Web Development | 0 articles | Tech News, Tutorials & Expert Insights

article-image-content-delivery-alfresco-3

29 Sep 2010

11 min read

Content Delivery in Alfresco 3

29 Sep 2010

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article-image-deployment-feature-alfresco-3

Packt

29 Sep 2010

3 min read

The Deployment Feature of Alfresco 3

Packt

29 Sep 2010

3 min read

Alfresco 3 Web Content Management Create an infrastructure to manage all your web content, and deploy it to various external production systems A complete guide to Web Content Creation and Distribution Understand the concepts and advantages of Publishing-style Web CMS Leverage a single installation to manage multiple websites Integrate Alfresco web applications with external systems Read more about this book (For more resources on Alfresco 3, see here.) Alfresco WCM staging has an autodeploy option in its default workflow, allowing end users, at the time of submit, to enforce automatic deployment of approved changes directly to the live website without having to manually initiate deployment. The Submit Items window has an Auto Deploy checkbox, as shown in the following screenshot: Upon approval, if the auto deploy option is on, the workflow will perform a deployment to those live servers that have the Include In Auto Deploy option enabled. For more details about enabling this option, refer the Configuring a web project to use FSR section in the previous article. Deploying to a test server The Test Server Deployment functionality provides in-context preview by allowing a contributor to deploy their content to an external target (either an ASR or FSR), from which it can be rendered by any web application technology that can either read from a filesystem or access an ASR via HTTP (which includes all of the major web application technologies in use today, including Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Python, CGI, and so on). Once a test server has been deployed to, it is allocated to the user or workflow that performed the deployment. Once the user or workflow has finished with the test server it is released and returned to the pool of test servers. This happens automatically in the case of a workflow sandbox and manually via a UI action for User Sandboxes. The following process has to be followed to use the test server: Set up a test server pool. Deploy to a test server. Preview the content. Release the test server. Setting up a test server pool The following are the steps to configure a Web Project to use an FSR. Navigate to Company Home Web Projects | <web project name>|. Select the Edit Web Project Settings from the Action menu. Click on Next to reach the Configure Deployment Servers window. Click on the Add Deployment Receiver link as shown in the following screenshot: For Type, select Test Server, specify the Display Name, Host name, and the Target Name. Click on the Add button. Similarly configure another test server, say with "cignex-test2" as the target. Ensure that the FSR is running on the test server. The targets "cignex-test1" and "cignex-test2" are configured in FSR. Deploy to a test server Let's say, you as a content manager would like to deploy your User Sandbox to the test server for testing purposes. Go to your User Sandbox and from the More Actions menu choose Deploy as shown in the following screenshot: The Deploy Sandbox window displays, listing all of the unallocated test servers as shown in the next screenshot. Select a test server to use (only one test server can be allocated to a sandbox at a time), and click on OK. The Monitor Deployment information displays once the deployment completes. If an error occurs, the reason for the error is shown under the Deployment Failed message:

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887

article-image-drupal-site-configuration-performance-maintenance-logging-and-errors-and-reports

Packt

28 Sep 2010

9 min read

Drupal Site Configuration: Performance, Maintenance, Logging and Errors and Reports

Packt

28 Sep 2010

9 min read

Drupal 7 A comprehensive beginner's guide to installing, configuring, and building a professional Drupal 7 website Set up, configure, and deploy a Drupal 7 website Easily add exciting and powerful features Design and implement your website's look and feel Promote, manage, and maintain your live website In-depth coverage of Drupal's new core features, including image handling and fields Extended media coverage Completely new coverage on Views Improved and updated coverage on themes and theming Over 150 online quiz questions and exercises included Revised and updated for Drupal 7 based on comments from thousands of readers Read more about this book (For more resources on Drupal, see here.) Performance Every once in a while, someone makes a site that becomes wildly popular. Having many people visiting all at once can put some serious strain on the server's resources and cause all sorts of problems as the congestion builds. If you are unsure about what resources are available on your site, check with the hosting service and find out what they provide in the way of disk space, monthly transfer, and transfer speed. Many hosting services will boast unlimited bandwidth, but won't talk about connection speed. In other words, they don't meter how much water you use because they only let you switch the hosepipe on half way. It's important to know the limitations of the hardware and network resources, but don't fall into the trap of believing this is the most important thing to know. Ensuring that there are facilities in place to handle a large amount of traffic will go some way in ensuring that your site scales well. It's a time-honored tradition in the corporate world to throw extra resources at computing problems—buying the latest, fastest servers to help speed up slow applications, upgrading network hardware to allow data to travel more freely, and so on. Invariably though, poorly designed software, or software that is poorly tuned for performance always finds a way to utilize all the resources one can throw at it and still want more. More often than not, it is better to look at why software is chewing up resources and see what can be done to either stop it or at least alleviate the problem, so that the software utilizes its resources wisely. Drupal already has several strategies in place to help you, the site administrator, decide how and when to use resource-intensive modules and how to maximize the site's efficiency. Caching This section provides several options to improve the performance of your site, and as nothing in this world is really free, you need to understand that, by and large, obtaining a performance boost comes at the expense of something else—namely, how up-to-date content is. The following screenshot shows the performance page: The first option, CLEAR CACHE, is useful while making modifications to a site because it helps to ensure that changes are definitely displayed and not held up while the site cache is still in operation. Having the ability to clear the cache in order to view precisely how pages are being built is useful, but comes at a price. Remember that if you have a large site with lots of content, then Drupal will have to do a lot of work to rebuild its cache, and it is possible that users may notice a slowdown during this time. It is important to only enable caching on a live site, and not on the development machine, because changes to a page show up only when the cache expires—causing confusion if you are expecting something else during testing. As you know, Drupal uses PHP to build web pages that are returned to a user's browser. Most of the time, these pages are unchanged between requests, and Drupal ends up repeating the work of building the same page before sending it off to the other users who requested it. It makes sense to tell Drupal that if it has created a web page once, it should store a copy of this page and serve that copy instead of going through the trouble of recreating it. The process of storing copies of web pages in order to reduce the amount of effort required to repeatedly create a page is known as caching. The trade-off when using page caching is that any changes to a page are only shown to the users once that cached version has expired and been replaced. This makes caching a suitable method for boosting performance whenever content is not updated very often or when it is not important to have new content presented immediately. You will need to decide how long you think it is suitable to go before any updates made to a page must be shown—the longer you leave a page cached, the less work Drupal has to do, but the longer it will take for new content to show on the site. If your site is a daily blog, then by all means set the cache for up to a day at a time. If your site is a super busy, breaking news portal, then clearly you would opt for a cache time in minutes. Drupal also has the ability to cache the content of blocks, which can be a real performance boost for authenticated users (since page caching is only available for anonymous users). Blocks are constructed independently from the page as a whole, and often require expensive database requests or other operations in order to provide the information they contain. Enabling block caching means that blocks no longer have to query the database (or whatever else it is they are doing) each time a page refreshes. Rather, they simply serve up the cached version and save on all that work. Again, make sure you carefully weigh up the benefits between having fresh content and having high performance. Bandwidth optimization BANDWIDTH OPTIMIZATION, shown at the bottom of the page in the previous screenshot, deals with how to best transfer data from your server across the Internet to the users' browsers. The way in which data is transferred plays a big role in optimizing performance. In general, the most important things to remember are: Keep files small Keep the number of files down As shown, Drupal can aggregate and compress disparate CSS and JavaScript files in order to reduce the size and number of requests made to a server. Obviously, this has a huge number of benefits, especially if you are charged for bandwidth usage. Again, don't aggregate files during development. Turn this feature on only once the site has gone live, otherwise you are in for some serious frustration when changes to themes or scripts don't show up or behave as expected. Maintenance I should make the following point very clear: All major development or changes to a site should be performed on the development machine and thoroughly tested before being implemented or ported to the live site. There will be times, however, when you simply have to make some changes directly to the live site—even if it is only to implement upgrades that have already been tested out on the development server. If this is the case, then rather than allow users to browse a site under maintenance, visit the Maintenance mode page in the Development section, and select Put site into maintenance mode, provide a Maintenance mode message to display if the default one is not suitable, and get on with your work. Be very careful when working in maintenance mode because once you have logged out you are effectively locked out too. This is because, by default, only one user (that is the administrative user) can do anything on the site while it is offline. If you log off and try logging in again, you are no longer the administrative user; you are instead anonymous and are shown only the offline message: This is not very helpful if you do happen to be the site administrator; so Drupal allows the login page to be accessed as normal. Navigate to http://localhost/ drupal/user, and you will be able to log in as the administrator and use the site without hindrance. Make sure you know the administrator's password before going into maintenance mode. Everyone else is locked out until the site is no longer under maintenance. Logging and errors Go to Logging and errors in the DEVELOPMENT section of the Configuration overlay. This page provides a few options used to control how errors are displayed and logged: Error messages to display allows you to decide whether to write errors to the screen or not. While you are busy building the site, it's useful to view All messages in order to determine what has gone wrong and when. However, once it is time to go live you should change this to None for security reasons. Doing so prevents Drupal from displaying information to malicious users who might be able to use it in an attack on your site. The final setting, Database log entries to keep, at least to begin with, is sensible. You may wish to increase or decrease the number of records stored on the system depending on how much work you have to do in order to maintain the site properly. Remember that Drupal can properly maintain the site's event logs only if the cron jobs are being run regularly. Having only one setting to make is not that exciting, but once the site is live and messages are no longer visible through the pages, you can check the logs in the Reports section. Doing this on a regular basis is a good strategy to ensure that the site continues to run smoothly. Error messages, warnings, and so on are effectively windows into the operations of the site, and are indispensable tools.

