How-To Tutorials - CMS & E-Commerce

Calling Services from Java Code So far, we have explored services invoked as events from the controller (example <event type="service" invoke="learningFirstService"/>). We now look at calling services explicitly from code. To invoke services from code, we use the dispatcher object, which is an object of type org.ofbiz.service.ServiceDispatcher. Since this is obtainable from the DispatchContext we can invoke services from other services. To demonstrate this we are going to create one simple service that calls another. In our services.xml file in ${component:learning}servicedef add two new service definitions: <service name="learningCallingServiceOne" engine="java" location="org.ofbiz.learning.learning.LearningServices" invoke="callingServiceOne"> <description>First Service Called From The Controller</description> <attribute name="firstName" type="String" mode="IN" optional="false"/> <attribute name="lastName" type="String" mode="IN" optional="false"/> <attribute name="planetId" type="String" mode="IN" optional="false"/> <attribute name="fullName" type="String" mode="OUT" optional="true"/> </service> <service name="learningCallingServiceTwo" engine="java" location="org.ofbiz.learning.learning.LearningServices" invoke="callingServiceTwo"> <description>Second Service Called From Service One</description> <attribute name="planetId" type="String" mode="IN" optional="false"/> </service> In this simple example it is going to be the job of learningCallingServiceOne to prepare the parameter map and pass in the planetId parameter to learningCallingServiceTwo. The second service will determine if the input is EARTH, and return an error if not. In the class org.ofbiz.learning.learning.LearningEvents, add the static method that is invoked by learningCallingServiceOne: public static Map callingServiceOne(DispatchContext dctx, Map context){ LocalDispatcher dispatcher = dctx.getDispatcher(); Map resultMap = null; String firstName = (String)context.get("firstName"); String lastName = (String)context.get("lastName"); String planetId = (String)context.get("planetId"); GenericValue userLogin = (GenericValue)context.get("userLogin"); Locale locale = (Locale)context.get("locale"); Map serviceTwoCtx = UtilMisc.toMap("planetId", planetId, "userLogin", userLogin, "locale", locale); try{ resultMap = dispatcher.runSync("learningCallingServiceTwo", serviceTwoCtx); }catch(GenericServiceException e){ Debug.logError(e, module); } resultMap.put("fullName", firstName + " " + lastName); return resultMap; } and also the method invoked by learningServiceTwo: public static Map callingServiceTwo(DispatchContext dctx, Map context){ String planetId = (String)context.get("planetId"); Map resultMap = null; if(planetId.equals("EARTH")){ resultMap = ServiceUtil.returnSuccess("This planet is Earth"); }else{ resultMap = ServiceUtil.returnError("This planet is NOT Earth"); } return resultMap; } To LearningScreens.xml add: <screen name="TestCallingServices"> <section> <actions><set field="formTarget" value="TestCallingServices"/></actions> <widgets> <include-screen name="TestFirstService"/> </widgets> </section></screen> Finally add the request-map to the controller.xml file: <request-map uri="TestCallingServices"> <security auth="false" https="false"/> <event type="service" invoke="learningCallingServiceOne"/> <response name="success" type="view" value="TestCallingServices"/> <response name="error" type="view" value="TestCallingServices"/> </request-map> and also the view-map: <view-map name="TestCallingServices" type="screen" page="component://learning/widget/learning/LearningScreens.xml#TestCallingServices"/> Stop, rebuild, and restart, then fire an OFBiz http request TestCallingServices to webapp learning. Do not be alarmed if straight away you see error messages informing us that the required parameters are missing. By sending this request we have effectively called our service with none of our compulsory parameters present. Enter your name and in the Planet Id, enter EARTH. You should see: Try entering MARS as the Planet Id. Notice how in the Java code for the static method callingServiceOne the line resultMap = dispatcher.runSync("learningCallingServiceTwo", serviceTwoCtx); is wrapped in a try/catch block. Similar to how the methods on the GenericDelegator object that accessed the database threw a GenericEntityException, methods on our dispatcher object throw a GenericServiceException which must be handled. There are three main ways of invoking a service: runSync—which runs a service synchronously and returns the result as a map. runSyncIgnore—which runs a service synchronously and ignores the result. Nothing is passed back. runAsync—which runs a service asynchronously. Again, nothing is passed back. The difference between synchronously and asynchronously run services is discussed in more detail in the section called Synchronous and Asynchronous Services. Implementing Interfaces Open up the services.xml file in ${component:learning}servicedef and take a look at the service definitions for both learningFirstService and learningCallingServiceOne. Do you notice that the <attribute> elements (parameters) are the same? To cut down on the duplication of XML code, services with similar parameters can implement an interface. As the first service element in this file enter the following: <service name="learningInterface" engine="interface"> <description>Interface to describe base parameters for Learning Services</description> <attribute name="firstName" type="String" mode="IN" optional="false"/> <attribute name="lastName" type="String" mode="IN" optional="false" /> <attribute name="planetId" type="String" mode="IN" optional="false"/> <attribute name="fullName" type="String" mode="OUT" optional="true"/></service> Notice that the engine attribute is set to interface. Replace all of the <attribute> elements in the learningFirstService and learningCallingServiceOne service definitions with: <implements service="learningInterface"/> So the service definition for learningServiceOne becomes: <service name="learningCallingServiceOne" engine="java" location="org.ofbiz.learning.learning.LearningServices" invoke="callingServiceOne"> <description>First Service Called From The Controller</description> <implements service="learningInterface"/></service> Restart OFBiz and then fire an OFBiz http request TestCallingServices to webapp learning. Nothing should have changed—the services should run exactly as before, however our code is now somewhat tidier. Overriding Implemented Attributes It may be the case that the interface specifies an attribute as optional="false", however, our service does not need this parameter. We can simply override the interface and add the <attribute> element with whatever settings we wish. For example, if we wish to make the planetId optional in the above example, the <implements> element could remain, but a new <attribute> element would be added like this: <service name="learningCallingServiceOne" engine="java" location="org.ofbiz.learning.learning.LearningServices" invoke="callingServiceOne"> <description>First Service Called From The Controller</description> <implements service="learningInterface"/> <attribute name="planetId" type="String" mode="IN" optional="false"/></service> Synchronous and Asynchronous Services The service engine allows us to invoke services synchronously or asynchronously. A synchronous service will be invoked in the same thread, and the thread will "wait" for the invoked service to complete before continuing. The calling service can obtain information from the synchronously run service, meaning its OUT parameters are accessible. Asynchronous services run in a separate thread and the current thread will continue without waiting. The invoked service will effectively start to run in parallel to the service or event from which it was called. The current thread can therefore gain no information from a service that is run asynchronously. An error that occurs in an asynchronous service will not cause a failure or error in the service or event from which it is called. A good example of an asynchronously called service is the sendOrderConfirmation service that creates and sends an order confirmation email. Once a customer has placed an order, there is no need to wait while the mail service is called and the mail sent. The mail server may be down, or busy, which may result in an error that would otherwise stop our customer form placing the order. It is much more preferable to allow the customer to continue to the Order Confirmation page and have our business receive the valuable order. By calling this service asynchronously, there is no delay to the customer in the checkout process, and while we log and fix any errors with the mail server, we still take the order. Behind the scenes, an asynchronous service is actually added to the Job Scheduler. It is the Job Scheduler's task to invoke services that are waiting in the queue. Using the Job Scheduler Asynchronous services are added to the Job Scheduler automatically. However, we can see which services are waiting to run and which have already been invoked through the Webtools console. We can even schedule services to run once only or recur as often as we like. Open up the Webtools console at https://localhost:8443/webtools/control/main and take a look under the Service Engine Tools heading. Select Job List to view a full list of jobs. Jobs without a Start Date/Time have not started yet. Those with an End Date/Time have completed. The Run Time is the time they are scheduled to run. All of the outstanding jobs in this list were added to the JobSandbox Entity when the initial seed data load was performed, along with the RecurrenceRule (also an Entity) information specifying how often they should be run. They are all maintenance jobs that are performed "offline". The Pool these jobs are run from by default is set to pool. In an architecture where there may be multiple OFBiz instances connecting to the same database, this can be important. One OFBiz instance can be dedicated to performing certain jobs, and even though job schedulers may be running on each instance, this setting can be changed so we know only one of our instances will run this job. The Service Engine settings can be configured in frameworkserviceconfigserviceengine.xml. By changing both the send-to-pool attribute and the name attribute on the <run-from-pool element>, we can ensure that only jobs created on an OFBiz instance are run by this OFBiz instance. Click on the Schedule Job button and in the Service field enter learningCallingServiceOne, leave the Pool as pool and enter today's date/time by selecting the calendar icon and clicking on today's date. We will need to add 5 minutes onto this once it appears in the box. In the below example the Date appeared as 2008-06-18 14:11:24.265. This job is only going to be scheduled to run once, although we could specify any recurrence information we wish. Select Submit and notice that scheduler is already aware of the parameters that can (or must, in this case) be entered. This information has been taken from the service definition in our services.xml file. Press Submit to schedule the job and find the entry in the list. This list is ordered by Run Time so it may not be the first. Recurring maintenance jobs are imported in the seed data and are scheduled to run overnight. These will more than likely be above the job we have just scheduled since their run-time is further in the future. The entered parameters are converted to a map and then serialized to the database. They are then fed to the service at run time. Quickly Running a Service Using the Webtools console it is also possible to run a service synchronously. This is quicker than going through the scheduler should you need to test a service or debug through a service. Select the Run Service button from the menu and enter the same service name, submit then enter the same parameters again. This time the service is run straight away and the OUT parameters and messages are passed back to the screen: Naming a Service and the Service Reference Service names must be unique throughout the entire application. Because we do not need to specify a location when we invoke a service, if service names were duplicated we can not guarantee that the service we want to invoke is the one that is actually invoked. OFBiz comes complete with a full service reference, which is in fact a dictionary of services that we can use to check if a service exists with the name we are about to choose, or even if there is a service already written that we are about to duplicate. From https://localhost:8443/webtools/control/main select the Service Reference and select "l" for learning. Here we can see all of our learning services, what engine they use and what method they invoke. By selecting the service learningCallingServiceOne, we can obtain complete information about this service as was defined in the service definition file services.xml. It even includes information about the parameters that are passed in and out automatically. Careful selection of intuitive service names and use of the description tags in the service definition files are good practice since this allows other developers to reuse services that already exists, rather than duplicate work unnecessarily. Event Condition Actions (ECA) ECA refers to the structure of rules of a process. The Event is the trigger or the reason why the rule is being invoked. The condition is a check to see if we should continue and invoke the action, and the action is the final resulting change or modification. A real life example of an ECA could be "If you are leaving the house, check to see if it is raining. If so, fetch an umbrella". In this case the event is "leaving the house". The condition is "if it is raining" and the action is "fetch an umbrella". There are two types of ECA rules in OFBiz: Service Event Condition Actions (SECAs) and Entity Event Condition Actions (EECAs). Service Event Condition Actions (SECAs) For SECAs the trigger (Event) is a service being invoked. A condition could be if a parameter equalled something (conditions are optional), and the action is to invoke another service. SECAs are defined in the same directory as service definitions (servicedef). Inside files named secas.xml Take a look at the existing SECAs in applicationsorderservicedefsecas.xml and we can see a simple ECA: <eca service="changeOrderStatus" event="commit" run-on-error="false"> <condition field-name="statusId" operator="equals" value="ORDER_CANCELLED"/> <action service="releaseOrderPayments" mode="sync"/></eca> When the changeOrderStatus transaction is just about to be committed, a lookup is performed by the framework to see if there are any ECAs for this event. If there are, and the parameter statusId is ORDER_CANCELLED then the releaseOrderPayments service is run synchronously. Most commonly, SECAs are triggered on commit or return; however, it is possible for the event to be in any of the following stages in the service's lifecycle: auth—Before Authentication in-validate—Before IN parameter validation out-validate—Before OUT parameter validation invoke—Before service invocation commit—Just before the transaction is committed return—Before the service returns global-commit global-rollback The variables global-commit and i are a little bit different. If the service is part of a transaction, they will only run after a rollback or between the two phases (JTA implementation) of a commit. There are also two specific attributes whose values are false by default: run-on-failure run-on-error You can set them to true if you want the SECA to run in spite of a failure or error. A failure is the same thing as an error, except it doesn't represent a case where a rollback is required. It should be noted that parameters passed into the trigger service are available, if need be, to the action service. The trigger services OUT parameters are also available to the action service. Before using SECAs in a component, the component must be informed of the location of the ECA service-resources: <service-resource type="eca" loader="main" location="servicedef/secas.xml"/> This line must be added under the existing <service-resource> elements in the component's ofbiz-component.xml file. Entity Event Condition Actions (EECAs) For EECAs, the event is an operation on an entity and the action is a service being invoked. EECAs are defined in the same directory as entity definitions (entitydef): inside files named eecas.xml. They are used when it may not necessarily be a service that has initiated an operation on the entity, or you may wish that no matter what service operates on this entity, a certain course of action to be taken. Open the eecas.xml file in the applicationsproductentitydef directory and take a look at the first <eca> element: <eca entity="Product" operation="create-store" event="return"> <condition field-name="autoCreateKeywords" operator="not-equals" value="N"/> <action service="indexProductKeywords" mode="sync" value-attr="productInstance"/></eca> This ECA ensures that once any creation or update operation on a Product record has been committed, so long as the autoCreateKeywords field of this record is not N, then the indexProductKeywords service will be automatically invoked synchronously. The operation can be any of the following self-explanatory operations: create store remove find create-store (create or store/update) create-remove store-remove create-store-remove any The return event is by far the most commonly used event in an EECA. But there are also validate, run, cache-check, cache-put, and cache-clear events. There is also the run-on-error attribute. Before using EECAs in a component, the component must be informed of the location of the eca entity-resource: <entity-resource type="eca" loader="main" location="entitydef/eecas.xml"/> must be added under the existing <entity-resource> elements in the component's ofbiz-component.xml file. ECAs can often catch people out! Since there is no apparent flow from the trigger to the service in the code they can be difficult to debug. When debugging always keep an eye on the logs. When an ECA is triggered, an entry is placed into the logs to inform us of the trigger and the action. Summary This brings us to the end of our investigation into the OFBiz Service Engine. We have discovered how useful the Service Oriented Architecture in OFBiz can be and we have learnt how the use of some of the built in Service Engine tools, like the Service Reference, can help us when we are creating new services. In this article we have looked at: Calling services from code (using dispatcher). IN/OUT parameter mismatch when calling services Sending feedback; standard return codes success, error and fail. Implementing Service Interfaces Synchronous and asynchronous services Using the Service Engine tools ECAs: Event Condition Actions

