Tim Krause - PhD

One of the significant changes to DocMan 1.5 is that the modules are no longer separate download and installs.

Whether you want to add a module that provides a listing of your DocMan tree structure, recent downloads, or top downloads, the process is relatively simple.

First, choose Extensions/Module Manager and click the "New" icon.

The types of modules that you can create will be listed in alphabetical order. You'll want to find the DOCMan modules, which should look like Figure 1.

Figure 1: The DOCman modules

For this example, we'll create a component that will display the DOCman content that has been downloaded the most often (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Select DOCman Most Downloaded

At this point, all we need to do is configure our module to look the way we want it to, and to choose where we want to display it. This process should look no different than the process for configuring most Joomla! modules. Figure 3 illustrates the options available to us.

Figure 3: Configuring DOCman Modules

1. Give your module a title, like 'Top Downloads' to help users identify what is being displayed.
2. Set 'Show Title' to 'Yes' so that it displays on the screen.
3. Set 'Enabled' to 'Yes'.
4. Choose a module location. I prefer a two column layout, and use the 'left' postion for supporting content like this.
5. Leave 'Access Level' set to 'public' so that everyone can see the module, but remember that you can make modules available only after a user has logged in. This might be a way to create lists of premium content for registered users only. If you do this, remember to also change the permission on the content and content category to 'registered' as well.
6. Choose the menus where you want the module to display. For consistency, I ususally leave the default menus set to 'all'.
7. There are a couple of remainin parameters that are specific to DOCman and this module: 
   1. 'Limits' is the number of items that will display. The default option of '3' seems low; for my site, 5 seems about right.
   2. 'Show icon' if set to 'yes' will generate file type icons so that users know what kind of file they might be downloading.
   3. 'Show counter' if set ot 'yes' displays a counter for each piece of content and may help users see in a glance just how popular your content is.

Configuring other DOCman modules works exactly the same way. Enjoy.