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1374

article-image-creating-custom-wcm-workflow-group-using-alfresco-3

Packt

27 Sep 2010

13 min read

Creating a Custom WCM Workflow for a Group using Alfresco 3

Packt

27 Sep 2010

13 min read

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0
1990

article-image-basics-wordpress-and-jquery-plugin

Packt

27 Sep 2010

10 min read

The Basics of WordPress and jQuery Plugin

Packt

27 Sep 2010

10 min read

WordPress 3.0 jQuery Enhance your WordPress website with the captivating effects of jQuery. Enhance the usability and increase visual interest in your WordPress 3.0 site with easy-to-implement jQuery techniques Create advanced animations, use the UI plugin to your advantage within WordPress, and create custom jQuery plugins for your site Turn your jQuery plugins into WordPress plugins and share with the world Implement all of the above jQuery enhancements without ever having to make a WordPress content editor switch over into HTML view Read more about this book (For more resources on WordPress and jQuery, see here.) WordPress plugins overview So themes change the look of WordPress without affecting its functionality. But what if you want to change or add functionality? WordPress plugins allow easy modification, customization, and enhancement to a WordPress site. Instead of having to dig in to the main files and change the core programming of WordPress, you can add functionality by installing and activating WordPress plugins. The WordPress development team took great care to make it easy to create plugins using access points and methods provided by the WordPress' Plugin API (Application Program Interface). The best place to search for plugins is: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/. The following is a screenshot of the WordPress plugin directory's main page: (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge.) Once you have a plugin, it's a simple matter of decompressing the file (usually just unzipping it) and reading the included readme.txt file for installation and activation instructions. For most WordPress plugins, this is simply a matter of uploading the file or directory to your WordPress installation's wp-content/plugins directory and then navigating to the Administration | Plugins | Installed panel to activate it. The next screenshot shows the Plugins admin panel with the activation screen for the default Askimet, Hello Dolly, and new WordPress Importer plugins: So how does a WordPress plugin differ from a jQuery plugin? In theory and intent, not that much, but in practice, there are quite a few differences. Let's take a look at jQuery plugins. jQuery plugins overview jQuery has the ability to allow you to take the scripts that you've created and encapsulate them into the jQuery function object. This allows your jQuery code to do a couple of key things. First, it becomes more easily ported over to different situations and uses. Second, your plugin works as a function that can be integrated into larger scripts as part of the jQuery statement chain. The best place to browse for jQuery plugins is the jQuery plugins page (http://plugins.jquery.com/), as seen in the next screenshot: In addition to having jQuery already bundled, WordPress has quite a few jQuery plugins already bundled with it as well. WordPress comes bundled with Color, Thickbox as well as Form and most of the jQuery UI plugins. Each of these plugins can be enabled with the wp_enqueue_script either in the theme's header.php file or function.php file, in WordPress. In this article, we'll shortly learn how to enable a jQuery plugin directly in a WordPress plugin. Of course, you can also download jQuery plugins and include them manually into your WordPress theme or plugins. You'd do this for plugins that aren't bundled with WordPress, or if you need to amend the plugins in anyway. Yes, you've noticed there's no easy jQuery plugin activation panel in WordPress. This is where understanding your chosen theme and WordPress plugins will come in handy! You'll soon find you have quite a few options to choose from when leveraging jQuery. Now that we have an overview of what WordPress themes, plugins, and jQuery plugins are, let's learn how to take better advantage of them. The basics of a WordPress plugin The goal here is to show you the structure of a simple WordPress plugin and the basics of how to construct one. Understanding this, you can begin to write your own basic plugins and feel more confident looking through other people's plugins when assessing what kind of features they provide to your WordPress site and if you need to tweak anything for your jQuery enhancements. Even as simply and basically as we're going to work, you'll see how truly powerful WordPress plugins can be. Want to become a WordPress plugin rockstar? You can start off with, yet again, WordPress 2.7 Complete by April Hodge Silver and Hasin Hayder. There's a chapter on plugins that walks you through creating very useful simple plugins, as well as a more complex plugin that writes to the WordPress database. Beyond that, you'll want to check out WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide by Vladimir Prelovac. Don't let the title fool you, Vladimir will have you generating feature rich and dynamic WordPress plugins using WordPress' coding standards all explained with clear, step-by-step code. Working with plugins does require some experience with PHP. I'll keep this explanation fairly straightforward for non-PHP developers, and those of you with PHP experience should be able to see how to expand on this example to your advantage in WordPress. Just as with themes, WordPress plugins require a little structure to get started with them. There's no defined hierarchy for plugin files, but you do need, at the very least, a PHP file with a special comment up top so that WordPress can display it within the Plugin Management page. While there are some single-file plugins out there, such as the Hello Dolly plugin, which comes with your WordPress installation, you never know when you first start developing, the ways in which a plugin may grow. To be safe, I like to organize my plugins into a uniquely named folder. Again, like with themes, WordPress relies on the plugin directory's namespace, so uniqueness is of key importance! In the wp-content/plugins directory you can place a unique folder and inside that, create a .php file, and at the beginning of the file, inside the <?php ?> tags, include the following header information. Only the bold information is absolutely required. The rest of the information is optional and populates the Manage Plugins page in the Administration panel. <?php /* Plugin Name: your WordPress Plugin Name goes here Plugin URI: http://yoururl.com/plugin-info Description: Explanation of what it does Author: Your Name Version: 1.0 Author URI: http://yoururl.com */ //plugin code will go here ?> Make sure that you don't have any spaces before your <?php tag or after your ?> tag. If you do, WordPress will display some errors because the system will get some errors about page headers already being sent. Once you have your .php file set up in its own directory, inside your plugin directory, you can add a basic PHP function. You can then decide how you want to evoke that function, using an action hook or a filter hook. For example: <?php /* Plugin Name: your WordPress Plugin Name goes here Plugin URI: http://yoururl.com/plugin-info Description: Explanation of what it does Author: Your Name Version: 1.0 Author URI: http://yoururl.com */ function myPluginFunction(){ //function code will go here } add_filter('the_title', 'myPluginFunction'); //or you could: /*add_action('wp_head', 'myPluginFunction');*/ ?> If you didn't have wp_head or wp_footer in your theme, many plugins can't function, and you limit yourself to the plugins you can write. In my plugins, I mostly use wp_header and the init action hooks. Luckily, most filter hooks will work in your plugins as WordPress will run through them in The Loop. For the most part, you'll get the most work done in your plugin using the_title and the_content filter hooks. Each of these filter's hooks will execute your function when WordPress loops through those template tags in the loop. Want to know what filter and action hooks are available? The list is exhaustive. In fact, it's so immense that the WordPress codex doesn't seem to have them all documented! For the most complete listing available of all action and filter hooks, including newer hooks available in version 2.9.x, you'll want to check out Adam Brown's WordPress Hooks Database: http://adambrown.info/p/wp_hooks. Overwhelmed by the database? Of course, checking out Vladimir's WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide will get you started with an arsenal of action and filter hooks as well. You now understand the basics of a WordPress plugin! Let's do something with it. Project: Writing a WordPress plugin to display author bios As we've discussed, plugins can help expand WordPress and give it new functionality. However, we've seen that adding jQuery scripts directly to the theme and editing its template pages here and there will do the trick in most cases. But let's imagine a more complicated scenario using our modified default theme and the hypothetical client. While we tweaked the default theme, I figured that this client might want to have her site's focus be more journalism oriented, and thus, she'd want some attention drawn to the author of each post upfront. I was right, she does. However, there's a catch. She doesn't just want their WordPress nickname displayed; she'd prefer their full first and last name be displayed as well, as it's more professional. She'd also like their quick biography displayed with a link to their own URL and yet, not have that information "get in the way" of the article itself, or lost down at the bottom of the post. And here's the really fun part; she wants this change affected not just on this site, but across her network of genre-specific news sites, over 20 of them at last count (dang, I forgot she had so many sites! Good thing she's hypothetical). For this specific WordPress site, it's easy enough to go in and comment out the custom function we dealt with earlier: add in the_author tag and display it twice, passing each tag some parameters to display the first and last name. I can also add a tag to display the author's biography snippet from the user panel and URL (if they've filled out that information). Also, it's certainly easy enough to add a little jQuery script to make that bio div show up on a rollover of the author's name. However, having to take all that work and then re-copy it into 20 different sites, many of which are not using the default theme, and most of which have not had jQuery included into their theme, does sound like an unnecessary amount of work (to boot, the client has mentioned that she's deciding on some new themes for some of the sites, but she doesn't know which sites will get what new themes yet). It is an unnecessary amount of work. Instead of amending this theme and then poking through, pasting, testing, and tweaking in 20 other themes, we'll spend that time creating a WordPress plugin. It will then be easy to deploy it across all the client's sites, and it shouldn't matter what theme each site is using. Let's get started!