The unsung heroes of every application are the simple things like buttons, menus, and toolbars. In this article by Shea Frederick, Steve 'Cutter' Blades, and Colin Ramsay, we will cover how to add these items to our applications. Our example will contain a few different types of buttons, both with and without menus. A button can simply be an icon, or text, or both. Toolbars also have some mechanical elements such as spacers and dividers that can help to organize the buttons on your toolbars items. We will also cover how to make these elements react to user interaction. A toolbar for every occasion Just about every Ext component—panels, windows, grids can accept a toolbar on either the top or the bottom. The option is also available to render the toolbar standalone into any DOM element in our document. The toolbar is an extremely flexible and useful component that will no doubt be used in every application. Ext.Toolbar: The main container for the buttons Ext.Button: The primary handler for button creation and interaction Ext.menu: A menu Toolbars Our first toolbar is going to be rendered standalone in the body of our document. We will add one of each of the main button types, so we can experiment with each: Button—tbbutton: This is the standard button that we are all familiar with. Split Button—tbsplit: A split button is where you have a default button action and an optional menu. These are used in cases where you need to have many options in the same category as your button, of which there is a most commonly used default option. Menu—tbbutton+menu: A menu is just a button with the menu config filled in with options. Ext.onReady(function(){ new Ext.Toolbar({ renderTo: document.body, items: [{ xtype: 'tbbutton', text: 'Button' },{ xtype: 'tbbutton', text: 'Menu Button', menu: [{ text: 'Better' },{ text: 'Good' },{ text: 'Best' }] },{ xtype: 'tbsplit', text: 'Split Button', menu: [{ text: 'Item One' },{ text: 'Item Two' },{ text: 'Item Three' }] }] });}); As usual, everything is inside our onReady event handler. The items config holds all of our toolbars elements—I say elements and not buttons because the toolbar can accept many different types of Ext components including form fields—which we will be implementing later on in this article. The default xtype for each element in the items config is tbbutton. We can leave out the xtype config element if tbbutton is the type we want, but I like to include it just to help me keep track. The button Creating a button is fairly straightforward; the main config option is the text that is displayed on the button. We can also add an icon to be used alongside the text if we want to. Here is a stripped-down button: { xtype: 'tbbutton', text: 'Button'} Menu A menu is just a button with the menu config populated—it's that simple. The menu items work along the same principles as the buttons. They can have icons, classes, and handlers assigned to them. The menu items could also be grouped together to form a set of option buttons, but first let's create a standard menu. This is the config for a typical menu config: { xtype: 'tbbutton', text: 'Button', menu: [{ text: 'Better' },{ text: 'Good' },{ text: 'Best' }]} As we can see, once the menu array config is populated, the menu comes to life. To group these menu items together, we would need to set the group config and the boolean checked value for each item: menu: [{ text: 'Better', checked: true, group: 'quality'}, { text: 'Good', checked: false, group: 'quality'}, { text: 'Best', checked: false, group: 'quality'}] Split button The split button sounds like a complex component, but it's just like a button and a menu combined, with a slight twist. By using this type of button, you get to use the functionality of a button while adding the option to select an item from the attached menu. Clicking the left portion of the button that contains the text triggers the button action. However, clicking the right side of the button, which contains a small down arrow, triggers the menu. { xtype: 'tbsplit', text: 'Split Button', menu: [{ text: 'Item One' },{ text: 'Item Two' },{ text: 'Item Three' }]} Toolbar item alignment, dividers, and spacers By default, every toolbar aligns elements to the leftmost side. There is no alignment config for a toolbar, so if we want to align all of the toolbar buttons to the rightmost side, we need to add a fill as the first item in the toolbar. If we want to have items split up between both the left and right sides, we can also use a fill: { xtype: 'tbfill'} Pop this little guy in a tool-bar wherever you want to add space and he will push items on either side of the fill to the ends of the tool bar, as shown below: We also have elements that can add space or vertical dividers, like the one used between the Menu Button and the Split Button. The spacer adds a few pixels of empty space that can be used to space out buttons, or move elements away from the edge of the toolbar: { xtype: 'tbspacer'} A divider can be added in the same way: { xtype: 'tbseparator'} Shortcuts Ext has many shortcuts that can be used to make coding faster. Shortcuts are a character or two that can be used in place of a configuration object. For example, consider the standard toolbar filler configuration: { xtype: 'tbfill'} The shortcut for a toolbar filler is a hyphen and a greater than symbol: '->' Not all of these shortcuts are documented. So be adventurous, poke around the source code, and see what you can find. Here is a list of the commonly-used shortcuts:

Workflow is the automation of a business process, during which documents are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules. Every Content Management System implementation has its own workflow requirements. For some companies, workflow could be a simple approval process. For some companies, it could be a complex business process management system. Workflow provides ownership and control over the content and processes. Introduction to the Alfresco workflow process Alfresco includes two types of out of the box workflow. The first is the Simple Workflow, which is content-oriented, and the other is the Advanced Workflow, which is task-oriented. The Simple Workflow process in Alfresco involves the movement of documents through various spaces.A content item is moved or copied to a new space at which point a new workflow instance is attached, which is based on the workflow definition of the space. A workflow definition is unaware of other related workflow definitions. The Advanced Workflow process is task-oriented, where you create a task, attach documents that are to be reviewed, and assign it to appropriate reviewers. The same robust workflow capabilities are available in Document Management (DM), Records Management (RM), Web Content Management (WCM), and throughout our applications, which includes Alfresco Share. You can use the out of the box features provided by both types of workflow, or you can create your own custom advanced workflow, according to the business processes of your organization. Simple Workflow Consider a purchase order that moves through various departments for authorization and eventual purchase. To implement Simple Workflow for this in Alfresco, you will create spaces for each department and allow documents to move through various department spaces. Each department space is secured, only allowing the users of that department to edit the document and to move it to the next departmental space in the workflow process. The workflow process is so flexible that you could introduce new steps for approval into the operation without changing any code. Out of the box features Simple Workflow is implemented as an aspect that can be attached to any document in a space through the use of business rules. Workflow can also be invoked on individual content items as actions. Workflow has two steps. One is for approval while the other one is for rejection. You can refer to the upcoming image, where workflow is defined for the documents in a space called Review Space. The users belonging to the Review Space can act upon the document. If they choose to Reject, then the document moves to a space called Rejected Space. If they choose to Approve, then the document moves to a space called Approved Space. You can define the names of the spaces and the users on the spaces, according to your business requirements. The following figure gives a graphical view of the Approved Space and the Rejected Space: Define and use Simple Workflow The process to define and use Simple Workflow in Alfresco is as follows: Identify spaces and set security on those spaces Define your workflow process Add workflow to content in those spaces, accordingly Select the email template and the people to send email notifications to Test the workflow process Let us define and use a Simple Workflow process to review and approve the engineering documents on your intranet. Go to the Company Home > Intranet > Engineering Department space and create a space named ProjectA by using an existing Software Engineering Project space template. Identify spaces and security If you go to the Company Home > Intranet > Engineering Department > ProjectA > Documentation space, then you will notice the following sub-spaces: Samples: This space is for storing sample project documents. Set the security on this space in such a way that only the managers can edit the documents. Drafts: This space contains initial drafts and documents of ProjectA that are being edited. Set the security in such a way that only a few selected users (such as Engineer1, Engineer2— as shown in the upcoming image) can add or edit the documents in this space. Pending Approval: This space contains all of the documents that are under review. Set the security in such a way that only the Project Manager of ProjectA can edit these documents. Published: This space contains all of the documents that are Approved and visible to others. Nobody should edit the documents while they are in the Published space. If you need to edit a document, then you need to Retract it to the Drafts space and follow the workflow process, as shown in the following image:    Defining the workflow process Now that you have identified the spaces, the next step is to define your workflow process. We will add workflow to all of the documents in the Drafts space. When a user selects the Approve action called Submit for Approval on a document, then the document moves from the Drafts space to the Pending Approval space. We will add workflow to all of the documents in the Pending Approval space. When a user selects the Approve action called Approved on a document, then the document moves from the Pending Approval space to the Published space. Similarly, when a user selects the Reject action called Re-submit on a document, then it moves from the Pending Approval space to the Drafts space. We will add workflow to all of the documents in the Published space. When a user selects the Reject action called Retract on a document, then it moves from the Published space to the Drafts space. You can have review steps and workflow action names according to your business's requirements.

