Item management

Important

You can edit items even if the category or release they are in is unpublished.

To manage the items in ARS, just click on the Items button on the Control Panel page, or the Items link right below the component's name in any ARS page. A standard Joomla! administrator list page appears.

The search box will filter items based on their title or description. If you know the numeric ID of an item you can find it quickly by searching for id:1234 where 1234 is the numeric item ID. If you know the exact filename (for “file” type items) or URL (for “link” type items) you can search by them using the file and link prefixes in the search box, i.e. file:filename.ext link:https://www.example.com/your_url.zip.

You can quickly make a copy or change the release assignment of an item by selecting its checkbox on the left-hand column and clicking the Actions, Batch button on the toolbar. The copied Item will be unpublished and have an ordering of 0.

Deleting an item is an irreversible change. If you are not sure, unpublish instead of removing the item.

You can edit an item by clicking on its name (the Title column) in the list.

You can add one or more new items by clicking on the New button.

You can edit the release or the category the item belongs to by clicking on the name of the category in the Category column.

Do note that when filtering by Category you will no longer see the Category name printed above the release version in the Release column. All items displayed obviously belong to the Category you are filtering by.

Also note that when filtering by Release you will no longer see the Release column at all. All items displayed obviously belong to the Release you are filtering by.

Editing or adding an item

The item editor page consists of the following fields:

Release
Choose the release where the item will be placed in.

Tip

If you had filtered the items list using a specific release, that release will be automatically selected in this field. If you filtered by a Category you'll only see releases under the category you filtered by. Filter the list, save some time.

Title
The title of the item, used to display it to your users. If you are using Automatic Descriptions you don't have to fill it in.

Alias
This is the alias (slug) appended to the URL pointing to that category's page. It's best to keep it short and only use lowercase unaccented Latin letters (a-z), numbers (0-9), dashes and underscores. Anything else may behave oddly.

Tip

Leave it blank. As soon as you select a file or type in a link, ARS will automatically fill it in before your eyes. Didn't I already mention that ARS is designed to save you lots of time? But please note that ARS will also include the extension of the file (e.g. .zip) in the alias.

Type
What kind of download is this. File items allow your visitors to download files stored on your server, the most common case of downloads. However, Link items allow you to link to a file or even a web page by its URL. You can use it to let your visitors download files hosted on external sites (e.g. your friend's site, GitHub, Amazon S3, Dropbox, OneDrive etc) or redirect visitors to an external page. Using the Link type will not reveal the URL of the external item to your visitors until they proceed with downloading the item. Furthermore, all download links are marked as no-follow and no-index, so that search engines do not reveal the URL to the linked file/page.

File Name
If you chose the File type, this displays a drop down of files found in the category's Files Directory and all of its subdirectories. Yes, that list could be very long, so we are cheating: we only show you the files which have not been already used in other File items on any category. So, instead of having to scroll through a never ending list of files you will only see the files you haven't already used. As soon as you choose a file, the Alias will be filled in if and only if it was empty to begin with.

URL
If you chose the Link type, type in the full URL to the file or web page you want to link to. As soon as you click anywhere outside this field, the Alias will be filled in automatically based on the contents of the URL field if and only if you had an empty alias.

File size
Type in the file size in bytes. If you leave it empty, ARS will try to determine this automatically. In the case of Link items, it will try to download the linked file to determine this and the file hashes (see below).

MD5 Signature etc Type in the corresponding hash of the file. If you leave it empty, ARS will try to determine this automatically. In the case of Link items, it will try to download the linked file.

Hits
How many times the item has been downloaded. You can use this field to alter that number. Do note that you do not need to change it on copied items; copies will automatically receive a Hits number of zero.

Enabled
Should it be visible to your users? Set to off to hide the category from view.

Access
The Joomla! access level / view level to apply to the item. You can create custom view levels, effectively choosing which user groups should be granted access.

Show unauthorised links Should a link to the Item be displayed even if the user does not have access to it or its parent Release or Category? Will result in a 403.

Redirect URL for unauthorized If the option above is set to Yes, users without access to the item, release or category will be linked to this URL instead. For example, a page on your site which explains how to get access.

Environments Choose one or more ARS Environments. These are used to denote compatibility with specific versions of PHP, Joomla etc.

Update Stream Choose the update stream this download item corresponds to. Used to generate INI and XML update streams for automatic updates.

Language Only show this Item when the site is viewed in the selected language. Choose All to always display.

Ordering Display ordering of items. By default, items in the frontend are displayed ordered by the ordering specified here, ascending (lowest to highest).

Created Date When this Item was first made available. Corresponds to the created_on field in the database. If left blank it will be replaced by the date and time when you click on the Save button.

Created By The user who created this Item. Corresponds to the created_by field in the database. If left blank it will be replaced by your user.

Description
Use the WYSIWYG editor to type in a description to be displayed for this item. You can use plugins freely.

Clicking on the Save & New button will save the item and immediately let you create a new category.

Automatic Item Descriptions

If there is a corresponding entry in the Automatic item descriptions page