How-To Tutorials - CMS & E-Commerce

Shipping Shipping is a very important aspect of an e-commerce system; without it customers will not accurately know the cost of their order. The only situation where we wouldn't want to include shipping costs is where we always offer free shipping. However, in that situation, we could either add provisions to ignore shipping costs, or we could set all values to zero, and remove references to shipping costs from the user interface. Shipping methods The first requirement to calculate shipping costs is a shipping method. We may wish to offer a number of different shipping methods to our customers, such as standard shipping, next-day shipping, International shipping, and so on. The system will require a default shipping method, so when the customer visits their basket, they see shipping costs calculated based off the default method. There should be a suitable drop-down list on the basket page containing the list of shipping methods; when this is changed, the costs in the basket should be updated to reflect the selected method. We should store the following details for each shipping method: An ID number A name for the shipping method If the shipping method is active or not, indicating if it should be selectable by customers If the shipping method is the default method for the store A default shipping cost, this would: Be pre-populated in a suitable field when creating new products; however, when the product is created through the administration interface, we would store the shipping cost for the product with the product. Automatically be assigned to existing products in a store when a new shipping method is created to a store that already contains products. This could be suitably stored in our database as the following: Field Type Description ID Integer, Primary Key, Auto Increment ID number for the shipping method Name Varchar The name of the shipping method Active Boolean Indicates if the shipping method is active Default_cost Float The default cost for products for this shipping method This can be represented in the database using the following SQL: CREATE TABLE `shipping_methods` (`ID` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ,`name` VARCHAR( 50 ) NOT NULL ,`active` BOOL NOT NULL ,`is_default` BOOL NOT NULL ,`default_cost` DOUBLE NOT NULL ,INDEX ( `active` , `is_default` )) ENGINE = INNODB COMMENT = 'Shipping methods'; Shipping costs There are several different ways to calculate the costs of shipping products to customers: We could associate a cost to each product for each shipping method we have in our store We could associate costs for each shipping method to ranges of weights, and either charge the customer based on the weight-based shipping cost for each product combined, or based on the combined weight of the order We could base the cost on the customer's delivery address The exact methods used, and the way they are used, depends on the exact nature of the store, as there are implications to these methods. If we were to use location-based shipping cost calculations, then the customer would not be aware of the total cost of their order until they entered their delivery address. There are a few ways this can be avoided: the system could assume a default delivery location and associated costs, and then update the customer's delivery cost at a later stage. Alternatively, if we enabled delivery methods for different locations or countries, we could associate the appropriate costs to these methods, although this does of course rely on the customer selecting the correct shipping method for their order to be approved; appropriate notifications to the customer would be required to ensure they do select the correct ones. For this article we will implement: Weight-based shipping costs: Here the cost of shipping is based on the weight of the products. Product-based shipping costs: Here the cost of shipping is set on a per product basis for each product in the customer's basket. We will also discuss location-based shipping costs, and look at how we may implement it. To account for international or long-distance shipping, we will use varying shipping methods; perhaps we could use: Shipping within state X. Shipping outside of state X. International shipping. (This could be broken down per continent if we wanted, without imposing on the customer too much.) Product-based shipping costs Product-based shipping costs would simply require each product to have a shipping cost associated to it for each shipping method in the store. As discussed earlier, when a new method is added to an existing store, a default value will initially be used, so in theory the administrator only needs to alter products whose shipping costs shouldn't be the default cost, and when creating new products, the relevant text box for the shipping cost for that method will have the default cost pre-populated. To facilitate these costs, we need a new table in our database storing: Product IDs Shipping method IDs Shipping costs The following SQL represents this table in our database: CREATE TABLE `shipping_costs_product` (`shipping_id` int(11) NOT NULL, `product_id` int(11) NOT NULL,`cost` float NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`shipping_id`,`product_id`) )ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1; Weight-based