GavickPro Documentation

Gavern framework for Joomla 3.x – Cookie Law

Gavick Fully Supports EU “Cookie Law”

A new law came into effect in the European Union on May 26, 2012 which has come to be called the ‘cookie law’. Otherwise known as the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, this regulation restricts website owners from storing information through the use of Web browser cookies without first acquiring explicit consent. This law allows the Information Commissioner’s Office to fine companies up to ₤500,000 for breaches of privacy regulations.

GavickPro helps you to reduce your risk of non-compliance by building support for the ‘cookie law’ directly into our Gavern Framework. Since release 2.10/3.3 of the framework, it has included an administration panel labelled, “Cookie Law”.

The options available to be set in the plug-in are:

With the Cookie Law plug-in enabled, every site visitor should see the plug-in tag which, by default, is labelled, “Privacy Settings”. The consent settings are set and may be changed here at any time.

A Privacy Settings pop-up allows visitors to see what kind of cookies are used on your website. By default, our templates use only two kinds of cookies:

How does it work ?

In short, switching on the Cookie Law option disables such social media scripts as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even Google Analytics. Once the site visitor agrees (consents) to have a cookie file saved on the computer’s local drive, these scripts will be made activated. Prior to receiving consent, scripts have actually been loaded with the type “text/plain”; after consent, the type is switched to the default type=”text/javascript” format, effectively enabling the scripts.

The following image presents the plug-in bar which is displayed until a user consents to cookies on the website:

Additional information

For more information about the European Union Cookie Law, please check out our blog article. For a complete developer’s guide to implementing this regulation, visit The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Important Note to Developers

The complete guide to using the Cookie Consent plug-in is found at the Silktide website. If your site uses external scripts which requires the use of the Cookie Law, you should add the proper classes and change the type of imported scripts.

To add the Cookie Consent plug-in to social scripts, follow these steps:

Here is an example for Facebook ‘Like’ button :

<div id="fb-root"></div> <script type="text/javascript">
(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s);
js.id = id;
js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_GB/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=0000";
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }
(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); >
</script>

AFTER

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script type="text/plain" class="cc-onconsent-social">
(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_GB/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=0000";
fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }
(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));
</script>

The process is exactly the same for other types of cookies but with different classes in the script tag. More information, with examples, can be found here.

Gavern framework for Joomla 3.x – Cookie Law 3.675 (73.33%) 3 votes