(For more resources on Plone, see here.) Text editors The last key piece to successfully skinning a site is to choose a text editor or CSS editor that matches your needs and plays well with Plone. We are not talking about a word processor here, like Microsoft Word or Pages; rather, a text editor is a type of program used for editing plain text files. Text editors are often provided with operating systems or software development packages, and can be used to change configuration files and programming language source code. We'll look at a few of the more popular text editors that are appropriate for Plone development and theming. TextMate TextMate is a combination of text editor and programming tool that is exclusively for the Mac, and can be found at http://macromates.com. One of the key joys of working with TextMate is that it lets you open up an entire file structure at once to make navigation between related files easier. For Plone, this is essential. Your average file structure will look something like this: Rather than opening the entire buildouts folder, or even the plonetheme.copperriver folder, generally you only want to open the structure closest to the files you need in order to keep performance snappy—in this case, mybuildout[rockaway]/src/plonetheme.copperriver/plonetheme/copperriver/: As you can see, it opens the entire project in a clean interface with an easily navigable structure. Without this feature, skinning for Plone would be much more time-consuming. TextMate also offers numerous programmer-related tools: You can open two files at once (or more), and using the diff option you can compare the files easily Subversion (svn) support Ability to search and replace in a project Regular expression search and replace (grep) Auto-indent for common actions such as pasting text Auto-completion of brackets and other characters Clipboard history Foldable code blocks Support for more than 50 languages Numerous key combinations (for example, Apple + T opens a search window that makes it easy to locate a file) Themable syntax highlight colors Visual bookmarks to jump between places in a file Copy/paste of columns of text Bundles And much, much more The Bundle feature is one of the more interesting aspects of the tool. If you look at the HTML bundle, for example, it shows a list of common actions that you might wish to perform in a given document, and on the right, the code that spawns that action, and the hot-key that activates it. There's even a Zope/Plone TextMate support bundle found at http://plone.org/products/textmate-support that was developed by some of Plone's core developers. It enhances TextMate's already existing support for Python, XML, (X)HTML, CSS, and Restructured Text by adding features aimed specifically at the modern day Zope and Plone developer. For the geeks in the audience, the bundle's features include: Doctest support (restructured text with inline Python syntax and auto-indent of python code), pdb support (for debugging), ZCML support (no more looking up directives with our handy and exhaustive snippets), and a ZPT syntax that marries the best of both worlds (XML strictness with the goodness of TextMate's HTML support). This bundle plus TextMate's other capabilities make switching to developing for Plone on a Mac a good idea any day! As well as assigning a single key equivalent to a bundle item, it is possible to assign a tab trigger to the item. This is a sequence of text that you enter in the document and follow it by pressing the tab key. This will remove the sequence entered and then execute the bundle item. TextMate is full of hot-keys and features in general, yet it's surprisingly compact. Thankfully, the documentation is thorough. TextMate is a dream for themers and programmers alike. For those who are still new at CSS, another tool might be a good place to start, but for power users, TextMate is the primary tool of choice.

Adapting the CSS We've set up Tao as a subtheme of the Zen theme. As a result, the Tao theme relies upon a number of stylesheets, both in the Tao directory and in the parent theme's directory. The good news is that we do not need to concern ourselves with hacking away at all these various stylesheets, we can instead place all our changes in the tao.css file, located in the Tao theme directory. Drupal will give precedence to the styles defined in the theme's .css file, in the event of any conflicting definitions. Precedence and inheritance Where one style definition is in an imported stylesheet and another in the immediate stylesheet, the rule in the immediate stylesheet (the one that is importing the other stylesheet) takes precedence. Where repetitive definitions are in the same stylesheet, the one furthest from the top of the stylesheet takes precedence in the case of conflicts; where repetitive definitions are in the same stylesheet, nonconflicting attributes will be inherited. Setting the page dimensions For this exercise, the goal is to create a fixed width theme optimized for display settings of 1024 x 768. Accordingly, one of the most basic changes we need to make is to the page dimensions. If you look at the page.tpl.php file, you will notice that the entire page area is wrapped with a div with the id=page. Open up the tao.css file and alter it as follows. To help avoid precedence problems, place all your style definitions at the end of the stylesheet. Let's modify the selector #page. #page { width: 980px; margin: 0 auto; border-left: 4px solid #666633; border-right: 4px solid #666633; background-color: #fff;} In this case, I set page width to 980 pixels, a convenient size that works consistently across systems, and applied the margin attribute to center the page. I have also applied the border-left and border-right styles and set the background color. We also need to add a little space between the frame and the content area as well to keep the presentation readable and clean. The selector #content-area helps us here as a convenient container: #content-area { padding: 0 20px;} Formatting the new regions Let's begin by using CSS to position and format the two new regions, page top and banner. When we placed the code for the two new regions in our page.tpl.php file, we wrapped them both with divs. Page top was wrapped with the div page-top, so let's create that in our tao.css file: #page-top { margin: 0; background-color: #676734; width: 980px; height: 25px; text-align: right;} The region banner was wrapped with a div of the same name, so let's now define that selector as well: #banner { background-color: #fff; width: 980px; height: 90px; text-align: center;} Setting fonts and colors Some of the simplest CSS work is also some of the most important—setting font styles and the colors of the elements. Let's start by setting the default fonts for the site. I'm going to use body tag as follows: body { background: #000; min-width: 800px; margin: 0; padding: 0; font: 13px Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; color: #111; line-height:1.4em;} Now, let's add various other styles to cover more specialized text, like links and titles: a, a:link, a:visited { color: #666633; text-decoration: none;}a:hover, a:focus { text-decoration: underline;}h1.title, h1.title a, h1.title a:hover{ font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: normal; color: #666633; font-size: 200%; margin: 0; line-height: normal;}h1, h1 a, h1 a:hover { font-size: 140%; color: #444; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0.5em 0;}h2, h2 a, h2 a:hover, .block h3, .block h3 a {font-size: 122%; color: #444; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0.5em 0;}h3 { font-size: 107%;font-weight: bold;font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;}h4, h5, h6 {font-weight: bold; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;}#logo-title { margin: 10px 0 0 0; position: relative; background-color: #eaebcd; height: 60px; border-top: 1px solid #676734; padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px solid #676734;}#site-name a, #site-name a:hover { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Verdana, Sans-serif; font-weight: normal; color: #000; font-size: 176%; margin-left: 20px; padding: 0;}#site-slogan { color: #676734; margin: 0; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 20px; margin-top: 10px;}.breadcrumb {padding-top: 0; padding-bottom: 10px;padding-left: 20px;}#content-header .title { padding-left: 20px;} After you have made the changes, above, remember to go back and comment out any competing definitions that may cause inheritance problems.

Displaying author picture on posts Did you like the previous recipe in the first part? I hope you did! But personally, I must admit that even though displaying author information looks very cool, something is missing from the previous recipe. Can you guess what is it? It is a picture of the author, of course. Even if your author-related information is precise and complete, a picture is still essential. This is because it is the easiest, and quickest, way for a reader to recognize an author. But sadly, WordPress can't handle author pictures by default. Let's learn how to create a hack that will allow us to display the author's picture in the way that we want to. Getting ready As we'll be using author pictures in this recipe, you should start by requesting a picture of all of your authors. Although it isn't necessary, it will be really better if all of the pictures have the same width and height. A square of 80 to 110 pixels is a good standard. Also, make sure that all of your pictures have the same format, such as .jpg, .png, or .gif. How to do it Now that you have collected pictures of all of your authors, we can start to hack WordPress and insert author pictures in the posts First, you have to rename your images with the author IDs. You can also use author's last name if you prefer, but in this example I am going to use their IDs. Once you have your renamed authors' pictures, upload them to the wp-content/themes/yourtheme/images directory. Open the file single.php and add the following code within the loop: <img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url); ?>/images/<?php the_author_ID(); ?>.jpg" alt="<?php the_author(); ?>" /> Save the single.php file and you're done. Each post now displays a picture of its author! How it works The working of this code is pretty simple. You simply concatenated the result of the the_author_ID() function with the theme URL to build an absolute URL to the image. As the images are named with the author ID (for example, 1.jpg, 4.jpg, 17.jpg, and so on), the the_author_ID() function gives us the name of the picture to be displayed. You just have to add the .jpg extension. There's more... Now that you've learnt how to display the picture of the current author, you should definitely use this recipe to enhance the previous recipe. The following code will retrieve the author information, and display the author picture as we have learnt earlier: <div id="author-info"><h2>About the author: <?php the_author();?></h2><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url); ?>/images/<?php the_author_ID(); ?>.jpg" alt="<?php the_author(); ?>" /><?php the_author_description(); ?><?php the_author();?>'s website: <a href="<?php the_author_url(); ?>"><?php the_author_url(); ?></a><br />Other posts by <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?></div><!--/author-info--> The outcome of the preceding piece of code will look similar to the following screenshot: Displaying the author's gravatar picture on posts Gravatars (which stands for Globally recognized avatars) is a popular service, that allows you to associate an avatar image to your email address. On October 18, 2007, Automattic (The company behind WordPress) acquired Gravatar. Since WordPress 2.5 the popular blogging engine is fully gravatar-compatible, which results, in the ability to include gravatars in comments. In this recipe, I'll show you how to modify the previous code to use the author gravatar instead of a personal picture. Getting ready As we're going to use Gravatars, you (and each of your authors) first need a gravatar account. Carry out the following steps to create a gravatar account and associate an image to your email address. Go to the web site http://en.gravatar.com/site/signup, and enter your email address into the text field. Gravatar will send you a confirmation via email. Check your emails and open the one received from Gravatar. Click on the link to confirm your email address. Choose a username and a Password for your account. Once your username and Password has been created successfully, you'll see a text that reads Whoops, looks like you don't have any images yet! Add an image by clicking here. Click on the given link, and choose to upload a picture from your computer's hard drive, or the Internet. Once you are done choosing and cropping (if necessary) your picture, you have to rate it. Click on G unless—except, if your avatar is meant for mature audiences only. Done! You now have your own gravatar. How to do it Open the file single.php from the theme you're using and paste the following code: $md5 = md5(get_the_author_email());$default = urlencode( 'http://www.yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/images/default_avatar.gif' );echo "<img src='http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=$md5&amp;size=60&amp;default=$default' alt='' />"; How it works The first thing to do is to get an md5 sum from the author's email address. To do so, I used the php md5() function along with the get_the_author_email() function. I didn't use the_author_email() because this function directly prints the result without allowing you to manipulate it with php I then encoded the URL of a default picture that is to be shown if the author hasn't signed up to Gravatar yet. Once done, the gravatar can be displayed. To do so, visit the web site: http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php with the following parameters: gravatar_id: The gravatar id, which is an md5 sum of the user email size: The gravatar size in pixels default:The absolute URL to an image which will be used as a default image if the author hasn't signed up to gravatar yet Adding moderation buttons to the comments A common problem with comments is spam. Sure, you can moderate comments and use the Akismet plugin. However, sometimes someone leaves a normal comment, you approve it, and then the spammer—who knows that his comments aren't being accepted by the moderator—starts to spam your blog. Even though you can do nothing against this (except moderating all of the comments), a good idea is to either add spam and delete buttons to all of the comments. This way, if you see a comment saying spam while reading your blog, then you can edit it, delete it, or mark it as spam. I got this useful tip from Joost de Valk, who blogs at www.yoast.com Getting ready The following screenshot shows normal comments without the edit, delete and spam buttons: There's nothing complicated at all with this recipe. However, you must be sure to know which kind of blog the users are allowed to edit or delete your comments. For a list of actions and user roles, see the section named Controlling what users can do, which is later in this article. How to do it Open the file functions.php and paste the following piece of code: function delete_comment_link($id){if (current_user_can('edit_post')){echo '| <a href="'.admin_url("comment.php?action=cdc&c=$id").'">del</a> ';echo '| <a href="'.admin_url("comment.php?action=cdc&dt=spam&c=$id").'">spam</a>';}} Save the file functions.php and open the file comments.php. Find the comments loop and add the following lines: <?phpedit_comment_link();delete_comment_link(get_comment_ID());?> Save the file comments.php and visit your blog. You now have three links on each of the comments to edit, to delete (del), and to mark as spam as shown in the following screenshot: How it works In this recipe we started by creating a function. This function first verifies whether the current user has the right to edit posts. If yes, then the admin URLs to mark the comment as spam or delete it are created and displayed. In the file comments.php, we have used the edit_comment_link(), which is a built-in WordPress function. Some themes include this by default. We then used the comment ID as a parameter to the delete_comment_link() function that you had created earlier.