shipping costs Depending on the store being operated from our framework, we may need to base shipping costs on the weights of products. If a particular courier for a particular shipping method charges based on weights, then there isn't any point in creating costs for each product for that shipping method. Our framework can calculate the shipping costs based on the weight ranges and costs for the method, and the weight of the product. Within our database we would need to store: The shipping method in question A lower bound for the product weight, so we know which cost to apply to a product A cost associated for anything between this and the next weight bound The table below illustrates these fields in our database: Field Type Description ID Integer, primary key, Auto Increment A unique reference for the weight range Shipping_id Integer The shipping method the range applies to Lower_weight Float For working out which products this weight range cost applies to Cost Float The shipping cost for a product of this weight The following SQL represents this table: CREATE TABLE `shipping_costs_weight` (`ID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,`shipping_id` int(11) NOT NULL,`lower_weight` float NOT NULL,`cost` float NOT NULL,PRIMARY KEY (`ID`)) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ; To think about: Location-based shipping costs One thing we should still think about is location-based shipping costs, and how we may implement this. There are two primary ways in which we can do this: Assign shipping costs or cost surpluses/reductions to delivery addresses (either countries or states) and shipping methods Calculate costs using third-party service APIs These two methods have one issue, which is why we are not going to implement them—that is the costs are calculated later in the checkout process. We want our customers to be well informed and aware of all of their costs as early as possible. As mentioned earlier, however, we could get round this by assuming a default delivery location and providing customers with a guideline shipping cost, which would be subject to change based on their delivery address. Alternatively, we could allow customers to select their delivery location region from a drop-down list on the main "shopping basket" page. This way they would know the costs right away. Regional shipping costs We could look at storing: Shipping method IDs Region types (states or countries) Region values (an ID corresponding to a list of states or countries) A priority (in some cases, we may need to only consider the state delivery costs, and not country costs; in others cases, it may be the other way around) The associated costs changes (this could be a positive or negative value to be added to a product's delivery cost, as calculated by the other shipping systems already) By doing this, we can then combine the delivery address with the products and lookup a price alteration, which is applied to the product's delivery cost, which has already been calculated. Ideally, we would use all the shipping cost calculation systems discussed, to make something as flexible as possible, based on the needs of a particular product, particular shipping method or courier, or of a particular store or business. Third-party APIs The most accurate method of charging delivery costs, encompassing weights and delivery addresses is via APIs provided by couriers themselves, such as UPS. The following web pages may be of reference: http://www.ups.com/onlinetools http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/429083.html Using such an API, means our shipping cost would be accurate, assuming our weight values were correct for our products, and we would not over or under charge customers for shipping costs. One additional consideration that third-party APIs may require would be dimensions of products, if their costs are also based on product sizes.

(For more resources on Plone, see here.) Faculty/Staff Directory is practically a departmental web site in a box, but it doesn't stop there. The product is general enough to serve in non-academic settings as well. It is also not limited to people; it has been repurposed to such diverse applications as cataloguing tea leaves. It really is a general-purpose taxonomy engine—albeit with an academic bent in many of its naming choices. This article is an exploration of a product that will likely provide the framework for much of your site. We'll tour its features, get ideas on how they're commonly used in a school setting, and, finally, get a sneak peek into the future of the product. Install the product Faculty/Staff Directory depends on several other products: membrane, Relations, and archetypes.schemaextender. Thus, the easiest way to get it, as documented in its readme, is by adding Products.FacultyStaffDirectory to your buildout.cfg, like so: [buildout]eggs = ...