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2896

article-image-understanding-jquery-and-wordpress-together

Packt

27 Sep 2010

11 min read

Understanding jQuery and WordPress Together

Packt

27 Sep 2010

11 min read

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0
1836

article-image-installing-and-configuring-joomla-15

Packt

25 Sep 2010

7 min read

Installing and Configuring Joomla! 1.5

Packt

25 Sep 2010

7 min read

Building job sites with Joomla! A practical stepwise tutorial to build your professional website using Joomla! Build your own monster.com using Joomla! Take your job site to the next level using commercial Jobs! Extension Administrate and publish your Joomla! job site easily using the Joomla! 1.5 administrator panel and Jobs! Pro control panel interface Boost your job site ranking in search engines using Joomla! SEO Introduction You may have various approaches for building a jobsite, with job search and registration facilities for users and providing several services to your clients such as job posting, online application process, resume search, and so on. Joomla! is one of the best approaches and an affordable solution for building your jobsite, even if you are a novice to Joomla!. This is because Joomla! is a free, open source Content Management System (CMS) , which provides one of the most powerful web application development frameworks available today. These are all reasons for building a jobsite with Joomla!: It has a friendly interface for all types of users—designers, developers, authors, and administrators. This CMS is growing rapidly and improving since its release. Joomla! is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you're not an advanced user. Another advantage is that you need less time and effort to build a jobsite with Joomla!. You need to use a Joomla! jobsite extension to build your jobsite and you can use the commercial extension Jobs! because it's fully equipped to operate a jobsite, featuring tools to manage jobs, resumes, applications, and subscriptions. If you are looking for a jobsite such as Monster, Career Builder, a niche jobs listing such as Tech Crunch, or just posting job ads on your company site, Jobs! is an ideal solution. To know more about this extension, visit its official website http://www.instantphp.com/ Jobs! has two variations—Jobs! Pro and Jobs! Basic . The Jobs! Pro provides some additional features and facilities, which are not available in Jobs! Basic. You can use any one of them, depending upon your needs and budget. But if you need full control over your jobsite and more customization facilities, then Jobs! Pro is recommended. You can install Jobs! component and its modules easily, like any other Joomla! extension. You need to spend only a few minutes to install and configure Joomla! 1.5 and Jobs! Pro 1.3 or Jobs! Basic 1.0. It is a stepwise setup process. But first you must ensure that your system meets all the requirements that are recommended by developers. Prerequisites for installation of Joomla! 1.5 and Jobs! Joomla! is written in PHP and mainly uses MySQL database to store and manipulate information. Before installing Joomla! 1.5 and Jobs! extension, we need a server environment, that includes the following: Software/Application Minimum Requirement Recommended Version Website PHP 5 5.2 http//php.net MySQL 4.1 or above 5 http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html Apache 1.3 or above http://httpd.apache.org IIS 6 7 http://www.iis.net/ mod_mysql mod_xml mod_zlib You must ensure that you have the MySQL, XML, and zlib functionality enabled within your PHP installation. This is controlled within the php.ini file. Setting up a local server environment In order to run Joomla! properly, we need a server environment with pre-installed PHP and MySQL. In this case, you can use a virtual server or can choose other hosting options. But if you want to try out Joomla! on your own computer before using a remote server, we can set up a local server environment. To set up a server environment, we can use XAMPP solution. It comes equipped with Apache HTTP server, PHP, and MySQL. Installing these components individually is quite difficult and needs more time and effort. To install XAMPP, download the latest version of XAMPP 1.7.x from the Apache friends website: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html. Windows operating system users can install XAMPP for Windows in two different variations—self-extracting RAR archive and ZIP archive. If you want to use self-extracting RAR archive, first download the .exe file and then follow these steps: Run the installer file, choose a directory, and click on the Install button. After extracting XAMPP, the setup script setup_xampp.bat will start automatically. After the installation is done, click on Start All Programs | Apache Friends | XAMPP | XAMPP Control Pane|. Start Apache and MySQL by clicking on the Start buttons beside each item. If prompted by Windows Firewall, click on the Unblock button.For more information on installing XAMPP on Windows or troubleshooting, go to the Windows FAQs page: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/faqxampp- windows.html. If you are using Linux platform, download the compressed .tar.gz file and follow these steps for installation: Go to a Linux shell and log in as the system administrator root: su Extract the downloaded archive file to /opt: tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.7.3a.tar.gz -C /opt XAMPP is now installed in the /opt/lampp directory. To start XAMPP, call the command: /opt/lampp/lampp start You should now see something similar to the following on your screen: Starting XAMPP 1.7.3a... LAMPP: Starting Apache... LAMPP: Starting MySQL... LAMPP started. For more information on installing XAMPP on Linux or troubleshooting, go to the Linux FAQs page: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/faq-xampp-linux.html. If you want to use XAMPP in MAC operating system , download the .dmg file and follow these steps: Open the DMG-Image. Drag and drop the XAMPP folder into your Applications folder. XAMPP is now installed in the /Applications/XAMPP directory. To start XAMPP open XAMPP Control and start Apache and MySQL. After installation of XAMPP in a system, to test your installation, type the following URL in the browser: http://localhost/. You will see the XAMPP start page. Uploading installation packages and files to server Now, we need to copy or transfer Joomla! installation package files to server. Before copying the installation package, we must download Joomla_1.5.15-Stable-Full_ Package.zip from the webpage http://www.joomla.org/download.html, and then extract and unzip it. You can use WinZip or WinRAR to unzip these files. After unzipping the files, you have to copy files on your server root folder (for Apache, it is htdocs folder). If you are not using the XAMPP or local server environment, you need the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) software to transfer files to your server root folder, such as htdocs or wwwroot. The popular FTP software is FileZilla, which is absolutely free and available for different platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. You can get it from the website http://filezilla-project.org/. Creating database and user Before installing and configuring Joomla! and Jobs! extension, we also need to create a database and a database user. You can easily add a new database and any user by using phpMyAdmin in XAMPP server environment. To add a database, by using phpMyAdmin, you must follow the following steps: Type the address http://localhost/phpmyadmin in the web browser. The front page of phpMyAdmin will be displayed. Type a name for the database you want to create. For example, my_db in the Create new Database field and then click on the Create button to create the database. To be connected with the database, we need a user account. You can add a user account by clicking on the Privileges tab of phpMyAdmin. You will see all users' information. Click on Add a new User link of Privileges window. After clicking on the link, a new window will appear. Provide the required information in the Login Information section of this window and then click on the Go button. We have now completed the preparation stage of installing Joomla!.

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2041

article-image-oracle-bpm-suite-11gr1-creating-bpm-application

Packt

25 Sep 2010

7 min read

Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1: Creating a BPM Application

