Pop-up Messages in Joomla using JDialog

: Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge; Published: 24 October 2010 24 October 2010

One of our Joomla training members wanted to place an agreement in front of their users on certain pages. They wanted to force them to agree before going any further.

Our solution was the JDialog module. This works not just for agreements but for almost any type of pop-up message you want to display.

Install Jdialog

Go to the Jdialog page on https://extensions.joomla.org and click Download. Click "Download" to go to the developer's site and find the file. Download the file to your desktop.

In your Joomla administrator area, go to Extensions >> Module Manager and open the module.

Testing the Module

Enable the module and go to the front of your site. If the screen goes dark and you see the white box above, you know that things are working. Now, we can edit the settings. Please note the although the module works, the English text does leave something to be desired.

Configuring Jdialog

The first group of settings deals with the color and design of the pop-up box.

The second group of settings deals with what happens to the user when the interact with the pop-up box:

ok action: what happens when people agree or disagree with your pop-up question. The default is "none" which leaves them on the same page.
ok url: if you change "ok action" to either of the other settings, where will you send users if they agree?
ng url: if you change "ok action" to either of the other settings, where will you send users if they disagree?
msg title: the title of the pop-up message
msg1: the actual text of the message
yes button caption: the text of the button people will click if they agree
no button caption: the text of the button people will click if they disagree

The third group of settings deals with how the pop-up is triggered:

triger: what will cause the pop-up box to activate? "Cookie" is the default which will allow you to show the pop-up only one to each visitor. If you choose "noauth" it will show every time someone visits. It is worth choosing "noauth" while you're testing this module - other ways you might have to wait 365 days for the next test!
cookiename: this can nearly always be left as it is.
limitdays: how often do you want to show the pop-up to people.

Please not the cookies are in imperfect method of doing this. If someone clears their cookies regularly, they'll see the pop-up each time.

The final roup of settings deals with what the user sees when they visit:

agreecheck: will be actively have to check a box to agree with your statement.
checktext: what text will they have to agree with?
disagreewarn: if they try to move past the pop-up box without agreeing, do you want to warn them?
moduledisp: I'd nearly always set this to no as it just shows a module with a link back to the developer.