TOPIC: Hotspot and K2 Integration

Hi Daniel
This is Jennie masquerading as Andy!
I'm working on Andy's new site and we are now using K2. I'm having some problems getting this to work. In my K2 items we have some icons and a little bit of text in the Introtext, which we do NOT want to appear in the Hotspot pop up. And we have a short description in the FullText, which we do want to appear in the popup, along with the image and a link to the K2 item. Everything else is the the Tabs, we are using Styleware Tabs plugin for these.
My problem is that I rearrange or change the details in Hotspots, but as soon as I save the K2 item it reverts to showing the introtext in the popup, which is the bit we don't want!
I wonder if there's a way to get around it. I've looked at your documentation but I don't really understand the part about placeholders and how to use them?
The addresses are also changing when I save the K2 item, but I think the address details we have from the old site may be a bit loose. And one of the Hotspots disappears altogether when that gets saved in K2.
It might be better for us if K2 and Hotspots were only linked for the item link in the pop up and everything else was put in manually, but I don't know if this is possible?
Thank you for your help
Best regards
Jennie

Hey Jenne,
Go in the plugin and there you have this in description:
{introtext} is going to be replaced with the introtext from k2, {[fulltext}with the fulltext from k2.
If you don't want this - just remove those tags

After that you can edit your hotspots and change the hotspot text to what you want

Does this help?

Hi Daniel

Yes that helps thank you. I found this setting and changed it and I'll test it out.

I still have the issue with the addresses and the disappearing hotspot, and I'm not sure how these work.
I've set up an extra field in K2 for the address which is type TextArea. Should I put the address in there and leave the address blank in the Hotspot Location? Or vice versa? At the moment I've been putting in both, and then I end up with a different address to the one I put in both.

Many thanks
Jennie

Well, I don't think that a hotspot should be disappearing. Maybe it is not being added in the first place? A hotspot is only added when the address field in K2 is filled out and we can geocode it into a location. Keep in mind that the google geocoder doesn't always return the correct coordinates, or coordinates at all.. So if we don't have any match for a specific address we don't add a hotspot. However if we already have a hotspot, we won't delete it - as far as I remember.

Then the thing with editing. I just realized it. Most probably when you edit the k2 entry -> you'll always update the hotspot entry. So if you go to the hotspot, edit something there. Then go to k2 and edit something there - the hotspot will be override with the k2 changes.

What would you say about a checkbox in the k2 entry -> edit hotspot? What improvements would you generally suggest to the k2 integration?

What do you think?

Regards,
Daniel

Hi Daniel

I spoke to Andy about this before I went away, and he says that he's always relied on the lat and long coordinates to get the correct hotspot, not the address.

So I think this is going to be a problem if the K2 address will reset the coordinates, which is what it would appear to be doing, as the hotspot ends up being in the wrong place. In our case we would need to be able to override the K2 settings with the lat and long setting in the hotspot settings. In fact, I think the only linkage with k2 for us as far as I can see at the moment is to be able to link to the K2 article from the hotspot and to retrieve the text. We still have to upload a separate image for the hotspot, it would seem.

I'm thinking now that the hotspot is not actually disappearing, but is being moved when the coordinates are reset by the K2 save, and by chance was ending up directly behind another hotspot so I couldn't see it. When I zoom right in I can see it.

Thank you for your help
Best regards
Jennie

I've updated the k2 plugin, but it's in the 4.0 branch -> and this one is still in alpha.
That is why you'll have to use the attached file and do some work to upload the things as described:

Please download the attached zip file and unzip it on your pc.

Then upload the hotspots.php and hotspots.xml files to your site in
/plugins/k2/hotspots folder

the plg_k2_hotspots folder should go in the /media folder on your server.

Once you have this -> open the k2 - hotspot plugin in the backend.
You can provide a category mapping -> using this option you can map the k2 categories to the hotspot categories.

Save the config. Now when you go to your k2 item we no longer use the address field. Beneath the item you should see a google map + fields for street, city, zip and country. As well as lat & lng fields.

If you click on the map you can place your location. And you'll have to manually enter the address. This way you are able to add any address you want and we don't deal with the google geocoder anymore...

Let me know if it now works as expected or if I need to change something more.
Regards,
Daniel

Hi Daniel

Thank you for your help with this, I appreciate it.

I've followed your instructions and have noticed immediately it's caused a problem with the tabs. The JCE Editor is missing for the tabbed content and it is displaying in HTML.

I've provided a screen shot for you:




Thanks again
Jennie

Hi Daniel

Just to add that I've edited the hotspot fields in the K2 items and it looks to be updating the hotspots locations with the changes.

I'll ask Andy to double check if everything looks in the right place in the morning as he knows where they are supposed to be!

Thanks again

Jennie

Something worse has now happened to the tabs, they have all self destructed and completely disappeared!

I didn't notice straight away as I didn't think to check after I saved all the K2 items

Submit a private ticket and provide me with access to your site. I'll check what you've done.