The Rotating Post Titles with Post Preview gadget lists all your blog posts classified according to labels or categories. Blogger uses Labels to classify posts while Wordpress uses Categories for the same. Clicking on a Label or a category in the sidebar of a blog brings up all posts associated with that particular label or category. However, you will see only posts associated with that one label. In this gadget post titles are grouped under their respective labels. In this gadget in one look you can see all the post titles in that blog and all the labels in it. Thus you get a full summary of the blog. Hovering on a post title shows the Post Preview in the top pane. You can then click on it to go to that post to read it in full detail. What is Google AJAX feed API? AJAX (shorthand for asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a web development technique which retrieves data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display, and behaviour of the existing page. The whole page is not refreshed when data is retrieved. Only that section of the page which is a part of the gadget shows the data brought. With the Google AJAX Feed API, you can retrieve feeds and mash them up using Javascript. In this gadget, we will retrieve the post titles from the label feeds and display them using Javascript code. See picture below: This gadget shows list of posts grouped by label from my blog http://www.blogdoctor.me. Four post titles from three labels are shown but the code can be modified to show all posts from all labels (categories). This label is also shown as Gadget No 4 in My Gadget Showcase blog. The cursor autoscrolls down the post titles, and each post preview is shown at the top as an excerpt for five seconds before moving on to the next post. Obtaining the Google AJAX API Key The first step in installing the above gadget is to get the Google AJAX API Key. It is free and you can easily obtain it for any site blog or page by signing up for the key at the API key signup page. Type in your blog address in the My web site URL text box and click the "Generate API Key" button. On the resulting page copy the key and paste it in code below as shown. Customizing the code In the code below replace PASTE AJAX API KEY HERE with your actual key obtained above. <!-- ++Begin Dynamic Feed Wizard Generated Code++ --><!-- // Created with a Google AJAX Search and Feed Wizard // http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/wizards.html --> <!-- // The Following div element will end up holding the actual feed control. // You can place this anywhere on your page. --><div id="content"> <span style="color:#676767;font-size:11px;margin:10px;padding:4px;">Loading...</span> </div><!-- Google Ajax Api --> <script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=PASTE AJAX API KEY HERE" type="text/javascript"></script> <!-- Dynamic Feed Control and Stylesheet --> <script src="http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/dynamicfeed/gfdynamicfeedcontrol.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <style type="text/css"> @import url("http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/dynamicfeed/gfdynamicfeedcontrol.css"); </style><script type="text/javascript"> google.load('feeds', '1'); function OnLoad() { var feeds = [ { title: 'LABEL_1', url: 'http://MYBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/LABEL1?max-results=100' }, { title: 'LABEL_2', url: 'http://MYBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/LABEL2?max-results=100' }, { title: 'LABEL_3', url: 'http://MYBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/LABEL3?max-results=100' } ]; var options = { stacked : true, horizontal : false, title : "Posts from BLOG_TITLE" }; new GFdynamicFeedControl(feeds, 'content', options); document.getElementById('content').style.width = "200px"; } google.setOnLoadCallback(OnLoad); </script> In the above code replace LABEL_1, LABEL_2 and LABEL_3 and LABEL1, LABEL2 and LABEL3 by respective Label Names and BLOG_TITLE by the actual title of your blog. Also replace MYBLOG by actual blog subdomain. This is for blogspot blogs only. For Wordpress blog you will have to replace the label feeds:: http://MYBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/LABEL1?max-results=100 http://MYBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/LABEL2?max-results=100 http://MYBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/LABEL3?max-results=100 by the Category feed URLs from Wordpress blog. After customizing the above code in Blogger paste it in a HTML gadget while in Wordpress paste it in a Text widget. Further Customization To show more than four posts per label or category, you will have to modify the following Javascript code file: http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/dynamicfeed/gfdynamicfeedcontrol.js In the above mentioned Javascript code file, alter the following code line in it : GFdynamicFeedControl.DEFAULT_NUM_RESULTS = 4; Change '4' to '1000' and save the file as a MODgfdynamicfeedcontrol.js file in a text editor like Notepad. Upload the file to a free host and replace the link of the file in the above code. To change the styling of the gadget, you will have to modify the following file: http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/dynamicfeed/gfdynamicfeedcontrol.css Then save the modified file and upload it to a free host and replace its link in the above code. Working Example Posts from The Blog Doctor Change Post Formatting According to Author. by Vin - 30 Apr 2008 If you have a Team Blog made up of two authors you can change the formatting of the posts written by one author to ... Template Calling all Newbie Bloggers! Upgrade Classic Template without the "UPGRADE YOUR TEMPLATE" button. The Minimalist Minima Photoblog Template. Making the COMMENTS Link more User Friendly. CSS Change Post Formatting According to Author. Free CSS Navigation Menus in Blogger. Fix the Page Elements Layout Editor No Scrollbar Problem. Frame the Blog Header Image. Blogger Hacks Rounded Corner Headers for Blogger. Timestamp under the Date and Other Hacks. Add Icon to Post Titles. Many Headers In One Blog.   Summary The Rotating Post Titles with Post Preview gadget provides an at-a glance summary of your blog. All the posts are grouped by label or category and are linked to their post pages. The constantly rotating post excerpts at the top draws the attention of the reader and gets him/her more involved and eager to explore your blog. This increases the traffic and decreases the bounce rate of visitors from your blog.nara

What you will learn In this article, you will learn about: Using Taxonomy to link descriptive terms to Node Content Tag clouds Path aliases What you will do In this article, you will: Create a Taxonomy Enable the use of tags with Node Content Define a custom URL Activate site searching Perform a search Understanding Taxonomy One way to find content on a site is by using a search function, but this can be considered as a hit-or-miss approach. Searching for an article on 'canines' won't return an article about dogs, unless it contains the word 'canines'. Certainly, navigation provides a way to navigate the site, but unless your site has only a small amount of content, the navigation can only be general in nature. Too much navigation is annoying. There are far too many sites with two or three sets of top navigation, plus left and bottom navigation. It's just too much to take in and still feel relaxed. Site maps offer additional navigation assistance, but they're usually not fun to read, and are more like a Table of Contents, where you have to know what you're looking for. So, what's the answer?—Tags! A Tag is simply a word or a phrase that is used as a descriptive link to content. In Drupal, a collective set of terms, from which terms or tags are associated with content, is called a Vocabulary. One or more Vocabularies comprise a Taxonomy. This a good place to begin, so let's create a Vocabulary. Activity 1: Creating a Taxonomy Vocabulary In this activity, we will be adding two terms to our Vocabulary. We shall also learn how to assign a Taxonomy to Node Content that has been created. We begin in the Content management area of the admin menu. There, you should find the Taxonomy option listed, as shown in the following screenshot. Click on this option. Taxonomy isn't listed in my admin menuThe Taxonomy module is not enabled by default. Check on the Modules page (Admin | Site building | Modules) and make sure that the module is enabled. For the most part, modules can be thought of as options that can be added to your Drupal site, although some of them are considered essential. Some modules come pre-installed with Drupal. Among them, some are automatically activated, and some need to be activated manually. There are many modules that are not included with Drupal, but are available freely from the Drupal web site. The next page gives us a lengthy description of the use of a taxonomy. At the top of the page are two options, List and Add vocabulary. We'll choose the latter. On the Add vocabulary page, we need to provide a Vocabulary name. We can create several vocabularies, each for a different use. For example, with this site, we could have a vocabulary for 'Music' and another for 'Meditation'. For now, we'll just create one vocabulary, and name it Tags, as suggested below, in the Vocabulary name box. In the Description box, we'll type This vocabulary contains Tag terms. In the Help text box, we'll type Enter one or more descriptive terms separated by commas. Next is the [Node] Content types section. This lists the types of Node Content that are currently defined. Each has a checkbox alongside it. Selecting the checkbox indicates that the associated Node Content type can have Tags from this vocabulary assigned to it. Ultimately, it means that if a site visitor searches using a Tag, then this type of Node Content might be offered as a match. We will be selecting all of the checkboxes. If a new Node Content type is created that will use tags, then edit the vocabulary and select the checkbox. The Settings section defines how we will use this vocabulary. In this case, we want to use it with tags, so we will select the Tags checkbox. The following screenshot shows the completed page. We'll then click on the Save button. At this point, we have a vocabulary, as shown in the screenshot, but it doesn't contain anything. We need to add something to it, so that we can use it. Let's click on the add terms link. On the Add term page, we're going to add two terms, one at a time. First we'll type healing music into the Term name box. We'll purposely make the terms lower case, as it will look better in the display that we'll be creating soon. We'll click on the Save button, and then repeat the procedure for another term named meditation. The method we used for adding terms is acceptable when creating new terms that have not been applied to anything, yet. If the term does apply to existing Node Content, then a better way to add it is by editing that content. We'll edit the Page we created, entitled Soul Reading. Now that the site has the Taxonomy module enabled, a new field named Tags appears below Title. We're going to type soul reading into it. This is an AJAX field. If we start typing a tag that already exists, then it will offer to complete the term. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) is a method of using existing technologies to retrieve data in the background. What it means to a web site visitor is that data can be retrieved and presented on the page being viewed, without having to reload the page. Now, we can Save our Node Content, and return to the vocabulary that we created earlier. Click on the List tab at the top of the page. Our terms are listed, as shown in the following screenshot.  