Packt

25 Sep 2010

7 min read

Getting Started with Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 – A Hands-On Tutorial Learn from the experts – teach yourself Oracle BPM Suite 11g with an accelerated and hands-on learning path brought to you by Oracle BPM Suite Product Management team members Offers an accelerated learning path for the much-anticipated Oracle BPM Suite 11g release Set the stage for your BPM learning experience with a discussion into the evolution of BPM, and a comprehensive overview of the Oracle BPM Suite 11g Product Architecture Discover BPMN 2.0 modeling, simulation, and implementation Understand how Oracle uses standards like Services Component Architecture (SCA) to simplify the process of application development Describes how Oracle has unified services and events into one platform Built around an iterative tutorial, using a real-life scenario to illustrate all the key features Full of illustrations, diagrams, and tips for developing SOA applications faster, with clear step-by-step instructions and practical examples Written by Oracle BPM Suite Product Management team members Read more about this book (For more resources on Oracle, see here.) The BPM Application consists of a set of related business processes and associated shared artifacts such as Process Participants and Organization models, User Interfaces, Services, and Data. The process-related artifacts such as Services and Data are stored in the Business Catalog. The Business Catalog facilitates collaboration between the various stakeholders involved in the development of the business process. It provides a mechanism for Process Developer (IT) to provide building blocks that can in turn be used by the process analyst in implementing the business process. Start BPM Studio using Start | Programs | Oracle Fusion Middleware 11.1.1.3 | Oracle JDeveloper 11.1.1.3. BPM Studio supports two roles or modes of process development. The BPM Role is recommended for Process Analysts and provides a business perspective with focus on business process modeling. The Default Role is recommended for Process Developers for refinement of business process models and generation of implementation artifacts to complete the BPM Application for deployment and execution. Tutorial: Creating SalesQuote project and modeling RequestQuote process This is the beginning of the BPM 11gR1 hands-on tutorial. Start by creating the BPM Application and then design the Sales Quote business process. Open BPM Studio by selecting the BPM Process Analyst role when you start JDeveloper or if JDeveloper is already open, select Preferences from the Tools menu and in the Roles section, select BPM Process Analyst. Go to File | New to launch the Application wizard. In the New Gallery window, select Applications in the Categories panel. Select BPM Application in the Items panel. Specify the Application Name —SalesQuoteLab; the folder name should also be set to SalesQuoteLab. Click on the Next button. Enter QuoteProcessLab for the Project Name. Click on the Finish button. Go to the View | BPM Project Navigator. The BPM Project Navigator opens up the QuoteProcessLab – BPM Project that you just created. A single BPM Project can contain multiple related business processes. Notice that the BPM Project contains several folders. Each folder is used to store a specific type of BPM artifact. The Processes folder stores BPMN business process models; the Activity Guide folder is used to store the process milestones; the Organization folder stores Organization model artifacts such as Roles and Organization Units; the Business Catalog folder stores Services and Data; the Simulation folder stores simulation models to capture what-if scenarios for the business process and the Resources folder holds XSLT data transformation artifacts. To create a new business process model, you need to right-click on Processes and select New | Process. This launches the Create BPMN Process wizard. Select From Pattern option and select the Manual Process pattern. Recall that the Sales Quote Process is instantiated when Enter Quote task gets assigned to the Sales Representative role. The Asynchronous Service and the Synchronous Service patterns are used to expose the BPMN process as a Service Provider. Click on the Next button. Specify the name for the Process—RequestQuoteLab. Click on the Finish button. This creates a RequestQuoteLab process with a Start Event (thin circle) and End Event (thicker circle) of type None with a User Task in between. The User Task represents a human step that is managed by the BPM run-time engine—workflow component. The Start Event of type None signifies that there is no external event triggering the process. The first activity after the Start Event creates the process instance. In addition, a default swim lane—Role, gets created. In BPM Studio, the swim lanes in the BPMN process point to logical roles. A logical role represents a process participant (user or group) and needs to be mapped to physical roles (LDAP users/groups) before the process is deployed. Right-click on the User Task step, select Properties, and specify the name Enter Quote Details for the step. Click on the OK button. The next step is to rename the default created role to SalesRep. Navigate to QuoteProcessLab—BPM Project node and select the Organization node underneath it. Right-click on the Organization node and select Open. This opens up the Organization pane. Highlight the default role named Role and use the pencil icon to edit it to be SalesRep. Click on the + sign to add the following roles—Approvers, BusinessPractices, and Contracts. The following screenshot shows the list of roles that you just created: Close the Organization window. Go back to the RequestQuoteLab—process model. The participant for the Enter Quote Details—User Task is now set to the SalesRep role. Ignore the yellow triangular symbol with the exclamation for now. It indicates that certain configuration information is missing for the activity. Right-click on the process diagram just below the SalesRep-Lane. Choose the Add Role option. Choose Business Practices from the list of options available. Click on the OK button. Open the View | Component Palette. Drag and drop a User Task from the Interactive Tasks section of the BPMN Component Palette. Note: The Interactive Tasks refers to a step that is managed by the workflow engine. The Assignees (Participants) represent the business users who need to carry out the Interactive Task. The associated Task (work to be performed) is shown in the inbox of the assignees (similar to Email Inbox) when the Interactive Task is triggered. The User Task is the simplest type of Interactive Task where the assignee of the task is set to a single role. The actual work is performed only when the Assignee executes on his Task. The Task is presented to the Assignee through a browser based worklist application. In BPM Studio, the Assignee is automatically set to the role associated with the swim lane into which the Interactive Task is dropped. Place this new User Task after the existing Enter Quote Details—User Task by hovering on the center of the connector until it turns blue and name it Business Practices Review. The connection lines are automatically created. Drag the new Business Practices Review—User Task to the Business Practices lane. The performer or assignee for the Business Practices Review—User Task is automatically set to Business Practices—role. Create two more lanes for Approvers and Contracts. Drag and drop three User Tasks on to the process diagram, one following the other, and name them Approve Deal, Approve Terms, and Finalize Contracts respectively. Pin the Approve Deal step to the Approvers Lane. Pin the other two User Tasks—Approve Terms and Finalize Contracts steps to the Contracts Lane. Finally add a Service Task right after the Finalize Contracts step from the BPM Component Palette and name it Save Quote. The modified diagram should look like the following:

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0
1621

article-image-installing-and-configuring-jobs-and-managing-sections-categories-and-articles-using-jo

Packt

25 Sep 2010

4 min read

Installing and Configuring Jobs! and Managing Sections, Categories, and Articles using Joomla!

Packt

25 Sep 2010

4 min read

Building job sites with Joomla! A practical stepwise tutorial to build your professional website using Joomla! Build your own monster.com using Joomla! Take your job site to the next level using commercial Jobs! Extension Administrate and publish your Joomla! job site easily using the Joomla! 1.5 administrator panel and Jobs! Pro control panel interface Boost your job site ranking in search engines using Joomla! SEO Read more about this book (For more resources on Joomla!, see here.) Joomla! is a popular content management system, so it is mainly used for managing content. You can manage content from the Joomla! backend administrator panel. To go to this area, type in your web browser, the address of the server directory where the administrator folder is located. For example, if you have installed Joomla! in the joomla directory of local server, then the address is:http://localhost/ joomla/administrator. You will see the Joomla! Administration Login screen in your browser window. Log into the administrator panel as Super Administrator. By default, the username is admin. Then provide the password that you have created while you were configuring. Before adding an article as content, you must create a section and category for it. You can organize your content by using sections and categories because Joomla! uses a three-tier organization level for articles—Section | Category | Article. Any section contains one or more categories, and each category may have articles assigned to it. One article can only be in one category and section. You can easily add new sections, edit existing sections, publish or unpublish any section, and copy or delete sections from the Section Manager window. To manage sections, click on Contents | Section Manager (as shown in the following screenshot): The process of managing categories is quite similar to managing sections. You just need to click on Contents | Category Manager to go to Category Manager window and then manage your categories. After creating section and category, to add a new article from admin panel, click on Contents | Article Manager (as shown in the following screenshot): To add a new article, click on the New button in the Article Manager window and write your article with a title in Article: [New] window WYSISWYG editor area. You must also define the section and category for this article—which you have created earlier—and save this content. If you want to edit an article, select the article, click on Edit, and then make any changes in the article in Article: [Edit] window. Article Manager enables you to publish or unpublish an article. You can send an article to trash, copy an article, move an article, and so on. Just select an article and then click on the corresponding buttons. Managing extensions Components, modules, plugins, templates, and languages are collectively known as extensions. Each of these extensions is used for specific functions: Components: It is the largest and the most complex of the extension types. When a Joomla! web page is being loaded, a component is called to render the main page body. For example, the component com_banners displays a banner in a web page. Components are divided into two parts—for the administrator and for the frontend website. Modules: It is used for page rendering and doesn't need to be linked to anything. It can contain only static HTML, image, or text. For example, mod_mainmenu and mod_banners. Plugins: These were previously known as mambots. Using a plugin allows a developer to change the way their code behaves depending upon which plugins are installed to react to an event. Templates: It is basically the design of your Joomla! website. With a template, you can change the look and the feel of your website. Templates have certain fields in which components and modules are shown. You can easily create and customize any template file. Languages: Languages can be packaged in two ways—either as a core package or as an extension package—and allow both the Joomla! core as well as third-party components and modules to be localized or internationalized. To know more about extensions, go to the Joomla! documentation page: http://docs.joomla.org/Joomla!_Extensions_Defined. You can easily manage extensions by using the Extensions menu. For example, to install or uninstall any extension, click on the menu Extension | Install/Uninstall; to manage modules, click on the Module Manager; to manage plugins, click on the Plugin Manager; to manage templates, click on the Template Manager; and to manage language, click on the Language Manager.

