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JMatrix component released today and soon will be available on JED. It falls under the "Article Listing" category providing a Section/Category table view of your articles. I would be glad if you could give it a spin and let me know of any bugs or additional features you may like to see. You can download it here.
Now to use it, simply create a new Menu Item and select the JMatrix Item Type. Two Layouts are available, select either section or category depending on which articles you want to display. Don't worry if you want to display more than one categories, you can choose the section layout and then within the parameters exclude the categories you want to hide from this section. For each article you have the option to show the category name, the author, the creation date and the number of hits. Regarding the links that will be produced, you can either use the default Joomla router or the JMatrix one which is bound to the menu item name. Well, try both of them and see which one suits you best.
The next bunch of options affects the styling of the table. You can choose the number of columns the table has, the stylesheet that will be used and there are two emphasis levels available to highlight a number of articles if you like. By the way, you can find the Article ID of the articles you want to highlight at the Article Manager. Most likely you will need to create your own stylesheet to adapt to the colors of your site. Stylesheets reside in /components/com_jmatrix/style/css and images that can be used as backgrounds are under /components/com_jmatrix/style/images. The easiest thing to do is copy/paste one of the existing stylesheets in this directory and give it a name; the new stylesheet will appear on the drop-down list.
At the Advanced Parameters section you will also find various sorting options. If you want to manually sort either the categories or the articles that are displayed, select the Category Order or the Article Order and adjust them using the Category/Article Managers.
Just to give you a feeling of the final view:
Feel free to use the forum to post any questions and let me know of any live sites you use JMatrix on.
Cheers!
Victor
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