Microsoft Office 2003 add-ins For Microsoft Windows users, a natural way of working with the files is by using the Microsoft Office tools. It would be a tedious job for Content Managers to have to search and locate the documents using an Alfresco web client, copy them onto their local desktop, edit them, upload them to Alfresco, and secure them. How about having all of the features mentioned above in your choice of editor itself? Alfresco provides Office add-ins for MS Word 2003, MS Excel 2003, and MS PowerPoint 2003, to allow them to manage the content directly from those tools. This improves the productivity of Content Managers. Support for Microsoft Office 2007 Although the Alfresco add-ins were developed for Microsoft Office 2003, they are also compatible with Microsoft Office 2007. If you are using Microsoft Office 2007 on Windows Vista, then the add-in is not effective, as it provides read-only access to the repository. Unfortunately, this is a known problem with Vista, as Microsoft has rewritten the WebDAV parts of Vista. You may consider the workarounds that are provided at the following URL: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/10/19/known-issue-office-2007-on-windows-vista-prompts-for-user-credentials-when-opening-documents-in-a-sharepoint-2007-site.aspx Installation Download the Alfresco office add-ins (ZIP file) from the source forge web site, by visiting the following URL: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=143373&package_id=237030 An individual installer (for Microsoft Word, Excel, and Power Point), as well as a combined installer, is available for download. Select an appropriate add-into download. Unzip the ZIP file and run the Setup.exe file contained within it. The set-up program will download the components that are needed, from the Microsoft web site. Once the set-up is complete, you can open the Office tool and use the add-in. For example, for MS Word 2003, you will notice a new button named Alfresco. For MS Word 2007, you will notice the add-in, as shown in the following screenshot: Configuration Click on the Alfresco button to open the add-in window. You need to configure the add-in, by clicking on the link provided at the bottom of the add-in window. Provide the URL details for the web client, WebDAV, and CIFS, as shown in the upcoming screenshot. No matter how you access the repository, you will still have to go through Alfresco's security rules. Provide the Userid and password for the purpose of authentication. The access to the Alfresco repository will be based on the authorization of the user. Click on the Save Settings button to go the main screen. If you have more than one Alfresco server to connect to, then you might have to manually change the settings as needed. Currently, there is no facility for storing the settings for more than one Alfresco server. Features of MS Word add-in The Alfresco add-in allows you to carry out the following activities directly from Microsoft Word. Refer to the following screenshot for more details: My Alfresco: Displays the My Alfresco dashlets Browse Spaces: Browses the entire repository for spaces and files. Search: Searches the repository for keywords. View Details: Views the details of the selected document. Workflow: Starts workflow for the active document. Tags: Allows you to add tags to the document. Transform to PDF: Transforms the selected MS Word document into PDF. Insert into Word: Inserts the selected document into Microsoft Word for editing. Save to Alfresco: Saves the current document to the current space. If the document has not been given a filename yet, then a pop-up panel will prompt you for one. Editing a file in Word To edit a file in Microsoft Word, double-click on the file name. The file is opened directly for editing. The MS Word file is locked for others, while it is being edited by you, as shown in the upcoming screenshot. You can perform all of the Alfresco repository activities, such as adding new tags and initiating a workflow approval process. Saving the file in Microsoft Word will directly save it in the Alfresco repository. If auto version is enabled, then it will be versioned automatically. When you close the file in MS Word, or exit from MS Word, the file will be unlocked in the repository. Recovering deleted content When you delete an item (either content or space) in Alfresco, the item is not deleted from the server, but is moved to a temporary store called Archive Space Store. This gives you a chance to recover items that were deleted. Deleted items will be kept in the temporary store forever, until you decide to either recover or purge them. These features are available to administrators through the Manage Deleted Items action. To test these features, log in as an administrator, create a couple of dummy files in any space, and then delete them. Click on the User Profile Icon  option, located above the menu item, and then click on the Manage Deleted Items button. The Manage Deleted Items pane appears, as shown in the following screenshot: You can list all of the deleted content by clicking on the Show All button, as highlighted in the preceding screenshot. You can also search for deleted items by name, by content, by date, or by the person who deleted it, by using the search options provided. Select the item that you previously deleted, and then click on the Recover Listed Items icon, as shown in the preceding screenshot. You will notice that the item is recovered to the original space. When an item is recovered, it is removed from the archive space store and moved to the original space from which it was deleted. Purged items are deleted forever and cannot be recovered. Because the deleted items will otherwise be in the temporary store forever, it is a good practice to purge them periodically. It is also recommended that you take regular backups of your data.  

Now that you understand the process behind forms authentication, we need to add it to our application. The process will be slightly different because we already have a database to use, but without the ASP.NET membership schema. We'll add that to the database and then create some user accounts and membership roles to handle the security for our application. We'll also secure some of our content and add a menu to our Master Page to navigate between the pages of our Content Management System. Preparing an existing SQL database As we have an existing database, we can't create a new database for our membership and authentication system. Well, actually we could, but using a second database is problematic when we upload the application to a host because many web hosting companies allow only a single database under the hosting plan. Besides, we can easily add the membership schema the same way we did earlier in the article with our empty database, using aspnet_regsql.exe. Previously we used the wizard, this time we'll use the command line. If you take a look at the database in SQL Server Management Studio Express now, before we execute the command to add the schemas, you should see the few tables that were already created, as shown below: The aspnet_regsql.exe tool Using the command line, the executable is simple, as long as you know the command line arguments. The syntax and command arguments for aspnet_regsql.exe are available online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x28wfk74.aspx. The following table shows the arguments we will use: Argument Description What we use -S The server name SQLEXPRESS -U The database username sa -P The database password SimpleCMS -d The database name SimpleCMS_Database -A The schema functions to install All functions   Our command line will look like this (all one line): aspnet_regsql.exe -S .SQLEXPRESS -U sa -P SimpleCMS -d SimpleCMS_Database -A all To run the command line, go to Start | Run and enter cmd in the Run dialog box. Press Enter and you will be at a command prompt. Type cd C:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727 and press Enter again, and you will be in the correct folder to find aspnet_regsql.exe. Note that you may need to change the path if your ASP.NET framework files are in a different location. Type the command line above and press Enter, and you should see that the command completed successfully, with a dialog similar to that below: Now that we have executed the aspnet_regsql.exe command line, if you look at the database tables in SQL Server Management Studio Express, you should see the added table for the users, membership, and roles we will use in our application. User accounts Earlier in the article, we created a single user account for accessing protected content. In a real-world environment, we would normally have many user accounts, way too many to add each account to each page we wanted to protect. Fortunately, the ASP.NET framework provides us with membership roles that we can place user accounts in, allowing us to define our access by role, not by user account. But first, we need some user accounts. Let's start by creating three accounts in our application  - User1, User2, and Administrator. Open the SimpleCMS web site in Visual Web Developer 2008 Express. Use the downloadable code provided for Chapter 4 of this book, it has the web.config file modified similar to what we did when we walked through the forms authentication demo earlier in the chapter. Open the Web Site Administration Tool by clicking on Website and then ASP.NET Configuration. If you click on the Security tab, you will see that we have no users configured for this application.  As you did earlier in the article, click on Create User and create the three users with user names of User1, User2, and Administrator. Use Password! as the password for each, and provide a valid email address for each (they can have the same email for testing). Also, provide a question and answer such as Favorite Color? and Blue. You can use the same question and answer for all three accounts if you wish. Each user entry should look something like the following: If you return to the Security tab, you will notice that we have three user accounts, but no roles for those accounts. Let's add them next. Membership roles ASP.NET membership roles provide the ability to group many individual accounts into a single role to provide access to a resource such as a page or application. Changing access for an individual user then becomes a simple task of assigning them to or removing them from the appropriate role. A single user account can belong to multiple roles to provide extremely granular access to the application resources if your security demands are extensive. To add roles to our application, we first need to enable roles. On the Security tab of the Web Site Administration Tool, under Roles, you should see a link to enable roles. Enabling roles consists of simply adding the following line to the web.config file in the system.web section: <roleManager enabled="true" /> Similar to the membership provider we created earlier, roles require a role provider. We need to add this provider to the role manager, so edit the web.config roleManager section to read: <roleManager enabled="true"><providers><clear/><add name="AspNetSqlRoleProvider"connectionStringName="SimpleCMS_DatabaseConnectionString"applicationName="/"type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider, System.Web,Version=2.0.0.0,Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" /></providers></roleManager> This adds an AspNetSqlRoleProvider that uses our connection string to the SimpleCMS database. At this point we have no roles defined, so let's create a few. Open the Web Site Administration Tool. If it's already open, you may need to close and reopen it because we modified the web.config file to add the role provider. Now, open the Security tab. In the Roles section, click on Create or manage roles. Let's create an administration role first. We'll need it to secure areas to just administrative access. Simply enter Administrator, click on Add Role, and you'll see the new role in the list. Add roles for Author, Editor, and Registered User in the same manner. The roles list should look something like the following figure when you finish: Adding users to roles Once we have users and roles created, we need to assign users to roles. To do this, use the Security tab of the Web Site Administration Tool, under the Users section, to manage users.  You'll see a list of user accounts, in our case all three of them, along with the ability to edit the user, delete the user, and edit the user's roles. Click on Edit roles next to the Administrator user and you'll see a checkbox list of user roles this account can be added to. Any roles currently assigned to the user will be checked. As there are currently none, check the Administrator role, and the Administrator user will be immediately added to the Administrator role, as shown below: If you were to look at the database tables that hold the user accounts and roles, you would see something like this for the users: Similarly, the roles would look like this: You'll note that both the users and the roles contain an ApplicationID that defines what application these users and roles belong to, and that each user or role is identified by a UserID or RoleID. These are automatically created by the ASP.NET membership framework and are globally unique identifiers (GUIDs), which ensure that the specific user or role is unique across all possible applications and uses of this specific database store. You would also find in the database a table that identifies users in roles, looking something like this: You'll notice that this is a joining table, used in a database when there is a many-to-many relationship. Many users can belong to a role and a user can belong to many roles, thus the use of this table. You'll also notice that the database table uses the UserID and RoleID, making it very hard to simply look at this table directly to find what users are assigned to what roles.  Fortunately, with the ASP.NET framework, you're isolated from having to work directly with the database, as well as relieved from having to create it and the code needed to access it.