0
0
1008

Packt

24 Sep 2010

9 min read

What's New in Moodle 2.0

Packt

24 Sep 2010

9 min read

Nine years ago, in Australia, a Computer Science graduate named Martin Dougiamas was trialing a web tool he'd developed to help teachers create lessons online. Inspired by his own experiences with the outback "School of the Air". Martin's Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment offered tutors a way to connect remotely with their students in a collaborative and supportive workspace. Did any of us foresee back then just how global a phenomenon Moodle would become? Now used by over 31 million students in over 44 thousand sites in over 200 countries, Moodle has truly changed the face of learning. With improved access to the internet, and with commercial companies being quick to spot a potential money-earner, many such Learning Management Systems have arisen since then. What makes Moodle special, however, is the fact that it has remained as Open Source technology. Anyone can use Moodle; everyone can make Moodle better. While offcial Moodle Partners will give you peace of mind if you want Moodle installed at your establishment, you are also entirely free to go for it alone. If you need advice, whether of a pedagogical or technical nature, ask in the forums at https://moodle.org/ where the doors are never closed. If you spot an error or a bug, then someone (perhaps even you) will fix it. If you have an idea for a "plug-in" that might be useful for other Moodlers worldwide, you can put forth your suggestion to the community. The world changes constantly and Moodle changes with it. Since its official "birth" in 2002, Moodle has gone through several full versions and a number of stable releases in between. You can even catch up on all the bug fixes and minor tweaks by downloading the weekly stable "+" build. This year, however, sees the advent of the latest, biggest, and most enhanced version: Moodle 2.0. It's a new "take" on an established package. It is rich with new features, and it retains all that was good from Moodle 1.9, blended with new ideas and improvements, suggested and developed by the huge Open Source community. Moodle 2.0 has been a long time in the making. Its arrival became somewhat of an in-joke on the forums of www.moodle.org. Over the last couple of years, the answer to many a query would has been "You can't do that yet, but you will be able to in Moodle 2.0" prompting one Moodle Partner to comment that alongside better navigation, cleaner appearance, more controlled activities, enhanced modules, and improved interaction, Moodle 2.0 was expected to "sort out wars and world famine". Well, they haven't quite managed that, (Although there's still time for Moodle 3.0!), but there are suffcient new features in Moodle 2 to warrant a close look. Looks cleaner, moves faster Previous versions of Moodle came with pre-installed themes, such as Cornfower or Wood, making an average Moodle site easily recognizable when meandering along the Internet. The Downloads tab on http://moodle.org/ links to a Themes section offering an array of other contributed "skins" for Moodle to enhance its appearance. Despite this, users still complained Moodle looked "clunky" in contrast with other, commercial Learning Management Systems. In recent years, the adoption of Moodle has broadened from universities and schools to major charities, businesses, and non-governmental organizations. They want integration with their websites and a clean, professional look. Moodle 2.0 has done away with the previous themes and will ultimately include 20 brand new themes, of which Boxxie , as seen in the following screenshot, is one: In the following screenshot you'll note that the Navigation block on the left has been docked to the side— this is a totally new way of moving around in Moodle 2.0. We have the option of saving space and docking — or of expanding the block as with the calendar to the right: Within a course the Navigation block will show links to individual sections and expand to the activities in those sections. It is now possible to rename the topic sections so that these names appear in the links rather than numbered topics. If you look at the following screenshot, we are in a course French for Beginners and Introduction is actually topic 0 and First Steps in French is topic 1. Note also that the link at the top My Home takes the user straight to their MyMoodle page. A new way of managing your content In Moodle 1.x, the Resource module offered the teacher in a course the ability to upload their documents, create web pages in Moodle, or even display a directory of materials. Users, who had particularly large files, say SCORM packages or multimedia for example, were able to upload via FTP once they knew the directory number for their course and were granted the rights to do so. Moodle 2.0 does away with most of this, using a different philosophy for file management. It has more functionality and is more secure; however, for some it might initially appear more complex to manoeuvre. Compare and contrast the Add a resource… drop-down in Moodle 2.0 (on the left) and Moodle 1.9 on the right: Note the simpler, clearer terms: File (instead of link to a file or web site) Folder (instead of Display a directory) Page (instead of Compose a web page/Compose a text page) URL (instead of link to a file or web site) While you are still able to upload all your word-processed documents and Powerpoint presentations, you can also easily embed media from other sites such as http://www.youtube.com/ or http://www.flickr.com/ from the new text editor (based on the popular tinyMCE editor as used in WordPress for example). Here's a screenshot of the so-called File Picker where you can see that, alongside files already in Moodle and files you might want to upload, there is a link and the facility to search YouTube: More places to have your say With the addition of a Comments facility in Moodle 2.0 it is now easier than ever for users to give feedback, voice their opinions and generally make their presence felt in your online community. A Comments block may be included on your course page to give the students the opportunity to rate the course or suggest improvements, as shown in the following screenshot: We get far more control over the location and positioning of blocks in Moodle 2.0. Due to this we're not just restricted to having the Comments block (or others) on our course page. Most screens will allow us to add a block now, so we could for example have comments on the diffculty of Quiz questions, or comments on the suitability of a particular uploaded resource. The same commenting feature has also been applied to the standard Moodle blog, such that users may now, at last, comment on each others' entries. Existing activities updated and improved A lot of time and effort has gone into making existing Moodle modules such as the Wiki, Quiz, and, Workshop easier to manage and more user-friendly. The latter are two of my favorites, both very powerful yet not immediately intuitive, particularly to new users. While I found the results they gave worth the initial hours spent figuring out how to set them up, I also found that many teachers felt daunted by their complexity. As a trainer I always felt the need to apologize before I showed people how to use the Quiz, and I only went through the Workshop settings on request from advanced users. Open Source, by its nature, depends on collaboration, and several Moodle developers and enthusiasts have made significant changes to the Quiz and Workshop modules – in fact, the Workshop module has been virtually rewritten for Moodle 2.0, so if you shied away from it before, now is definitely the time to give it another chance. This has improved the display and the search facility of the Quiz question bank, making it not only easier to locate and reuse previously made questions but also simplifying the process needed to create a new quiz from scratch — making the Moodle Quiz a realistic option for a new user to tackle without fear of confusion. The changes to the Workshop now give us a clear view of the different stages of the assessment process: Moodle has always had a Wiki module but with limited functionality. Some users preferred alternative wikis such as the OUwiki or NWiki instead. Indeed, http://moodle.org/ itself chose Mediawiki for its comprehensive and collaborative documentation. Moodler. The new, improved wiki for Moodle 2.0, incorporates features from OUwiki and NWiki and we'll investigate how they can enhance our students' learning experience. Moodle's built-in blog feature has always been very limited, for example, offering no comment facility. Attached as it is to a user's profile meant that a student could only have one blog, rather than a number of blogs according to which course they were in. Again, for this reason, blogging Moodlers around the world looked elsewhere — such as to WordPress or to the Open University's OUBlog. Moodle's blog is now much enhanced. If you have an external blog you can now import its posts (based on a feed URL and on tags) and use it within Moodle. You can now also associate an entry to a particular course, attach more than one file to your entry, have a proper RSS feed, and (with the Comments API mentioned earlier) make it possible for permitted users finally to give you their thoughts on your thoughts! Another successful vehicle for the exchanging of ideas is the Messaging block. This block is controversial in some circles, such as in schools with younger learners, where some consider it a distraction of the MSN type while others see it as an essential means of instant communication. The messaging block has been revamped and is now event-driven, allowing users to control which messages they receive and how.

