New fields in jos_content?

I am working on a site which allows registered users to post their bespoke manufacturing job specifications on the site under their usernames rather than their real names so manufacturers can quote against the posted specifications. I have got to grips with Chronoforms and Chronoconnectivty and see how I can produce the form and a nice table listing out the available jobs. However I need the manufacturer to be able to click on the job to view the job in detail and to contact the person posting it using usernames rather than emails so that people won't be bombarded by nuisance emails.

I have found UddeIM which gives me the messaging system I need and this works well with Community Builder and Community Builder Pro which will give me the ability to register different categories of user with different types of profile and a more sophisticated set of permissions than in the base Joomla installation. If I somehow can get my Chronoform quote request form submitted as Joomla content I am home and dry as I can treat each new form submission as an article in the quote request category, produce a Community Builder List showing only the username and not the author's real name, linking to the user's profile and add a UddeIM message facility to the user's profile.

My problem with this approach is that the Community Builder List only shows fields in the core Joomla application (i.e. intro text, full text and not much more). I need to capture more fields in my form but they need to show in the Community Builder List. Any ideas? Another approach, which would be preferable in many ways, would be to have a specific Chronoforms table rather than using the jos_content table but then I'd have the challenge of linking the username to the Community Builder profile (must confess I don't get the whole linkable fields thing in Chronoconnectivity yet). I did follow Max's article "Extending our articles list to include author data" but got stuck in the last bit which was about linkable fields. I followed his instructions to the letter and got error messages.

As per a previous post I am very much a newbie here so please do not assume too much knowledge; six weeks ago I had never heard of Joomla and thought php was one of those things you got nuisance calls about!

Thanks in advance for your help. I do think Chronoforms is an excellent product, much better than some of the others I have tried out over the last few weeks. Might even buy a validation key when I go live!

Hi fdaley,

I'm really not too clear what the question is here. If you want to add results from a ChronoForm to a Joomla! article then you can use (a) a Custom Code action to aggregate the results from the form into article contents followed by (b) a Submit Article action to add the article itself.

I don't know much about CB but this does sound like a roundabout approach; articles aren't really designed to hold data like this.

Bob

Thanks. On reflection you are probably right - I should be using a custom form and table and using Chronoconnectivity to tabulate the results. How would I then produce a link from the table to the form author's CB profile? I presume I would set the username as a likeable field and then link to [domain]/index.php/cb-user-profile/userprofile/[username] but what do I need to put as the dynamic username field given I want to link to the profile of the person who filled in the form (ie. the author) whose name appears in the table, not the current user.

Best wishes

Frances

Meant to say "linkable" field, not "likeable" field!

Hi Frances,

I'm not sure of the best answer here. I've done some quite complicated work with CB and ChronoConnectivity but for that we always ended up using Custom Code to do the Database queries and then using a Custom listing in CC to display the results. That way you can show just about anything.

Bob

Thanks. I'm trying to avoid a lot of coding but I guess I'll just have to get to grips with it.