(For more resources on Plone, see here.) Graphic design tools Any serious skinner needs a graphic design tool with certain capabilities in order to take the design files and assemble them into a finished web site. In particular, layers and the ability to slice pieces of a design and export those pieces are essential. Layers allow a themer to hide pieces not needed in a finished CSS theme, such as text that will eventually become real HTML on a page. Slices, meanwhile, are the pieces of an overall design that are exported during the layer manipulation process. They are the images the end user eventually sees on the rendered page. This is different from cropping, which actually alters the size of the canvas; slices are just pieces of the overall design, cut with precision, exported, and then manipulated with CSS. The most commonly used graphic design tools used for web design are Adobe® Photoshop®, Adobe® Fireworks® (formerly Macromedia) tool, and open source tools such as GIMP. It is not generally recommended to use tools such as Adobe® Illustrator®, Corel Draw and other vector-based packages. Web designs primarily use raster-based media, meaning that raster images are based on pixels and thus scale with loss of clarity. Conversely, vector-based images can be scaled infinitely without degrading, but are typically not appropriate for web design. Adobe Photoshop The most popular tool for processing image files is Adobe Photoshop. The files generated for designs are PSD, or Photoshop Document files. Adobe Photoshop meets the basic requirements of being able to manipulate the vector and raster images, layers, and slices, and offers a lot of additional functionality. The ability to control anti-aliasing and the quality and size of an exported image is essential in web design, and Adobe Photoshop (also, Adobe Fireworks) is quite powerful in this respect. A quick look at the Layers panel illustrates how sections can be grouped together, moved, or be shown or hidden via the "eyeball" icon. This show/hide functionality is very important. One situation where this becomes valuable is when you have a PSD file that indicates graphical buttons with text over them. For accessibility reasons, you may want to render the text as real HTML-rendered text, and not as an image. You need to be able to export the buttons in both their on and off states in order to get a proper rollover effect, and you need to hide the graphical text in order to do this. One site that illustrates this concept is http://greenforall.org. Using Adobe Photoshop, the layers where the text appears on the top navigation were hidden, and just the background on/off images were imported. On the finished web site, the top menu used the background images and real rendered text. The other core functionality that Adobe Photoshop offers is the ability to slice images and export them. The Copper River Watershed Project web site (http://www.copperriver.org) illustrates how slices might be used. The original Adobe Photoshop document is here: If you look closely, you can see a few key slices: the "Go" button next to the search field has been sliced, as has the Tour Our Watershed map and the gradation on the top navigation, which will be tiled horizontally. Below the orange navigation is a long slice that spans from the left-hand shadow over to the right-hand shadow. This image can be used to tile the length of the page. Additionally, the entire Information For... box has been sliced; in this case, for the final implementation, the text overlaying this slice was hidden and replaced with rendered text. If you look at the finished web site, you can see how these slices were applied. Photoshop provides a great deal of power, but in general, you may only use about 20% of the power it offers. You can visit http://adobe.com to see the tutorials on how to use the Adobe Photoshop effectively. Additionally, you may want to investigate Photoshop Elements; it doesn't allow you to slice images for the Web, but for the current price of $139.99, it's still a great tool for many web design activities: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin. Adobe Fireworks At the time Macromedia was purchased by Adobe in 2005, the interface was a little clumsy at times, but it did have a basic implementation of layers and slices. Over the past few years, based on the demos available, it appears that the interface has seen some great improvements, though it does not have the same power or market share as Adobe Photoshop has. However, at nearly $400 less than Adobe Photoshop, it's a great option. According to the Adobe web site, "Adobe Fireworks CS4 software is used to rapidly prototype web sites and application interfaces and to create and optimize images for the Web more quickly and accurately. It is ideal for web designers, web developers, and visual designers." It differs from Photoshop in that "Adobe Photoshop software is the industry standard for digital imaging, with a broad array of features and functionality used by photographers, graphic designers, web designers, and many other creative professionals. Fireworks is a much more focused tool, with the features for prototyping vectors and bitmaps for the web and application interfaces." The real selling point here, though, is integration with Adobe Photoshop, as a design may be shared between multiple people, each using different graphical programs. The ability to manipulate the vector and raster images is also important. Additionally, like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks provides the ability to work with layers and slices, and preserves many of the settings in an Adobe Photoshop PSD file. It's not as good at compositing and photo manipulation as Photoshop, but is a lot stronger with text, shapes, and final optimization. Selective JPEG optimization is also very handy, and allows you to heavily compress the portions of a JPEG while keeping text legible. Additionally, it's great for generating image maps (not often used in Plone), rollovers, and other common tricks. Finally, it allows you to view your work with either Windows or Mac gamma. Gamma correction basically refers to the ability to correct for differences in how computers (and especially computer monitors) interpret color values. There are two factors here: the ability to predict what an image, say a photograph, will look like on another monitor and the ability to match the colors from different sources on a single page—Adobe Fireworks excels at both. While Adobe Fireworks is not as feature-rich as Adobe Photoshop, it is still an extremely competent tool for slicing and exporting design elements at implementation time, not to mention more affordable. GIMP GIMP, also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program, can be downloaded for free from http://www.gimp.org. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring, and is covered by the GNU GPL license. According to the GIMP's web site, it can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, and more. From the perspective of how it compares to the key aspects of Adobe Photoshop® and Adobe Fireworks®, it has full support of layers and channels, plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats (that is, it can read Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks files), and best of all, it is open source. You can visit http://www.gimp.org/docs to download the user manual for the current release. GIMP also lists several user groups and resources at http://www.gimp.org/links that may be helpful. Even so, the latest releases are still quite recent, so development is still happening For a free solution to the image processing needs, GIMP is an excellent choice, but weak in terms of the user interface and layer compatibility with Adobe Photoshop. Browser add-ons and important notes Now that you have sense of the tools that are available for manipulating design files and exporting the necessary images for building your web site, let's look at how browsers affect the web site building process, either through add-on tools or through sheer bugginess. It's also worth mentioning that users should reference the A-List of popular browsers to see which browsers are still considered to be supported by web developers: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/index.html. This can help to ease the quality assurance load during web site testing. Many of these A-List browsers come with browser-specific tools that allow you to inspect your web site to descry the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) ID and class selectors, manipulate your CSS on-the-fly, optimize your site, explore color options, and more. We'll look at the available options for three major browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, but you should always be conscious of general browser penetration statistics so that you know which browsers are still in popular use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers. Now, let's get back to our key browsers. Internet Explorer From a themer's perspective, Internet Explorer is the most finicky browser against which to implement, as older versions of Internet Explorer followed the W3C's (World Wide Web Consortium's) standards differently than many other popular browsers. According to http://positioniseverything.net, a leading collector of browser fixes, "All browsers have CSS bugs, and IE leads the pack in this area, but that is not the end of the story. Microsoft has seen fit to engineer their browser to deliberately violate the standards in several critical ways. It might just be a misguided attempt to 'make it simple' for newbie coders, or it might be a cynical ploy to crush the competition, but in any case it creates huge headaches for those of us who desire to employ CSS positioning on our pages." While this may be true, many fixes for Internet Explorer have been identified, and thankfully, IE6, one of the more problematic browsers in recent years, is finally becoming obsolete. It was replaced by IE7, which was a vast improvement, but still did not implement the W3C conventions for CSS faithfully. As of this writing, Internet Explorer 8 was released and showing signs of having finally made strides toward real compliance to W3C standards. What this equates to is that web developers tend do their initial browser testing in browsers that are more compliant; that means doing most upfront testing in Firebug and Safari, and then rounding out the testing at the end against IE6, IE7, and IE8. Where possible, it's also important to test against other major browsers and handheld media. For testing against Internet Explorer, IE provides a tool called the Web Developer Toolbar for debugging. It is available for both IE6 and IE7 as an add-on and can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en. Web Developer Toolbar will no longer be the tool of choice for IE8, however, instead use the developer tools included with IE8. To use the developer tools in IE8, press Shift+F12 or click the "Developer Tools" icon in the command bar to begin using the tool. For IE6 and IE7, Web Developer Toolbar provides several features for exploring and understanding web pages. These features enable you to: Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page. Locate and select the specific elements on a web page. Selectively disable the Internet Explorer settings. View HTML object class names, IDs, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys. Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags. Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links. Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text. Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution. Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain. Display a fully-featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages. Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element. Right clicking on a style rule will allow you to trace the rules to a specific CSS file, if one is found. View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS. The Developer Toolbar can be popped up within the Internet Explorer browser window or opened as a separate window. If you are using a PC to test your sites, VMware, parallels, or a Windows emulator, you should download the Toolbar from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125120, install it, and restart IE. You can then click the Developer Toolbar icon in the command bar to display or hide the Developer Toolbar. Alternately, you can open the View menu and then use the Explorer Bar menu. In Internet Explorer 7, open the Tools menu and then use Toolbars/Explorer Bars to display or hide the Developer Toolbar. There are a few caveats here: The Developer Toolbar icon may not be visible by default. If you do not see it after restarting Internet Explorer, click the right-facing arrows at the end of the IE7 command bar to view all the available Toolbar buttons. Some menu items are unavailable (grayed out) when running Internet Explorer in Protected Mode on Windows Vista. To use those options, temporarily turn off Protected Mode or right-click the Internet Explorer icon in the Programs menu and choose Run as administrator. In IE6 or in IE7 with tabbed browsing off, using the validation links will navigate the current window to the validation page. To launch the validation links in a new window, open the Tools menu, click Internet Options, and uncheck Reuse windows for launching shortcuts in the Advanced tab, or use IE7 with tabbed browsing enabled. Generally, you can use this tool by expanding the left side of the panel displayed to navigate through your site's structure. It displays CSS IDs and classes in a hierarchical fashion. On the right-hand side, it displays the properties assigned to each of those IDs or classes. You can modify those by using the + icon in the center Attributes section to add a new property and using that to add to or alter the existing CSS. As stated before, the left-hand pane allows you to expand and walk through the structure of your web site. When you refresh, unfortunately, the entire tree closes. To continue troubleshooting a specific element on the page, you must drill down to it again or use the "selector" tool. It's somewhat clumsy, but it works and is invaluable when debugging web pages in Internet Explorer.  