(other eggs)... Products.FacultyStaffDirectory Then, shut down Zope, and run buildout. After starting up Zope again, install FacultyStaffDirectory in the Add-on Products control panel, and you're ready to go. Test drive Faculty/Staff Directory Faculty/Staff Directory (FSD) is tremendously flexible; you can use it as a simple list of phone numbers or as the foundation supporting the rest of your site. In this section, we take FSD for a spin, with ample pit stops along the way to discuss alternative design possibilities. Keep in mind that FSD's features are given to creative repurposing. We'll not only see their typical uses but some more inventive ones as well. Create a directory and choose global roles Faculty/Staff Directory centers around the idea of collecting people in a central folder called, fittingly, a faculty/staff directory. Our first step is to create that folder. Once you've installed FSD in the Add-on Products control panel, choose a place in your site where you would like to place a personnel directory, and add a faculty/staff directory there. You'll be prompted for two things: Title (which is usually something like People) and a selection of Roles. These roles, part of FSD's optional user-and-group integration, are granted site-wide to all people in the directory. Thus, as with the similarly scoped roles in the Users and Groups control panel, it's best to use them sparingly: choose only Member or, if you don't intend the people represented in your Directory to log in, no roles at all. Most roles should be assigned on a per-folder basis using the Sharing tab, and FSD provides facilities for that as well, as we discuss later in the Integrate users and groups section. Add people Now that you have a place to keep them, it's time to add actual personnel. FSD represents people through the aptly named Person type. A fully tricked-out person might look like this: People, without exception, live directly inside the faculty/staff directory—though they often appear to be elsewhere, as we will soon see. Each person can track the following information: Basic Information   Access Account ID Doubling as the object ID (or "short name") of the person, this field should contain the person's institution-wide login name. If you choose to take advantage of FSD's user-and-group integration, this is how logged-in users are matched with their Person objects. The name of this field and its validation requirements can be changed (and should be, in most deployments) in the Faculty/Staff Directory control panel under Site Setup. Name First, middle, and last names, as well as a suffix such as Ph. D or Jr. Image A picture of the person in GIF, JPEG, or PNG format, for use on their page and in some listings. It will be automatically scaled as necessary. Classifications Classifications are FSD's most prominent way to group people. This is a convenient place to assign one or more when creating a person. Departments Another way of grouping people. See Group People, below, for an in-depth comparison of all the various types of groupings. Password If the Person objects provide user passwords option in the FSD control panel is on, one can log into the Plone site using the Access Account ID as a username and the contents of this field as a password. Personal Assistant(s) Other people who should have access to edit this person's information (excluding password and the fields under User Settings). Contact Information   Email This email address is run through Plone's spam armoring, as yet not widely cracked, before being displayed to visitors. An alternative armoring method ("somebody AT here DOT edu") is available from the FSD control panel under Site Setup. Street Address City State Postal Code Phone The required format of the Office Phone field, along with its example text, can be set in the FSD control panel-a must for installations outside the United States and Canada. Professional Information   Job Titles As many job titles as you care to provide, one per line. These are all listed on the person's page. Biography A rich text field for the person's biographical information. Since this field can contain all the formatting you can muster-headings, images, and all-it is a wonderful thing to abuse. Fill it with lists of published journal articles, current projects, and anything else appropriate to show on the person's page. Education A plain text field where every line represents a conferred degree, certification, or such. Web Sites A list of URLs, one per line, to display on the person's page. There is no option to provide link text for these URLs, so you may wish to embed links in the Biography field instead. Committees Specialties The committees and specialties to which this person belongs. See the full discussion of FSD's various methods of grouping people under Group People, below. User Settings   Language Content Editor If you leave FSD's user-and-group integration enabled for the Person type, these duplications of the standard Plone options will apply. Integration can be disabled on a type-by-type basis in the FSD control panel under Site Setup. That's a lot of information, but you can fill out only what you'll use. Fields left blank will be omitted from directory pages, labels and all. For more thorough customization, you can write a Faculty/Staff Directory extender product to hide inapplicable fields from your content providers or to collect information that FSD doesn't ordinarily track. Here's how to add people to the directory: From within the directory, pull down the Add new… menu, and choose Person. Fill out some of the person's attributes. Be sure to assign at least one classification to each person, but don't worry about departments, specialties, or committees yet, as we're about to cover them in detail.

