Trouble Creating Sermons Automatically

Hi. First of all, I think that SermonSpeaker is a great component. We have been using it for several years now and really like it. Recently our site crashed and the only way to fix it was a complete reinstall of Joomla. As a result we lost all of our sermons and are in the process of putting them back on line. I have been trying to do so via the "Create sermons automatically" option in Tools. I keep getting the following error message:

"This alias is already used for another item (remember it may be a trashed item)"

None of the sermons that I am trying to create via this method show up in the SermonSpeaker component, so I am not sure what is going on. Is there an easy way to correct the problem?

Thanks in advance.

Mark Fuss

If you have multiple sermons with the same name, then the alias creation fails since it has to be unique.
Also if there are empty alias it may become an issue.

You can check the existing sermons and change their alias. YOu can also do that directly in the database if that's easier.

Thomas,

Thank you for your response. It may prove helpful for me to give you a bit more information about our specific issue. We have 171 sermons located on Amazon S3. I have only added 14 of them to our new install of Joomla. Again, as I stated in the original post, we had to start from scratch. SermonSpeaker will read all 171 files from our Amazon S3 bucket, but will return the error that they all contain alias information that is already in use. This is a bit confusing to me. I am sure that is because I am a preacher and not a programmer. Is there anything that I can to the audio files to correct this? Is there anything that I can do within Joomla to fix this? I really do not want to have add 171 sermons one at a time. I will do that, if that is my only option, it is just that I would prefer a shortcut.

Any assistance that you can give will be greatly appreciated.

The alias is generated either based on the title stored in the ID3 tags of the files or by the filename itself. It's basically an URL-safe variant of the title.
The error occurs on the first sermon where the alias already exists and the script stops afterwards. That means that the 15th sermon it tries to add has a similar title or filename as one of the 14 already existing ones (published, unpublished, trashed or archived).
Now you have to find the one and change that alias. After that you can run the script again and it will pick up where it left (as far as I remember).

For more detailed trouble shooting I would need access to the site

Thomas,

I think that I understand a bit better now. Thank you. However, another issue has now come up. All of our audio files are in an Amazon S3 bucket. All of the files are have been made public. SermonSpeaker tells me that it cannot read the mp3 tags from any of the files we have on Amazon. Can you help me with this?

Also, what date format should I use in the mp3 tag so that SermonSpeaker picks it up correctly?

Thanks for your help.

That's true, since your server doesn't have direct access to the files on Amazon S3, it can't read the tags. Your server would have to first download the files in order to read the tags, which would slow down the whole process so much that it likely times out after the first sermon. So there isn't much you can do here. It's a downside of hosting the files on an extern server.

The ID3 tags are described here: id3.org/id3v2.3.0
The "TDAT Date" tags for example requires the date in DDMM format.