0
0
3398

article-image-generating-content-wordpress-top-plugins

Packt

24 Sep 2010

4 min read

Generating Content in WordPress Top Plugins

Packt

24 Sep 2010

4 min read

WordPress Top Plugins Find and install the best plugins for generating and sharing content, building communities and generating revenue Learn WordPress plugin basics for both Macs and PCs Focuses exclusively on 100% free and open plugins Screenshots for each plugin Organized by complexity to install and manage Search Terms for automatic installation of plugins Instructions on configuring and setting up the more complex plugins Read more about this book (For more resources on WordPress see here.) GD Star Rating By Milan Petrovic (http://dev4press.com/) Why it's awesome: Quickly adds ratings and ranking to your blog posts Why it was picked: Super easy to get running, offers lots of customizations Manual Install URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gd-star-rating/ Automatic Install search term: GD Star Rating Geek level: Newbie Configuration location: Top Navigation | GD Star Rating Used in: Posts, comments, pages If you want to know what your readers like, then you need to allow them to quickly rate your individual posts and rank other readers' comments; GD Star Rating does exactly this. Don't be fooled by its deceptively simple outer shell. Those rating stars are backed by a massive administrative area that allows you to customize virtually every aspect of how a user rates your blog's content. For example, you can change how the stars look, how many times to allow users to vote, where to display ratings, and much, much more. In addition to being crazily customizable, GD Star Rating also offers awesome analytics on who's rating what, which items are popular, and virtually any other data point you could imagine. Fixing the default ratings Out of the box, GD Star Rating will include both a 10 Star Rating bar and a Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down ranking scale. Obviously, a post doesn't need both, and 10 Star Rating will work just fine for all of our blog posts. The Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down will be great for our comments. To access GD Star Rating's main settings, visit GD Star Rating | Settings. Turning off Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down on posts Uncheck the checkbox next to For Individual Posts and For Individual Pages. Turning off Star Ratings on comments Uncheck the checkbox next to For Comments for Posts and For Comments for Pages. Better Tag Cloud By Nicolas Kuttler (http://www.nkuttler.de/) Why it's awesome: It's not really awesome, just wonderfully practical and create a nicely customizable TagCloud Why it was picked: Updated often, flexibility of placement, color customizations Manual Install URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nktagcloud/ Automatic Install search term: Better Tag Cloud Geek level: Newbie Configuration location: Settings | Better Tag Cloud Used in: Posts, pages, widgets The Tag Cloud widget that comes with WordPress is very simple. Luckily, Nicolas Kuttler took the initiative to create a wonderful replacement. Not only does Better Tag Cloud give you a new widget, it also lets you include your tag cloud in posts and pages. Use the shortcode [nktagcloud] to include Better Tag Cloud in a post or page. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) By Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (http://mitcho.com/) Why it's awesome: Search engine optimization and increasing average time on site for you visitors Why it was picked: Accuracy of the relation algorithm Manual Install URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/ Automatic Install search term: YARPP Geek level: Newbie Configuration location: Settings | Related Posts (YARPP) Used in: Posts Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) helps your readers and the search engine bots to find other posts on your website that are similar to the one they are currently reading. Once installed and activated, the YARPP plugin is virtually done. Check out one of your blog posts, and see if you like the results. Below the article will be a list of similar posts to the one you're reading. While out of the box YARPP will satisfy 80 percent of the people, you should check out the YARPP settings, as it offers a ton of configuration options.

0
0
1205

Packt

24 Sep 2010

6 min read

Generating Content in WordPress Top Plugins—A Sequel

Packt

24 Sep 2010

6 min read

WordPress Top Plugins Find and install the best plugins for generating and sharing content, building communities and generating revenue Learn WordPress plugin basics for both Macs and PCs Focuses exclusively on 100% free and open plugins Screenshots for each plugin Organized by complexity to install and manage Search Terms for automatic installation of plugins Instructions on configuring and setting up the more complex plugins Read more about this book (For more resources on WordPress see here.) CForms II By Oliver Seidel (http://deliciousdays.com) Why it's awesome: Super easy to create engaging and secure forms Why it was picked: Popularity and ease of use Manual Install URL: http://deliciousdays.com Automatic Install search term: CFORMS Geek level: Webmaster Configuration location: Top Navigation | cforms II Used in: Posts, widgets, pages WordPress lacks any methods for creating a form (beyond the comment form) to collect visitor questions, contact info, or any other type of communication data. CForms makes creating custom forms as easy as pointing and clicking. Forms can be embedded throughout your blog, including widgets, posts, and pages. CForms administration CForms is a very powerful and somewhat complex plugin, so let's take a moment to get familiar with the Administration section. Form Action is the somewhat hard-to-find Admin Actions. You will use this expandable menu to save your changes, delete, create, and back up your forms. Form Selection is how you switch between your different forms. Form Name is where you will define your form's name. This name will be used when you want to insert this form into a blog post, page, or widget. Fields are the individual inputs your form will contain. Kind of Field allows you to define a field as either a single line of text, multi-lined text, multiple-choice, captchas, file uploader, and a lot more. Add New Field will insert a new field into your form. Modifying the default form Once inside the CForms Administration, located at Settings | CForms II, you will see your "default form". This default form is the basic information needed to create a "Contact Us" form on your blog, including the field's name, e-mail, website, and message. Click the Field Sort Order icon, and drag it to reorder the field to any other position. Use the Default Value icon to specify what the field's default value should be, as well as mouse over values and error messages. Use the Delete this Field icon to remove a field from your form. Adding your form to a page, post, or widget CForms can be inserted into pages, posts, and widgets. However, the widget version is awfully wide and will most likely not look right in your sidebar. At the time of writing, there is no apparent way to modify this. Once inside the page or post editor, you will find a new icon added to your "Descriptions" toolbar. Once you click the CForms icon, you will need to select which form you would like to include. The drop-down box will contain all of the forms you currently have active. If you would rather use the coding method to insert your form, use the WP tag  or the PHP tag <?php insert_cform("my form name"); ?>. Advanced CForms customizations While CForms might not be the easier form/mailer plugin available, it is hands down the most flexible. Make sure to delve into the additional options towards the bottom of the Form Manager. File upload settings If you will be using the File Upload field, you will need to provide some additional server information for it to work properly. Specifically, you will need to define where your file should be uploaded to, the maximum file sizes, and what type of files are allowed to be uploaded. Messages, text, and button label Customize your buttons, error messages, and text non-fictions for a given form. Core Form Admin / e-mail options Inside the Core Form Admin, you will be able to turn on and off the ability to track submissions in the RSS feed, set redirection rules, set start and end dates when a form will be shown. Admin e-mail message options Configure the e-mail message that will be sent to the administrator, once a user submits a form—including setting which e-mail address to send to, the header and footer html, and the from e-mail address. Auto confirmation Automatically send your visitor a confirmation e-mail, once they submit a form by clicking the Activate Auto confirmation link. Through this option, you will be able to configure the subject and message to send, the moment a form is submitted. Multi-part / multi-page forms Create multiple page forms by activating the Multi-part form option. Once activated, the Multi-part forms panel will allow you to define what step the current form in your process is, along with the ability to add back and next buttons. Tell-A-Friend form support The Tell-A-Friend field must be activated before you can leverage it. Once activated, you will have a new field type called "tell-a-friend". This "field" is actually multiple fields that are required to tell a friend about a given web page. WP comment feature You can actually replace WordPress' comment system with CForms. This might be helpful if you would like to customize the fields that a user can submit on a comment, or if you want the user to be able to send the author an e-mail opposed to a public comment. Third-party read-notification support CForm offers integration with notification services readnotify.com and didtheyreadit.com to notify you if a user reads your e-mail. These services might cause your e-mails to be triggered as spam. MapPress—Google maps By Chris Richardson (http://wphostreviews.com) Why it's awesome: Easily hack together some neat mashups on Google's dime Why it was picked: Popularity, ease of setup Manual Install URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mappress-google-maps-for-wordpress/ Automatic Install search term: Mappress Geek level: Newbie Configuration location: Settings | MapPress Used in: Posts, pages MapPress makes it easy to insert custom Google Maps into your blog. Once installed, you will have the option to add multiple locations by address or lat/long. You will need a Google Maps API-key, which can be obtained from http://bit.ly/gmap-api. Google requires users who customize maps to have an API key. This allows them to track usage and ensure that people are not using Google Maps outside the 'Terms and Conditions'. If you do not have a need for customizing the content on the map, then you could always bypass installing this plugin and use the embed code directly from Google Maps. Adding a map to a post or page You will now have a new panel titled MapPress during the editing or creation of a post/page. The MapPress panel is where you define the size of your map, and the specific points of interest.

