hello!

I'm sad to read that you already tried to reach us... we must have missed that... SORRY :S

please accept my appologies.

now, back to business:

I asume your component is correctly installed. at this point:

0) be sure to take a look at the parameters of music colleciton at the backend, and click save. you don't need to understand them all or read them all (but it won't be a bad idea to do so!), but the important is that you click SAVE at least once.

1) on the backend, go to ARTISTS and click new to add a new artist. the info you can provide is quite obvious on the form: artist name, country, picture, biography...
2) after saving your artist, go to ALBUMS and click NEW to add an album. on the first tab you see, you can fill out the info about the album (including the artist, from the list). there's a second tab called SONGS which you can use to add songs into that particular album. there's a button "add new song" which you can click as many times as you like to add more and more songs. there's a field in each song where you can upload your MP3 for that song. when you're finished, click SAVE.

well, that's the basis of CREATING. now let's talk about the other important point, which is SHOWING info in the frontend.

1) the best way to start is to create a MENU ITEM, on your menu manager, pointing to MUSIC COLLECTION > ARTISTS (DETAILED)

that should be your starting point of your Music Collection, in the frontend.

2) from here, on the frontend, you can navigate thru artists by clickin on the LETTER BAR. when entering an artist, you can see his albums, and then his songs, etc...

3) but probably, the first question that comes to mind is: how do I "populate" the Music Collection homepage? it looks EMPTY! I can only see the letter bar and the search bars!

you are right: you need to decide WHAT to show in here. the way to show things in here is using the INTROTEXT1 and INTROTEXT2 parameters of music collection configuration. anything you write in here will be shown on MC's homepage...

now: how to show "music" info here then? well, using MODULES. it's quite simple:

4) create a module you want to show there. for instance.. featured artists, or featured albums, or top rated albums, statistics.. whatever you want. and you can create as many differents modules as you want. no limit. the way to create a module is just the standard way of creating modules in Joomla... you probably already know how it works. create the modules and store them in an UNUSED position (lets say, for instance, user4)

5) on the introtext fields, you write {loadposition user4} where you want the modules on that position to be rendered... and you're good to go! using this small technique you can achieve very complete and different MC's starting pages..

I thing that should be enough, to START. but there's a lot more, of course. you can fins some very helpful articles on our FEATURES section and SUPPORT section, for instance how to customize artist's and album's pages with modules.

here I just wrote what I though would be useful to you to start, but after that, the best you can do is keep asking me questions about what you need to do/show and don't know how.

ok?

hope it helps!

and once more, my appologies for have missed the previous post!!!

Germi

oh by the way we were just talking with tow other customers about customizing the homepage, and one of them wrote a quite useful post in here:

http://www.joomlamusicsolutions.com/en/forum/general/blank-page.html#9626

Thank you very much for the prompt reply, it's most appreciated. I will follow the instructions and let you know, if I need any additional help. Thanks!