I’ve been a longtime user of MT, since version 3.2, and have followed its evolution closely from the inside out. When the beta-test and release-candidate versions of MT5 were released for public testing, I jumped on them and got my hands as dirty as I could, cloning my own MT4-driven site and testing it out in a separate MT5 instance (almost everything, plugins included, worked as-is). With each set of changes, I’ve also identified a couple of gotchas and potential problems that new users will want to keep an eye out for, and that any current MT user will want to be mindful of when they upgrade. Pages And Sites: Getting (Re)Organized The single biggest outward change to Movable Type is a reworking of how blogs are organized. Movable Type 4 introduced the ability to create and edit individual HTML pages in a folder hierarchy, each styled with the same templates used to create one’s blog. With MT5, this is paired with a new meta-organizational feature: the ability to create "websites" as an adjunct to one’s blog. A website contains a page hierarchy, but is kept as physically distinct as possible from a blog, so one site could contain a number of different blogs. This way, one could create a set of pages that changed very little—a corporate mission statement, an about-us page, personnel, etc.—and keep them entirely distinct, not just in the file hierarchy but in terms of permissions and editability. It’s another step towards making MT into a general content management system—or, at least, to add CMS-like features to the program to make it that much more powerful generally. One downside to this new behavior is that it throws first-timers and MT4 users for a bit of a loop. You can’t just create a blog—rather, you have to create a website (even if it’s just an empty one) and then create a blog under it. The blog and the website can share the same page hierarchy as long as nothing’s formally published in the website, or at least as long as no pages from one overwrite the other. Databases: MySQL All The Way Sometimes a new version of a product means features are dropped rather than added. Movable Type 5 is no exception, since it removes support for a number of database products. Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server are now only supported in the Enterprise edition of the product; some (SQLite and Postgres) have been relegated to plug-ins. Several things were behind this decision. First, MySQL has by and large been the database that people have used with Movable Type (and with blogging generally). It’s free, it’s been ported to most every platform of significance, and it’s already accumulated a large enough user base—both with Movable Type and other blogging programs—that consolidating on it as a standard would probably not inconvenience too many people. The second decision: convenience of support. It’s easier to support one commonly-used (and free) database system instead of several that are both free and commercial. If you’ve been using SQLite or PostgreSQL as your database, MovableType.org has some migration instructions for moving to MySQL. The short version: create a backup of your site/blog through MT itself, make a new installation of MT 5 on a MySQL instance, and restore the blog in MT. I’ve jumped through these exact hoops myself, so a word of caution. If you’re dealing with a really big blog (more than, say, 10MB) and you’re hosting the blog on a remote server, your best bet is to send the backup file to someone at the host and have them perform it for you locally. Part of the reason the MT full-system backup process is a bit clunky is because it is typically done through the progam’s web interface; it’s not something that can be done through a command line. (There is a third-party command-line backup solution for MT—but it’s been written for MT4, so there’s no guarantee it works with MT5, and it hasn’t been updated since 2008.)

Page navigation is an important part of application development and Windows Presentation Foundation supports navigation in two types of applications. These are the standalone application and the XAML browser application also known as XBAP applications. In addition to navigation between pages in the application it also supports navigation to other types of content such as HTML, objects and XAML files. Implementing a page Page class is one of the classes supported by WPF and you can use hyperlinks declaratively to go from page to page. You could also go from page to page programmatically using the NavigationService. In this article navigation using hyperlinks will be described. Page can be viewed as a package that consists of content which may be of many different kinds such as .NET framework objects, HTML, XAML, etc. Using the page class you can implement a Page which is a navigable object with XAML content. You implement a page declaratively by using the following markup: <Page /> Page is the root element of a Page which requires XAML namespace in its declaration as shown above. The Page can contain only one child element and you may simplify the snippet to just: <Page > <Page.Content> <!