standard or advanced search plugins manually

Regards

Thanks for replying,

a) Honestly it feels a little bit intrusive for me. People working with local servers know how to deal with errors (or at least they will learn soon enough). Point is this is very hard to debug, as you're gonna question your apache installation first. Moreover there is still some strict errors in flexicontent, so I cannot really see the reason why keeping this code.

b) I never said you had to remove it !! Just asking what could be an example of using tags that cannot be reproduced with categories. To me, tags start to be interesting when you can play with at least two of them at the same time.

c) Thanks for that !

mmm, i see
about it being there it is to help with people reporting "white pages"

and about strict errors, yes we need to remove them but, i think also phpthumb will not work with strict errors ON ?