New to Cabalt, beginner questions?

Hi David,

I am not a Joomla expert nor a Cobalt expert, but, I am using Joomla for my sites for more than 3 years and Cobalt about 5 months so far, so, based on my own newbie experience, I can definitely assume you that Cobalt can easily achieve what you are trying to do, so, I will try to answer your questions one by one:

dbrakki I need to create a very simple site where a registered user can, by filling out a form in the front end insert some information. The information i need is the following:

• Company name from drop down field
• Company City from drop down city
• Connection type (radio button with two options)
• Addition text from text area field

Cobalt can easily do all of these, there are even much more powerful fields that can give much potential to your site.

dbrakki Once the user enters this information, i need this to be subject to approval prior to be available to other users. Maybe by converting the content to an article? ( is it possibile to convert your content to a joomla article?)

Cobalt itself is a component, not a plugin and it has its own article structure, it is not connected at all with default com_content (article system) of Joomla, it generates records based on information submitted on frontend, therefore, if you create a type and connect it to a section, all records submitted by a user will be publish as an article, no need to do any conversion or integration with Joomla default article system.

Based on this screenshot, you will see that you can easily set records to be approved by moderator(s) or site admin prior to be approved and available on the website.

dbrakki Not registered users need to be able to view the information entered by registed users in a list or grid format where they will also be able to rate each inserted "post".

You can easily set submitted records to be viewed by the public so that even non registered users can view submitted records, as far as grid layout is concerned, Cobalt template system comes in form of list or table layout, if you want to have your records to be available in form of grid, you'll have to purchase some advanced template structure as this one here.

dbrakki Can this be achieved with your extension? and if so.. what will i need? I see that there are various things i can choose however it is unclear to me which one i need to accomplish my website.

Based on my answers above, I will again say YES, what you want to achieve is definitely possible with Cobalt, you'll just need to understand Cobalt structure (which is a bit frustrated at the beginning), but when you have understand it, it's just easy, for what you want to create, you can just download the free version of Cobalt as you do not really need the premium fields or plugins, then you just need to purchase the advanced template I mention above, that's all you'll need to create what you need.

Honestly, I am not a team member of Cobalt, just a user like you, I decided to subscribe to Cobalt after trying all other available content construction kit and above all, Cobalt is the best.

Additionally, if you need any kind of support, the forum has lots of experienced users like me including Cobalt developers such as Sergey who will definitely provide you daily support on all your requests and inquiries, which are not available easily for other extension developers.

Regards,

Tomy

Hello dbrakki and welcome to the world of Cobalt!

Great overview by Tomy... also hence the very good product page with the read more areas. I would also suggest to browse the demo site, and have a look at the docs/quickstart and video.

BTW, Cobalt is also available as a FREE edition, which is already very powerful. So, download and install away... download and install the FREE PACKS, and you are going to learn "by doing".

dbrakki

Company name from drop down field

Company City from drop down city

May I ask you what you mean by "drop downs"? Do you want to offer pre-populated selectboxes? What is the source of your company and city data?