-- Page Content --> Hello, XAML</Page.Content></Page> Since a Page has the content you can access any content on the page by the dot notation Page.content as shown here above. Creating a Page in Visual Studio 2008 When you use Visual Studio 2008 you can create a WPF Browser application in C# as shown in the New Project window (opened with File | New Project...). When you create the project as above you will be creating a project which has a Page element as shown in the figure. Page1.xaml has both a preview window as well as XAML markup in a tabbed arrangement as shown here. Page1 is a named page object with a class [x:Class="Page1"]. You can review the content shown in the earlier snippet by taking out the extra namespace from the page shown here. The contents on a page can consist of other objects such as controls which can be used for various activities one of which is navigating from page to page. These controls can provoke events which can be implemented both as mark up and code that supports the page(also known as code behind). The page created by Visual Studio provides the necessary configuration to interact with the page as shown in Page1.xaml in the above figure and the code behind page shown in the figure below. The default page created by Visual Studio fulfils the three necessary criteria for a page with which you can interact by providing the following: x:Class="Page1" this markup attribute enables the MS Build engine to build a Page1 partial class which has the same name as the attribute of x:Class namely "Page1" This requires the inclusion of a namespace provided by the second namespace declaration The generated class should implement an InitializeComponent and the default page has this implemented as show above Configuring a Start Page When the application starts you need to specify that the browser should bring up a designated page. In order to support this the browser application requires an infrastructure to host the application and the WPF's Application class provides the necessary information in the form of an ApplicationDefinition file. In the XBAP application we have created you may review the information in the Application definition as shown here. You can specify the start up page as the application starts by specifying it in the Application definition as shown in the next figure. Without the StartupURI the page does not get displayed. The StartupURI can also be specified in a Startup event handler. Page appearance in the browser As the application starts up you may want to control how the page hosted in the window appears. You can set certain properties declaratively as shown where the WindowTitle, WindowWidth, WindowHeight, Title can all be set. The first three items are what you will see when the page gets displayed. For example consider the following xaml mark up: <Page x_Class="WPFSharp_Nav01.Page1" WindowWidth="500" WindowHeight="200" Title="Pagex" Background="Blue" WindowTitle="What is this?" > <TextBox Width="400" Height="25">Hello, XAML Browser App</TextBox></Page> The page gets displayed as shown when the application starts up. The WindowWidth is the outer width and the WindowHeight is the outer height of the browser window.

(For more resources on Joomla!, see here.) Add a quick survey  form to your Joomla site Dynamic web application often means database at the back-end. It not only takes data from the database and shows, but also collects data from the visitors. For example, you want to add a quick survey into your Joomla! Site. Instead of searching for different extensions for survey forms, you can quickly build one survey form using an extension named CK Forms. This extensions is freely available for download at http://ckforms.cookex.eu/download/download.php. For building a quick survey, follow the steps below: Download CK Forms extension from http://ckforms.cookex.eu/download/download.php and install it from Extensions | Install/Uninstall screen in Joomla! Administration area. Once installed successfully, you see the component CK Forms in Components menu. Select Components | CK Forms and you get CK Forms screen as shown below: For creating a new form, click on New icon in the toolbar. That opens up CK Forms: [New] screen. In the General tab, type the name and title of the form. The name should be without space, but title can be fairly long and with spaces. Then select Yes in Published field if you want to show the form now. In Description field, type a brief description of the form which will be displayed before the form. In Results tab, select Yes in Save result field. This will store the data submitted by the form into database and allow you to see the data later. In Text result field, type the text that you want to display just after submission of the form. In Redirect URL field, type the URL of a page where the user will be redirected after submitting the form. In E-mail tab, select Yes in Email result field, if you want the results of the forms to be e-mailed to you. If you select Yes in this field, provide mail-to, mail cc, and Mail BCC address. Also specify subject of the mail in Mail subject field. Select Yes in Include fileupload file field if you want the uploaded file to be mailed too. If an e-mail field is present in the form and the visitor submits his/her e-mail address, you can send an acknowledgement on receiving his/her data through e-mail. For sending such receipt messages, select Yes in E-mail receipt field. Then specify e-mail receipt subject and e-mail receipt text. You can also include the data and file submitted via the form with this receipt e-mail. For doing so, select Yes in both Include data and Include fileupload file fields. In Advanced tab, you can specify whether you want to use Captcha or not. Select Yes in Use Captcha field. Then type some tips text in Captcha tips text, for example, 'Please type the text shown in the image'. You can also specify error texts in Captcha custom error text field. In Uploaded files path field, you can specify where the files uploaded by the users will be stored. The directory mentioned here must be writable. You can also specify the maximum size of uploaded file in File uploaded maximum size field. To display Powered by CK Forms text below the form, select Yes in Display "Powered by" text field. In Front-end display tab, you can choose to display IP address of the visitor. You can view help on working with CK Forms by clicking on Help tab. After filling up all the fields, click on Save icon in the toolbar. That will save the form and take you to CK Forms screen. Now you will see the newly created form listed in this screen.