0
0
856

article-image-creating-channel-moving-website-expressionengine

Packt

23 Sep 2010

7 min read

Creating Channel for Moving a Website to ExpressionEngine

Packt

23 Sep 2010

7 min read

Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2 A step-by-step guide to ExpressionEngine: the web-publishing system used by top designers and web professionals everywhere Learn all the key concepts and terminology of ExpressionEngine: channels, templates, snippets, and more Use RSS to make your content available in news readers including Google Reader, Outlook, and Thunderbird Manage your ExpressionEngine website, including backups, restores, and version updates Written in an easy-to-follow step-by-step style, with plenty of examples and exercises Read more about this book (For more resources on ExpressionEngine, see here.) Introducing Ed & Eg Ed & Eg are fictional financial advisors in Anytown, USA. They have a small website written in static HTML/CSS that describes their services and how to get in touch with them. Their website currently consists of six HTML pages, one CSS styling file, and a handful of images. Although relatively simple, neither Ed nor Eg are familiar with HTML code, so they tend not to update their website. Although this has been fine for them up to now, they want to start reaching out and interacting with existing and potential customers through their website and they have picked ExpressionEngine for the task. Soon they will see what a good choice they have made! To download their website, you can either visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and select this book from the drop-down list for the code files, or visit http://www.leonardmurphy.com/book2. Extract the EdEg directory into any directory on your computer. Once extracted, you can view the website by opening the index.html file in your browser. If the pages appear unstyled, you may not have extracted the files first. Although you can open the individual files from within the compressed directory, they will not be styled and the links will not work. The website design was adapted from a design called Pluralism from http://www.freecsstemplates.org/. The design itself is released for free under the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.5, and you can download the original design (as well as many other free CSS designs) from their website. Deciding upon an approach There are three basic ways in which you could approach converting this site into ExpressionEngine. You could use a third-party add-on such as Structure (http://buildwithstructure.com/) that is designed specifically to help maintain static pages in ExpressionEngine. This can be especially useful when dealing with multiple tiers of static content. However, since this is not part of the built-in ExpressionEngine functionality, this article does not use this method. You could put the page layout code into templates, but put the main text of each page into a channel and then use the {exp:channel:entries} tag in your templates to display the page content. You could put both the page layout code and the main text of each page into templates and not use channels at all. The last option, leaving the content of each page in a template, is actually a good approach in certain circumstances: If there are only a handful of static pages, it might be less work and less complication to keep the static content in templates, rather than creating a channel to hold the content. If each static page has its own look and feel, then keeping each page in a separate template allows more flexibility between pages. If you are comfortable editing templates whenever you want to change the content of the static pages, then keeping the content in templates will work fine. (However, if you plan to have someone else update the content, having them edit the content in a channel is easier for them and a less risky task for you than letting them edit the template). Since Ed & Eg's static pages have a consistent look and feel, and Ed & Eg are not completely comfortable editing HTML themselves, using a channel for the page content is a good solution. With each website page in the current static website as its own channel entry, Ed & Eg will be able to change the wording of a page easily by editing the corresponding entry, while the more complicated HTML that builds the page will be out of their sight. Note that in this article, we will not be converting the Frequently Asked Questions page. Designing and building your channel Creating a new channel for your website involves the same basic steps each time. These steps can be completed in any order and you will often find this to be an iterative process: You can optionally create custom statuses, custom categories, and/or custom fields for your new channel You have to create the channel that will hold the new content You have to populate the channel with some content You have to create (or modify) templates that will display the content Let's begin! Custom statuses Each entry in ExpressionEngine can, by default, be marked as open or closed. An open entry means that the entry is visible on your website, whereas a closed entry means the entry is not visible. It is possible, however, to create more than these two statuses. You can use custom statuses to separate certain entries from others (such as the Agile Records website uses a custom status of Featured to identify which band to feature on the front-page). You can also use a custom status to build a workflow, for example, a draft custom status to indicate an entry that has been written, but needs someone else to review before being marked as open and appearing on the website. At this point in the design process, there is no reason for Ed & Eg's website channel to have custom statuses so the included Statuses status group (which includes open and closed statuses) will suffice. Categories Each channel in ExpressionEngine can also be associated with a category group. Once a channel has a category group, each entry in that channel can then be assigned to one or more categories in that group. Categories provide a natural but powerful way to organize your content, enabling you to group entries that are in the same category together and thereby encourage visitors to click-through to more of your content that interests them. Categories can also be used, such as status groups, to identify certain entries and do something different with them in your templates. The Agile Records example site uses categories to identify Staff Bios in the about channel and display them in their own section on the About page. For Ed & Eg's website, there are only a few static pages, so there is no reason to use categories. Custom fields As an example, say you have a channel for recipes. You could have a custom field for the description of the dish, a field for the ingredients, a field for the preparation steps, a field for the nutritional information, and an image field for a photo of the finished dish. You can create a field for whatever information you want to store in your channel. That said, not every channel needs its own set of custom fields. Different channels will often have similar content (for example, an introduction, the content itself, and an image). When this is the case, using the same field group for more than one channel works very well and reduces the amount of administrative overhead. By default, the blank installation of ExpressionEngine does not include any custom field groups, so at least one must be created in order to build a channel. For Ed & Eg's website, two custom fields will be ideal—one to contain the text of the page and one for the image that appears at the top left on some pages. Although the picture is a static image of coins right now, creating it as a custom field will give Ed & Eg the flexibility to have a different image on different pages, without having to edit the HTML code. Do not worry about second-guessing ahead of time all the fields that you might need. While it is true that we may one day need a heading 6 and a text 6, they can always be added when the need arises. So now that we know what custom fields we want to create, how do we create them?

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article-image-tips-and-tricks-working-jquery-and-wordpress

Packt

23 Sep 2010

10 min read

Tips and Tricks for Working with jQuery and WordPress

Packt

23 Sep 2010

10 min read

WordPress 3.0 jQuery Enhance your WordPress website with the captivating effects of jQuery. Enhance the usability and increase visual interest in your WordPress 3.0 site with easy-to-implement jQuery techniques Create advanced animations, use the UI plugin to your advantage within WordPress, and create custom jQuery plugins for your site Turn your jQuery plugins into WordPress plugins and share with the world Implement all of the above jQuery enhancements without ever having to make a WordPress content editor switch over into HTML view Read more about this book (For more resources on WordPress and jQuery, see here.) The following are the tips and tricks required for working with jQuery and WordPress. Keep a code arsenal A "snippet collection" or, what I call my "code arsenal" will go a long way to help you out, not just with jQuery and WordPress code, but also with the general HTML markup and even CSS solutions you create, not to mention any other code language you work in. I'm terrible at remembering syntax for code, markup, and CSS. I often know what I need, but can never quite recall exactly how it's supposed to be typed. I used to spend hours going through various stylesheets, markup, and codes from previous projects to copy into my current project as well as googling (and "re-googling") web pages that had samples of the syntax I needed. If you often find yourself in a similar situation, using the Snippets or Clip features that are usually available in good HTML/Code editors will free you from this mundane (and very time consuming) task. You simply type or paste the WordPress template tags, functions, PHP code, key CSS rules, and jQuery functions (and any other code syntax, whatever you find you need to use the most), into the Snippets or Clips panel available in your editor, and the application saves it for you, for future use. As you work on different projects, you'll come up with solutions that you'll probably want to use again in the future, say, a set of CSS rules for unordered lists that make a nice gallery view, or a very clever use of two jQuery functions together. Every time you create something you think may come in handy (and a lot of it will come in handy again), be sure to save it right then and there, for future reference. Good editors such as Dreamweaver, HTML-Kit, and Coda usually have the ability to organize snippets and keep them logically grouped so they're easy to access. Some editors will even let you assign custom "key shortcuts" and/or drag-and-drop to your clips right into your working file. How easy is that? Free your arsenal Once you discover how handy this is, you might want to have your arsenal available to other programs you work with, especially if you switch between multiple editors and authoring environments. I suggest you invest in a multi- paste/clip board application that lets you save and organize your code snippets. When I was on a PC, I used a great little app called Yankee Clipper 3 (which is free and is available at http://www.intelexual.com/products/YC3/), and now on the Mac, I use iPaste (which has a modest price; go to http://www.iggsoftware.com/ipaste/). In addition to having your arsenal handy from any application, being able to go back through the last 10 or so items you copied to the clip board is a real time saver when you're working on a project. Your arsenal on-the-go Last, I find I like to take most of my arsenal with me. If you use a handheld device or have a phone with a note app that lets you categorize and search for notes (especially the one that will let you sync from your desktop or a web service), you'll probably find it useful to keep some or all of your arsenal in it so you can easily look up syntax from your arsenal at any time. I occasionally freelance at places that require me to use one of their computers and not my laptop, so having access to my arsenal on my device is very useful. Palm's native note app suited me great in this capacity for years and years; I now keep a large part of my arsenal in Google docs and use a little desktop app called NoteSync, which lets you write and view Google docs notes quickly (they'll have an Android app out soon, but in the meantime I use Gdocs on my Android device to see my notes). I have many friends who swear by EverNote's system (though, their mobile app only works offline on the iPhone and not on Android—as of yet). Once all your often used and creative one-off solutions are all located in a convenient (hopefully categorized and key-word-searchable) place, you'll be amazed at the amount of speed your development picks up and how much more relaxing it is. jQuery tips and tricks for working in WordPress Let's start-off with some of my favorite jQuery tips and tricks, before focusing on WordPress.There are also a few nuggets that will help you speed up your jQuery development. Try to use the latest version of jQuery This is one of the drawbacks to using the bundled WordPress version: it may get a little behind the current version of jQuery until the next version of WordPress comes out. I'm all for staying on top of the current version as jQuery's top goals for version releases are not just to provide new functionality, but continually streamline and improve the performance and speed of the existing functionality. If the latest version of jQuery available on CDN is greater than the version that's bundled, be sure to deregister jQuery first or restrict your newer version with the if else statements, so it loads on the front end of the site on required pages only. Otherwise, you may create problems with plugins using the bundled version of WordPress. Stay current with the Google CDN The best way to stay current is to simply use Google's CDN.There are additional advantages to loading up from Google's CDN instead for your project's hosted server. Instead of having to load JavaScript's, libraries and assets one by one from your server, your site can simultaneously load the main library from the Google CDN in addition to other local jQuery scripts and collateral. The bonus is that jQuery will be cached for users who've visited other sites that load it up from Google's CDN. Stay in No Conflict mode The great thing about WordPress is that a site can have so many people contributing to it in lots of different ways: writing content, working on the theme, and adding WordPress plugins. One of the worst things about WordPress is that so many people can easily contribute who knows what to a site, depending on their admin status, some other collaborator could add to them, or what plugins they could install. Staying in No Conflict mode is a must for WordPress. This in conjunction with using the wp_enque_script to load in WordPress will ensure that jQuery doesn't get "pushed out" if anyone loads up any other plugin that uses say MooTools or Scriptaculous, or even just an older version of jQuery. It's easy to stay in noConflict mode. Just use jQuery instead of the shortcut dollar sign ($) in front of your scripts. jQuery('.selector').function(); Make sure other scripts in the theme or plugin use the Script API If you're using a theme or a plugin from a third party, take a look through the theme's header.php file or the plugin's PHP pages and double-check that all scripts have been loaded in using the register and wp_enqueu_script methods. I've had a few instances that were rather frustrating and caused some hair-pulling, as we tried to figure out why my jQuery scripts were not working or wondering how I "broke" them porting them over to the live site. Turns out, the live site had a plugin installed that my sandbox site didn't, and you guessed it, that plugin was including an older version of jQuery and a custom script file using hard-coded script tags instead of the wp_enqueue_script method. Once this was figured out and straightened up, setting everything into noConflict mode, everything worked fine again! Check your jQuery syntax This one always gets me. You write up a nifty little jQuery chain, add a few tweaks to it, and the darn thing just stops working. And you know it's right! Well, at least, you think it's right. Right? This is where a great code editor comes in handy. You'll want some nice find features that let you step through and look at each returned find, as well as let you run a find not just on the whole document, but on individual selections. I like to select the just the "offending chain" and run the following find features on it to see what comes up. Colons and semicolons Do a find for : (colons); you'll probably find a few that are accidentally set up as ; (semicolons) in your function's various object parameters, or you may have typed a colon where a semicolon should have been there. Closing parenthesis I'll also run a find on closing parenthesis, ), and make sure each one that comes up is part of a continuing chain or the end of the chain marked with a;. Mismatched double and single quotes Last, a quick check for matched-up single and double quotes sometimes shows me where I've messed up. Panic's Coda lets you place in "wild cards" into the find so a search for "*' or '*" usually turns up a pesky problem. Most good code editors have color-coded syntax, which really helps in recognizing when something isn't right with your syntax, such as not having a closing quote mark at all or parenthesis. But, the issues above are tricky as they'll still often display as proper color coded syntax, so you don't know until you run your script that something's wrong. Use Firefox and Firebug to help with debugging Firebug has a feature called "console logging". This is one of many great features of Firebug in my opinion. For years I often resorted to using JavaScript's "alert" statement to try and show me what was going on "inside" my work but the Firebug console handles so much more than that. This is really useful because sometimes you have to debug a "live" site and setting up JavaScript alerts is a little risky as you may confuse visitors to the site. Using Firebug's console logging eliminates that. First up, there's the console.log and console.info statements which you can add to your jQuery scripts to pass info to and have a plethora of useful (and sometimes not-so-useful, but interesting) information about your script returned. console.profile and console.time are great for measuring how fast you scripts are being processed by the browser. For a complete overview of everything Firebug's console can do, check out: http://www.getfirebug.com/logging.