We will consider the example of an imaginary web site created for a restaurant called Good Eatin' Bistro. Chef Wanyama is the owner of the Good Eatin' Bistro, a popular upscale restaurant. You can check this web site at http://goodeatin.drupalbyexample.com/. Web site backups A strong backup plan is critical for any successful web site. A good backup plan will protect against hardware failure, allow you to transfer your web site to another host, and allow you to recover from malicious hacking into your web site. When you create a backup plan, you should also test the restoration from this backup to make sure that the backup works correctly. In this section, we will explore ways of performing backups regardless of the host that you are using. Your hosting provider may also offer a solution that will back up files and databases either one time, or on a recurring basis. If your host does provide backup capabilities, you should review them to see if they suit your needs completely, or if you want to augment them or replace them with the techniques in this section. Manually backing up a site Good Eatin' Goal: Back up the web site without using a custom backup module. Additional modules needed: None. Basic steps If you do not want to use a dedicated module to perform your backups, you can manually download the files and the database information that make up the site. However, this can be more time-intensive and error-prone than using a custom backup module. A manual backup has two steps, in which you must first back up the files that make up the site and then back up the database information. To back up the files for the web site, use the following procedure: Begin by opening the utility that you use to transfer files to the web site. This could be an FTP client, or an online file manager. My favorite FTP client is FileZilla, which is a freely-available open source client. The FileZilla client can be downloaded from http://filezilla-project.org/. Select the backup location on your local computer to which you want to copy the files, and select the root directory of your web server as the remote directory. You may want to date the backup folder so that you can maintain a history of the site. Next, download the files to your local directory. If you want, you can compress the files into a ZIP file or a compressed archive. To reduce the amount of data that you need to download, you should be able to download just the sites directory, because that folder contains all of the custom files, pictures, themes, and modules that you have added to the site. To back up the database information, you can use your web site provider's database management utility. Many hosts provide phpMyAdmin for this purpose. If you are unsure whether or not your host gives you access to phpMyAdmin, you can contact their customer support group to check. Begin by opening phpMyAdmin and selecting the database that has your site information within it. The screen should be similar to the following: If you have multiple databases available on the host, you may need to select the database that you want to work with in the drop-down list at the upper left corner of the screen. Next, select the Export tab at the top of the screen. phpMyAdmin will prompt you to select the tables that you want to download and the format that you want to download in, as shown in the following screenshot: If you want to be able to rebuild the database at a later time, you should export all the tables in SQL format. Next, you will need to specify the name of the file to download to. You can use __DB__ as the database name. You may want to zip the file to reduce storage space. Then click Go to begin the download process. You will be prompted for the location to which you want to save the exported data. When you are ready to restore the web site from backup, you simply reverse the process. You should always import into a blank database, to avoid conflicts with existing data. You can either drop or delete all of the titles in the existing database, or you can create a new database to import the data into. After you have cleaned out your database, select the Import tab in phpMyAdmin. Now navigate to the file that you exported earlier, and click Go to begin the import. You may need to delete all of the tables in the database before you import the data, depending on the options you chose when you exported the data. To reload the files, simply open your FTP client, select the same directories that you used when creating the backup and then upload the files, rather than downloading them. Automatic site backups Good Eatin' Goal: Back up a web site so that it can be stored for easy recovery. Additional modules needed: Backup and Migrate (http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate). Basic steps Although you can manually back up your files and database, this process can be time-consuming and error prone. Luckily, the Backup and Migrate module makes this process easier, and optimizes the backups to exclude unnecessary data. Begin by downloading and installing the Back up and Migrate module. You can now back up your data by selecting Content management and then Backup and migrate, from the Administer menu. The Backup and Migrate module allows you to fully customize the backup files that are created. You can control which tables are included in the backup, and whether or not the data in the table is backed up. By default, the Backup and Migrate module does not back up cache information, session information, or watchdog information, because data in these tables is temporary and can easily be re-created. There are a variety of other options that you can choose from, which control how the resulting file is named, how it is compressed, and where it is compressed to. Once you have set the options as desired, click Backup Database to begin the backup process. If you have selected the Download option, the file will be sent to your computer so that you can store it. If you select the Save to Files Directory option, the backup file will be saved onto the server so that you can download it later, either directly from the server or using the Saved Backups tab. If you would like the Backup and Migrate module to back up your database automatically on a regular basis, you can schedule the back up to occur at specified intervals by clicking on the Backup Schedule tab, as shown here: Please note that the backups created by the Backup and Migrate module do not include the files from the site, so you will still need to back up these files independently. You can minimize the backup file size by only backing up the files that the users can upload. These files are typically stored in the files directory. The process for backing up files is identical to the process used in the section on manual backups. Restoring a site from a backup Good Eatin' Goal: Restore information from a backup file created by the Backup and Migrate module. Additional modules needed: Backup and Migrate (http://drupal.org/project/backup_migrate). Basic steps Restoring a backup created by the Backup and Migrate module is a simple process. Navigate to the Backup and Migrate manager by selecting Content management and then Backup and Migrate, from the Administer menu. Next, click on the Restore/Import DB tab. Navigate to the location of your backup file. After you have selected the backup file, click on Restore Database to begin the restore process. Please read all displayed warnings carefully, and make sure that you test the import on a test installation for your site before running it on your production site. If you are sure that you want to proceed with the import, agree to the confirmation and click restore. You may also need to import any saved files, if the server file system is not fully up-to-date. We discussed this previously in the section on manual backups.

Maintaining content As you continue to add content to your web site, you will need to ensure that your content is properly moderated, that old content is removed, and that changes to web site content are tracked. Creating content revisions Good Eatin' Goal: Create revisions of content to ensure that you have a complete record of changes to your web site's content. Additional modules needed: None. Basic steps We have simply updated our pages as necessary to add new functionality and content. However, if you have many editors, content that changes frequently, a need to view the history of a page, or need the ability to easily return to an old version of a page, you will want to store multiple revisions of your pages. To do this, carry out the following steps: Edit the content for which you want to create a new revision. Make the changes as needed and, before saving, expand the Revision information section. Select the Create new revision option and enter a message describing the changes that you have made to the node. When you save the content, you will see a new tab called Revisions. Clicking on this tab will show you a list of all of the revisions that have been created for the page. If you would like to return to an older version of the page, you can click the revert link. Or, if you want to remove an older revision, you can click the delete link to get rid of it permanently. You can control which users have access to the revision system by using the Permissions Manager. Drupal allows you to control which users can: view revisions, revert revisions, and delete revisions. If you want to force users to always create new revisions when editing content, edit the content type and then expand the Workflow settings. Change the default options to select the Create new revision option. When editors change content, the Create new revision option will be selected by default, and they will not be able to change the option unless they have the administer nodes permission. If you want to approve all revisions before publication, you can deselect the Published checkbox. Comparing content revisions Good Eatin' Goal: Compare the text of two different revisions of a page. Additional modules needed: Diff (http://drupal.org/project/diff). Basic steps Although the built-in functionality for creating revisions in Drupal works perfectly well, it can be difficult to review the changes that were made in each revision. The Diff module makes comparing revisions very easy. Begin by installing and activating the Diff module. To use the Diff module, simply view the revisions for any page. You will notice that the Revisions list has changed to allow you to select the revisions to be compared. Select the revisions to compare and then click on the Show diff button. Drupal will then display information about the text that has been changed, added, or deleted. Moderate content Good Eatin' Goal: Find questionable or offensive content, and remove it from your site, easily. Additional modules needed: Modr8 (http://drupal.org/project/modr8). Basic steps An unfortunate side effect of having a web site on the Internet is that, at some point, a malicious user will attempt to post inappropriate content on your site. If your site is extremely busy, you may find yourself with a large amount of content to review and approve. The Modr8 module can help you manage the workload and can send emails to users letting them know when their content has been approved or rejected. Begin by installing and activating the Modr8 module. The settings for the Modr8 module can be accessed by selecting Site configuration and then Modr8, from the Administer menu. The basic settings control how often logs are removed. Alternatively, you can choose to keep the logs forever. You can also change the number of items in the moderation queue to be displayed at a time, as well as the default action for the content that requires moderation. You can also configure the email settings for the moderation queue, including the text of the emails, and whether or not emails should be sent to the user who posted the content when their content is approved and/or when their content is rejected. You can also choose to send an email if the moderator does not take action for the item and wants to send a note to the author. If you would like new content to be added to the moderation queue automatically, you can edit the content type and select the In moderation queue setting in the workflow section. To view the moderation queue, select Content management and then Moderated content, from the Administer menu. The moderation queue appears as follows: From this page, you can approve, delete, or defer action on any content that needs moderation. After you make your changes, click Save to complete your selections. You can also display a log of all the moderation actions, by clicking on Reports and then Content moderation log. The moderation log appears as follows: Allowing users to report questionable or offensive content. Good Eatin' Goal: Get feedback from users to learn what they find offensive so the objectionable content can be removed. Additional modules needed: Abuse (http://drupal.org/project/abuse). Basic steps In the last task, we reviewed methods that allowed you to moderate every piece of content that is added to the site. However, this can be a time-intensive task if the proportion of content that you receive that is questionable is low. If this is the case, you can allow your users to help you to moderate the content by using the Abuse module, to let them report items that they find offensive. This strategy has a couple of advantages. Firstly, you are freed from the maintenance of pre-approving all content before it is published. Secondly, it ensures that the content meets community standards, rather than placing you or your editors in charge of defining community standards. The Abuse module also has a Watchlist component that allows you to flag content as suspicious or banned, and automatically move them into a queue for review by an administrator. Begin by downloading and installing the Abuse and Watchlist modules, both of which are included in the Abuse installation. We will begin by editing the Watchlist settings, which can be accessed by selecting Site configuration and then Watchlist settings, from the Administer menu. You can include any words that you want to, in the Watch list and Filtered/banned word list, depending on your target audience and your site's needs; just make sure that you enter one word per line. Items on the Watch list can be viewed while they are in the review queue, and items on the Filtered/banned word list will be hidden until they are reviewed. You can also control which items are automatically added to the Watch list or banned list, based on the Watchlist word settings configured above. You can also force moderation for specific types if they are more prone to abuse. We can now modify the Abuse Moderation settings by selecting Site configuration and then Abuse Moderation settings, from the Administer menu. The first setting controls what content types are subject to abuse reports. The next section of controls how abuse tickets are to be handled by your moderators. If you have multiple moderators for your site, you can select the Abuse Assigned Moderators option. If you use this, you will also need to store the maximum number of items that have been flagged for abuse that are added to the moderator's queue. If moderators live in different time zones, you can set an hour of the day at which all moderation queues are cleared, so that items do not remain in the moderation queue for an overly-long period of time. Finally, you can configure the settings related to all of the items that have been flagged as abusive by a user. The Abuse threshold controls how many complaints must be registered for an item before it is moved into the moderation queue. 3 is a good number to start with, but you may want to increase or decrease the threshold depending on the needs of your site. You can edit the reasons for flagging an item for abuse by selecting Site configuration, then Abuse Moderation settings, and finally Abuse Moderation reasons, from the Administer menu. All available reasons will be listed on the page using a format similar to the example above. You can add new reasons, remove reasons, or change the text for reasons from this page. Before the abuse module is activated, you need to assign permissions to users, so that they can flag content for review. Content that has the abuse module activated will have a new Flag as offensive link added to it, as shown in the following screenshot: When the user clicks on the Flag as offensive link, he or she will be presented with a form where he or she can specify their contact information, and a reason why he or she believes that the content is offensive. Administrators can review content that has been flagged as offensive by clicking on Content management and then Moderate. The administrators can click on the Get More Tickets link to have additional items assigned to them. Once a ticket has been assigned to them, the administrator can view information about the user who submitted the content as well as the user who flagged the content, and choose what action to take for the content. The administrator can either allow the content, or remove the content from the web site. The administrator can also optionally send a warning to the user without further action.