Google Maps, YouTube, and SlideShare There are a lot of Internet and web services which you can use along with your blog to make your content more interesting for your viewers. With a good digital camera and video production software, you can make your own videos and presentations quickly and easily, and embed them in your posts with just a few clicks! For example, with Google Maps, you can add photos of your business to a custom map, and post it in your blog to attract customers. There are a lot of possibilities, and it all depends on your creativity! Including Google Maps in your posts Using Google Maps in your blog is a good way of promoting your business because you can show your visitors your exact location. Or you can blog about your favorite places and show them as if you were there, using your own photos. Time for action – using Google Maps There are a lot of things you can do with Google Maps, one of them is including maps of your favorite places in your blog, as we'll see in a moment: Open your web browser and go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com). Type Eiffel Tower in the search textbox, and click on the Search Maps button or press Enter. Your web browser window will split in two areas, as shown in the following screenshot: Click on the Eiffel Tower link at the bottom-left part of the screen to see the Eiffel Tower's exact position in the map at the right panel:  Now click on the Satellite button to see a satellite image of the Eiffel Tower:      Drag the Eiffel Tower upwards using your mouse, to center it on the map area: Click on the Zoom here link inside the Eiffel Tower caption to see a closer image: If you look closely at the previous screenshot, you'll notice three links above the map: Print, Send, and Link. Click on Link to open a small window: Right-click on the Paste HTML to embed in website field to select the HTML code, and then click on the Copy option from the pop-up menu: Open a new web browser window and log into your Roller weblog. In the New Entry page, type The Eiffel Tower inside the Title field, and Eiffel Tower Google Maps inside the Tags field. Then click on the Toggle HTML Source button in the Rich Text editor toolbar, type This is an Eiffel Tower satellite image, courtesy of Google Maps:<br> inside the Content Field, press Enter, and paste the code you copied from the Google Maps web page: Scroll down the New Entry page and click on the Post to Weblog button. Then click on the Permalink field's URL, to see your Google Maps image posted in your blog. Click on the Zoom here link once to see a close-up of the Eiffel Tower, as shown in the following screenshot: What just happened? Now you can add Google Maps functionality inside your blog! Isn't that great? You just need to copy and paste the HTML code that the Google Maps produce automatically for you. If you want a bigger or smaller map, you can click on the Customize and preview embedded map link to customize the HTML code that you're going to paste into your blog: Then you just copy the HTML code produced by Google Maps and paste it into your blog post: If you have a Google Maps account, you can create customized maps and show them to your visitors, add photos and videos of places you've visited, and even write reviews about your favorite restaurants and hotels. Have a go hero – explore Google Maps Now that you've seen how to embed Google Maps in your weblog, it would be a great idea to create your own Google Maps account, and start exploring all the things that you can do—inserting photos and videos about places you've visited in your own custom maps, adding reviews of restaurants and other businesses in your locality, and so on. You can explore other users' maps, too. Once you get the hang of it, you'll be traveling around the world and meeting new people from your own PC. Including YouTube videos in your posts YouTube is one of the most popular video sharing websites in the world. You can include your favorite videos in your blog, or make your own videos and show them to your visitors. However, before you start complaining that we have already seen how to insert videos on your weblog, let me tell you that the big difference between uploading a video to your own blog server and uploading a video to a YouTube server is bandwidth. When someone plays back a video from your weblog, the blog server transfers the video data to your visitor's web browser, so that he/she can begin to see it, even before the video downloads completely. This is known as video streaming. Now, imagine you have 1,000 visitors, and each one of them is viewing the same video from your weblog! There would be a big amount of data flowing from your weblog to each visitor's web browser! That amount of data flowing from one PC to another is called bandwidth. You would need a very broad connection to be capable of transmitting your video to all those visitors. That's where YouTube comes into play. They have lots of bandwidth available for you and the other millions of users who share videos daily! So, if you plan to include a lot of videos in your weblog, it would be a great idea to get a YouTube account and start uploading them. In the following exercise, I'll show you how to include a YouTube video in your post, without having to upload it to your weblog.