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2322

article-image-using-templates-display-channel-content-expressionengine

Packt

23 Sep 2010

7 min read

Using Templates to Display Channel Content in ExpressionEngine

Packt

23 Sep 2010

7 min read

Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2 A step-by-step guide to ExpressionEngine: the web-publishing system used by top designers and web professionals everywhere Learn all the key concepts and terminology of ExpressionEngine: channels, templates, snippets, and more Use RSS to make your content available in news readers including Google Reader, Outlook, and Thunderbird Manage your ExpressionEngine website, including backups, restores, and version updates Written in an easy-to-follow step-by-step style, with plenty of examples and exercises Read more about this book (For more resources on ExpressionEngine, see here.) Creating templates To start with, build two templates: one for the CSS stylesheet and one that contains the HTML that defines the page structure and brings in your channel content. Since the CSS template will be used all over your website, it makes sense to put this in a separate template group called includes (which you will create). For the page itself, use the index template in the site template group. In the control panel, click on Design | Templates | Template Manager from the top menu. Then select the New Group button, located above the list of existing template groups. Call the new template group includes. Do not duplicate a group and do not make the index template your site's home page. Click Submit. Back on the Template Management screen, make sure the includes template group is selected, and then click on New Template. Call the new template site_css and select a Template Type of CSS. Leave the radio button checked to create an empty template and click Create and Edit. From the Ed & Eg site that you downloaded and extracted earlier, open style.css in a text editor such as Notepad. Copy and paste the entire file into the includes/site_css template and click on Update. Within the stylesheet, there are several references to images in the image directory. For the style to render properly, you will also need to upload all the images in the /images sub-directory (including money.jpg) to the /images sub-directory on your website. After uploading all the images, you will also need to update the paths in the stylesheet to point to this sub-directory. Within the site_css template, wherever you see url(images/imgxx.jpg), change it so that it reads url(http://localhost/images/imgxx.jpg) (replacing http://localhost/ with your website domain if you are not using a localhost environment). There should be 10 replacements in total (one for each image). When you are done, click on Update and Finished. Next, on the Template Management screen, highlight the site template group and then select the index template. If you do not have such a template group and template then go ahead and create it now. Delete everything currently in the template. Open index.html of the static Ed & Eg website in a text editor such as Notepad. Copy and paste the entire source code into the template. Since the stylesheet is no longer located in style.css, this path needs to be updated. To do this, use the ExpressionEngine stylesheet variable to indicate the includes template group followed by the site_css template that the CSS stylesheet is in. Change the line: <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"media="screen" /> to read: <link href="{stylesheet=includes/site_css}" rel="stylesheet"type="text/css" media="screen" /> Finally, click Update to save the template and browse to http://localhost/site to view the output of the template as it stands right now. It should look identical to the static index.html page (except that in ExpressionEngine, none of the links will work because you have only created one page so far). If you did not hide your index.php file as part of installing ExpressionEngine, remember that your ExpressionEngine URLs will include the additional index.php (for example, http://localhost/site will become http://localhost/index.php/site for you). Did you spot the deliberate mistake? Although, at this point, everything looks good, the content being displayed in this URL is not from your channel at all, but is what you copied and pasted from the index.html file into your site/index template. The next step is to replace this static content with the content from the website channel. Pointing your template to your channel Pointing your template to use your channel content is the step that links together everything you have done so far (creating custom fields, creating the channel, publishing content to the channel, and creating templates). In the control panel, click on Design | Templates | Template Manager from the top menu. Then select the site template group and click to edit the index template. Delete all the code from after the <div id="content"> tag to the closing </div> tag (leave these two tags in place though). Underneath the <div id="content"> line, add the following. This code says that you would like to display content from the website channel (but only one entry and only the entry with a URL title of welcome_to_our_website). {exp:channel:entries channel="website" limit="1" url_title="welcome_to_our_website"} Next, add the following line. This says that you no longer want content from the website channel. {/exp:channel:entries} In between the opening {exp:channel:entries} and closing {/exp:channel:entries} tags, add the following code. This displays the title from your entry as an <h1> header. <h1>{title}</h1> Underneath the title, add the following code to place the image from your channel entry onto the page. The {if website_image} statement means that if there is no image defined in the channel entry, do not display the img code at all. {if website_image}<img src="{website_image}"class="left" />{/if} Finally, add the following tag to display the content of your content field: {website_content} The content section should now look like: <div id="content"> {exp:channel:entries channel="website" limit="1" url_title="welcome_to_our_website"} <h1>{title}</h1> {if website_image}<img src="{website_image}"class="left" />{/if} {website_content} {/exp:channel:entries} </div>  Finally, update the page title to reflect the entry title. To do this, replace the line <title> Ed & Eg Financial Advisors </title> with the following code. Although it looks complicated, it's actually the same as the }exp:channel:entries} code in the steps above, except that all you are displaying is the {title} field and not any of the other custom fields you created. By default, the {exp:channel:entries} tag requests a lot of information from your database, which can increase the amount of time it takes to display your page. Since you are only displaying one field, the disable parameter tells ExpressionEngine not to request other information you know you do not need (including the data in your custom fields). For more information on this parameter, you can visit http://expressionengine.com/user_guide/modules/channel/parameters.html#par_disable <title>{exp:channel:entries channel="website" limit="1"url_title="welcome_to_our_website" disable="categories|category_fields|custom_fields|member_data|pagination"}{title}{/exp:channel:entries} - Ed & Eg Financial Advisors</title> Click Update to save your changes and then browse to http://localhost/site to view your updated website. If everything is well, then you should not notice much difference at all, but behind the scenes, your content is now coming from your channel entry, rather than being part of your template.

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2956

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