AJAX: an acronym that Jesse James Garret of AdaptivePath.com came up with in 2005. Just a few short years later, it seems like every site has a "taste" of AJAX in it. If you're totally new to AJAX, I'll just point out that, at its core, AJAX is nothing very scary or horrendous. AJAX isn't even a new technology or language. Essentially, AJAX stands for: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and it is the technique of using JavaScript and XML to send and receive data between a web browser and a web server. The biggest advantage this technique has is that you can dynamically update a piece of content on your web page or web form with data from the server (preferably formatted in XML), without forcing the entire page to reload. The implementation of this technique has made it obvious to many web developers that they can start making advanced web applications (sometimes called RIAs—Rich Interface Applications) that work and feel more like software applications than web pages. Keep in mind that the word AJAX is starting to have its own meaning (as you'll also note its occasional use here as well as all over the Web as a proper noun rather than an all-cap acronym). For example, a Microsoft web developer may use VBScript instead of JavaScript to serve up Microsoft Access database data that is transformed into JSON (not XML) using a .NET server-side script. Today, that guy's site would still be considered an AJAX site rather than an "AVAJ" site (yep, AJAX just sounds cooler). In fact, it's getting to the point where just about anything on a web site (that isn't in Flash) that slides, moves, fades, or pops up without rendering a new browser window is considered an "Ajaxy" site. In truth, a large portion of these sites don't truly qualify as using AJAX, they're just using straight-up JavaScripting. Generally, if you use cool JavaScripts in your Joomla! site, it will probably be considered Ajaxy, despite not being asynchronous or using any XML. Want more info on this AJAX business? The w3schools site has an excellent introduction to AJAX, explaining it in straightforward simple terms. They even have a couple of great tutorials that are fun and easy to accomplish even if you only have a little HTML, JavaScript and server-side script (PHP or ASP) experience (no XML experience required): http://w3schools.com/ajax/. Preparing for dynamic content and interactive forms Gone are the days of clicking, submitting, and waiting for the next page to load, or manually compiling your own content from all your various online identities to post in your site. A web page using AJAX techniques (if applied properly) will give the user a smoother and leaner experience. Click on a drop-down option and check-box menus underneath are immediately updated with the relevant choices—no submitting, no waiting. Complicated forms that, in the past, took two or three screens to process can be reduced into one convenient screen by implementing the form with AJAX. As wonderful as this all sounds, I must again offer a quick disclaimer: I understand that, like with drop-down menus and Flash, you may want AJAX to be in your site, or your clients are demanding that AJAX be in their sites. Just keep in mind, AJAX techniques are best used in situations where they truly benefit a user's experience of a page; for example, being able to painlessly add relevant content via an extension or cutting a lengthy web process form down from three pages to one. In a nutshell, using an AJAX technique simply to say your site is an AJAX site is probably not a good idea. You should be aware that, if not implemented properly, some uses of AJAX can compromise the security of your site. You may inadvertently end up disabling key web browser features (such as back buttons or the history manager). Then there's all the basic usability and accessibility issues that JavaScript in general can bring to a site. Some screen readers may not be able to read a new screen area that's been generated by JavaScript. If you cater to users who rely on tabbing through content, navigation may be compromised once new content is updated. There are also interface design problems that AJAX brings to the table (and Flash developers can commiserate). Many times, in trying to limit screen real estate and simplify a process, developers actually end up creating a form or interface that is unnecessarily complex and confusing, especially when your user is expecting a web page to, well, act like a normal web page. Remember to check in with Don't Make Me Think: This is the Steve Krug book I recommend for help with any interface usability questions you may run into.Really interested in taking on AJAX? For you programmers, I highly recommend "AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications", Cristian Darie, Bogdan Brinzarea, Filip Chereches-Tosa, and Mihai Bucica, Packt Publishing. In it, you'll learn the ins and outs of AJAX development, including handling security issues. You'll also do some very cool stuff, such as make your own Google-style auto-suggest form and a drag-and-drop sortable list (and that's just two of the many fun things to learn in the book). So, that said, you're now all equally warned and armed with all the knowledgeable resources I can think to throw at you. Let's get to it: how exactly do you go about getting something Ajaxy into your Joomla! site? Joomla! extensions Keep in mind, extensions are not part of your template. They are additional files with Joomla!-compatible PHP code, which are installed separately into their own directories in your Joomla! 1.5 installation. Once installed, they are available to be used with any template that is also installed in your Joomla! installation. Even though these are not part of your template, you might have to prepare your template to be fully compatible with them. Some extensions may have their own stylesheets, which are installed in their extension directory. Once you've installed an extension, you may want to go into your own template's stylesheet so that it nicely displays XHTML objects and content that the extension may output into your site. Extensions are any component, module or plugin that you install into your Joomla! 1.5 installation. Components control content that displays in the main type="component" jdoc tag in your template. Note that components may also have module settings and the ability to display content in assigned module positions. The poll component is a good example of a component that also has module settings. Modules are usually smaller and lighter and only display in module positions. Plugins generally help you out more on the backend of your site, say to switch WYSIWYG editors or with enabling OpenID logins, but as we'll see, some plugins can affect the display of your site to users as well. Deciding where AJAX is best used On the whole, we're going to look at the most popular places where AJAX can really aid and enrich your site's user experience. We'll start with users adding comments to articles and pages and streamlining that process. We'll then take a look at a nice plugin that can enhance pagination for people reading long articles on your site. We'll then move on to the RSS Reader module, which can enhance the content in your modules (and even makes your users have fun arranging them). Finally, we'll realize that AJAX isn't just for impressing your site users. You, as an administrator, can (and do) take advantage of AJAX as well. Please note: These extensions were chosen by me based on the following criteria: 1. They provided some useful enhancement to a basic site.2. They, at the time of this writing, were free and received very good feedback on Joomla!.org's extensions site: http://extensions.Joomla.org. In the next few pages, I'll walk you through installing these extensions and discuss any interesting insights for doing so, and benefits of their enhancements (and some drawbacks). But you must use the extension links provided to make sure you download the latest stable versions of these extensions and follow the extension author's installation guides when installing these into your Joomla! site. If you run into any problems installing these extensions, please contact the extension's author for support. Always be sure to take the normal precaution of backing up your site before installation, at least for any non-stable extensions you may decide to try. Installing the Joomla! comment component Chances are, if you've invested in Joomla! 1.5 as your CMS, you need some powerful capabilities. Easy commenting with "captcha" images to reduce spam is always helpful: http://extensions.Joomla.org/extensions/contacts-&-feedback/comments/4389/details To install this extension (and the other few coming up), you have to basically go to Extensions | Install/Uninstall and upload the extension's ZIP file. You'll then proceed to the plugin, component, and/or modules panel and activate the extension so that it is ready to be implemented on your site. Upon installing this comment component, to my surprise, it told me that it was for an older version of Joomla! Everything on the download page seemed to indicate it worked with 1.5. The installation error did mention that I just needed to activate the System Legacy plugin and it would work. So I did, and the comment form appeared on all my article pages. This may seem like a step backward, but for extensions like this, which are very useful, if they work well and stay stable in Legacy Mode, a developer may have made the decision to leave well enough alone. The developer will most likely eventually upgrade the extension (especially if Legacy Mode goes away in future versions of Joomla!). Just be sure to sign up for updates or check back on any extensions you use if you do upgrade your site. You should do this regardless of whether your extensions run natively or in Legacy Mode. The advantage of AJAX in a comment form is that a user isn't distracted and comments post smoothly and right away (a bit of instant gratification for the user, even if you never "confirm" the post and it never gets actually published for other viewers). This extension outputs tables, but for the ease of handling robust comments and having a great admin area to manage them, I'll make do. The following screenshot shows the Joomla! comment component appearing in an article page: As you can see in my previous image, I have some strong styles that are trying to override the component's styles. A closer look at the output HTML will give me some class names and objects that I can target with CSS. The administration panel's Component | Joomla! Comment | Other Component settings page also allows quite a few customization options. The Layout tab also offers several included style sheets to select from as well as the option to copy the CSS sheet out to my template's directory (the component will do this automatically). This way, I can amend it with my own specific CSS, giving my comment form a better fit with my template's design. Installing the core design Ajax Pagebreak plugin If your site has long articles that get broken down regularly in to three or more pages, Pagebreak is a nice plugin that uses Ajax to smoothly load the next page. It's a useful feature that will also leave your site users with a little "oh wow" expression. http://www.greatJoomla.com/news/plugins/demo-core-design-ajaxpagebreak-plugin.html After successfully installing this plugin, I headed over to the Extensions | Plugin Manager and activated it. I then beefed out an article (with Lorem Ipsum) and added page breaks to it on the Home Page. It's hard to see in a screenshot, but it appears below the Prev and Next links without a full browser redraw. I've set my site up with SEO-friendly URLs, and this plugin does amend the URLs with a string; that is, http://yoururl.com/1.5dev/menu-item-4?start=1. I'm not sure how this will really affect the SEO "friendliness" value of my URL, but it does give me a specific URL to give to people if I want to send them to a targeted page, which is very good for accessibility. One thing to note, the first page of the article is the original URL; that is, http://yoururl.com/1.5dev/menu-item-4. The second page then appends ?start=1, the third page becomes ?start=2, and so on. Just be aware that when sending links out to people, it is always best to pull the URL directly from the site so that you know it's correct! Installing the AJAX RSS Reader Version 3 with Draggable Divs module RSS feeds are a great way to bring together a wide variety of content as well as bring all your or your organization's "social network happenings" to one place in your own site. I like to use RSS feeds to get people interested in knowing what an organization is doing (or tweeting), or reading, and so on. Having links and lists of what's currently going on can compel users to link to you, join your group, follow you, and become a friend, a fan, or whatever. This AJAX powered module has the extra feature of being draggable and somewhat editable. This is a nice way to draw a user in to the feeds and let them play with them and arrange the information to their taste. Sometimes, sorting and reorganizing makes you see connections and possibilities that you didn't see before. The next image may seem confusing, but it's a screenshot of the top div box being dragged and dropped: http://extensions.Joomla!.org/extensions/394/details AJAX: It's not just for your site's users I've already mentioned, when applied properly, how AJAX can aid in interface usability. Joomla! attempts to take advantage of this within its Administration panel by enhancing it with relevant information and compressing multiple page forms into one single screen area. Here's a quick look at how Joomla! already uses AJAX to enhance its Administration panel forms: The following image shows how the image uploader uses a "lightbox" div layer effect so that you can keep track of where you are in the content editor. In the next image, you can see how Joomla! helps keep the administration area cleared up by using smooth-sliding accordion panels. This helps you see everything on one page and have access to just what you need, when you need it.

Create web site project and add LinqDataSource control Open Visual Studio 2008 from its shortcut on the desktop. Click File | New | Web Site...(or Shift+Alt+N) to open the New Web Site window. Change the default name of the site to a name of your choice (herein LinqDemo)on your local web server as shown. Make sure you are creating a .NET Framework 3.5 web site as shown here. Drag and drop a LinqDataSource control from Toolbox|Data shown in the next figure on to the Default.aspx This creates an instance of the control LinqDataSource1 as shown. The figure also shows the smart tasks of this control as shown. Create a data context for the LinqDataSource control In order to use this control you also need to create a data context. Right click the localhost web site and choose Add New Item...to open the Add New Item - http://localhost/ LinqDemo window as shown. In the Visual Studio installed templates highlight Linq to SQL Classes. Change the default name from DataClasses.dbml to a name of your choosing. Herein MyDC.dbml. Click Add. This pops-up a Microsoft Visual Studio warning message as shown. The preferred location for this file is in the App_Code folder of your project as suggested here. Click on Yes. This adds a MyDC.dbml file to APP_Code folder as shown. MyDC.dbml consists of two components MyDC.dbml and MyDC.designer.vb to the App_Code folder as shown . Double click the MyDC.dbml node in the APP_Code folder. This opens the ObjectRelational Designer and the designer surface with two panes as shown. Read the instructions in the windows. In the left pane you can drag and drop items from the Server Explorer in Visual Studio to create the appropriate classes and in the right pane you can drag and drop stored procedures. In this article we will be looking at just creating classes from table objects.