(For more resources on Plone, see here.) The techniques in this article are applicable in many organizational schemes. We present one common arrangement as an example: a top-level folder where visitors can browse the highest-profile events on the site. Show events on a calendar Plone's out-of-the-box Events folder provides a basic way to find events: it displays them in a chronological list broken into pages of 20 each. While fine for simple cases, this is cumbersome for visitors who want to look at events for a certain future date. Part of our goal is to set up a monthly calendar to make this common case easy: Our first step toward the monthly calendar is to replace Plone's stock Events folder. Out of the box, it holds individual events along with a summarizing collection that acts as its front page. If you don't need a drill-down way of browsing your events by subject—for example, if you have so few that they all fit comfortably on a calendar like the above—you can leave the default Events folder in place. Otherwise, follow the instructions below to replace it with a standalone collection; this will interact better with Plone's navigation portlet, which we will use to implement the drilldown browsing. If you choose to stick with the stock Events folder, you may still wish to adjust the criteria of its inner collection as described in the following: First, delete the Events folder. Replace it with a new collection called "Events". Give it an Item Type criterion, and tell it to pull in everything of the type Event. The original Events collection had a Start Date criterion to keep past events off the page. We won't need that, since the calendar view we are about to apply keeps past events tucked away implicitly—and we do want the ability to see old events when we navigate to previous months. The original collection also had a State criterion that limited it to showing published events. If you need only to hide unpublished events from visitors, then you can dispense with this: the internal search routines used by the collection will naturally show only what the current user has permission to see. Preventing a common contributor errorOften, a less proficient contributor will add an event, see it on his or her own calendar, and move on, neglecting to publish it. Adding the State criterion can serve as a reminder, preventing the event from appearing until properly published. The downside is that it makes the calendar useless for intranets: Events that aren't publicly visible will never show up. But if you have no non-public events to list, consider recreating the State criterion. If you never want to show access-controlled events on the main calendar add a State criterion limiting the collection to published items. The Events collection is finished. Next, we apply a monthly calendar view to our data. Meet Plone4Artists Calendar Plone's built-in event listings are rather basic. We need to do special tricks with collections and default views just to sort them in chronological order. At best, this is several extra clicks, and, at worst, it can confuse your less technical content contributors. A third-party product called Plone4Artists Calendar makes this easy and gives us several other capabilities to boot. Plone4Artists Calendar is the current frontrunner in the Plone calendaring space. It provides... Daily, weekly, monthly, and a few other calendar-like views for folders and collections Rudimentary recurring event support Hooks for pulling events from other systems in realtime, with a bit of coding Don't let the name "Plone4Artists" put you off if you aren't an artist; though the Plone4Artists suite of products came out of a project to provide artist community web sites, there's nothing particularly artist-centric about them. In fact, there has been discussion about renaming them. The runner up: CalendarXThe other Plone calendar worth considering is CalendarX, whose most recent release at the time of this writing is 0.9.1. 0.9.0 was the first update to the product since since 2005 and represents a major refit. Its ancient data-modeling internals were replaced with a modern Archetypes implementation, and one no longer needed to venture into the ZMI to do simple configuration. Speaking of configuration, CalendarX exposes a lot of it: 6 tabs packed with options for tweaking calendar format, event display, widgets, and more. There are 57 options alone regarding its CSS cosmetics. If you need a specific look and aren't comfortable writing your own CSS or template code, CalendarX may be the ticket.However, be warned that CalendarX has a history of being sporadically maintained. It lacked Plone 3 compatibility for a long time, and compatibility work began only when a group of stranded Plone 2.5 users at Pennsylvania State University put a week of development work toward it. Its internals still hold a lot of legacy that may prove difficult to maintain as Plone evolves.Plone4Artists Calendar, on the other hand, is a simpler product—both inside and outside and with all the good and bad that entails—and the winds of further community effort are blowing in its direction. Its maintainable design and the willingness of developers to work on it make it the solution least likely to leave you stranded; this is why it is our recommendation in this article. Install Plone4Artists Calendar Before we can make use of its views, we need to install the product—actually, two products and several supporting packages. Weave these directives into the proper sections of your buildout.cfg... [buildout]...other directives...eggs = ...other eggs here... p4a.plonecalendar p4a.ploneevent[instance]...other directives...zcml = ...other ZCML listings here... # Plone4Artists Calendar doesn't support Plone 3.3's auto-ZCMLloading as of 2.0a2. p4a.plonecalendar-meta p4a.plonecalendar p4a.ploneevent[productdistros]recipe = plone.recipe.distrosurls =http://plone.org/products/calendaring/releases/0.4/calendaring-0-4-0.tgz ...run buildout, restart Zope/Plone, and install the Plone4ArtistsCalendar (p4a.plonecalendar) and Recurring Events (p4a.ploneevent) products in Site Setup → Add-on Products. Now that everything is installed, we apply a monthly calendar view to the Events collection: Navigate back to the Events collection, and choose Calendar from the new Sub-types menu. If it isn't already selected, choose Month view from the Display menu. Presto—we have a monthly calendar showing every event on our site.

This article gives you insight on weblogs and how they can be used to create a worldwide presence through the blogosphere. It also teaches you the difference between a blog and a CMS, the basics about newsfeeds and the important role they play for blogs, and how you can use them to spread information on the blogosphere. Before the action begins Before starting with this article's exercises, you need to download the support files (screenshots, videos, sounds, and so on) from http://www.packtpub.com/files/code/9508_Code.zip, and then unzip them into a folder—C:ApacheRollerBook, for example—on your hard drive. All these files are zipped in a file named chapter05.zip. Inside this file, there's an image file (chapter05_01.jpg), a sound file (seaontherocks.mp3), and several files for the video example (showvbox.mp4, showvbox_controller.swf, and FirstFrame.png). Uploading files to your weblog Now that you have the basic knowledge about how to manage your weblog, it's time to make things more interesting for you and your future visitors. So, how can we do that? Well, multimedia files (audio or video) are always a good addition to a web page, because they can express much more than using text-only posts. Imagine what you could offer to your clients, if you had an online specialty store. You could show your new items in your Roller weblog with full color photos, and you could also embed videos of your items in your posts, to give visitors a complete virtual tour of your store! To top that, you could show them a custom Google Map, where they could get directions from their location to your store! What else could you ask for? Using images on your posts An image can say a thousand words and if you include some of them in your posts, imagine the space you can save. Roller has a very friendly interface to help you upload and include images in your posts, and now you're about to learn how to do it! Time for action – uploading images into Roller In this exercise, I'll show you how to use Roller's file upload interface, so that you can add an image to an entry (post) in your blog:                                                                Open your web browser and log into Roller. The New Entry page will appear. Then click on the File Uploads link, under the Create & Edit tab: The File Uploads page will appear next, as shown in the following screenshot:      Click on the Browse... button of the first text field, and the File Upload dialog will appear. Go to the folder where you downloaded this article's support files, and double-click on the chapter5_01.png image to select it. The name of the file you selected will show up in the first textbox of the File Uploads page: Click on the Upload button to upload the image to your blog. Roller will respond with a success message as shown in the next screenshot: Take note of the URL shown in the previous message, because you'll use it when inserting the image inside a post in your blog. Now click on the New Entry link from the Create & Edit tab, and use the following screenshot as an example for your new post: Press Enter after the last line of text (Here's a screenshot of the official Website:) and click on the text editor's Insert/Modify Image button: The Insert Image dialog will show up. Type the URL of the image you uploaded to Roller (http://localhost/roller/main/resource/chapter5_01.png) inside the Image URL field, and click on the Preview button to see a small preview of the image. Then, type VirtualBox Web site in the Alternate text field and click on the OK button to insert the image in your post: You'll be taken back to the New Entry page again. To see the image, click on the Maximize/Minimize Editor button: The editor will fill up your web browser's entire workspace area and you will be able to see the image, as shown in the following screenshot: Click on the image to select it and change its size by dragging the little white square at the upper-right corner: Click on the Maximize/Minimize Editor button again to change the text editor to its original size. The image will now fit inside the text editor, as shown in the following screenshot: Use the down and right arrow keys to position the text cursor at the end of the post, press Enter and type the text shown in the following screenshot: Exit the text editor and scroll down the New Entry page until you locate the Post to Weblog button, and click on it to publish the post to the blog. Roller will show the Changes saved message inside a green box. Now click on the Front Page link in Roller's menu bar, at the upper-right corner of the screen, to go to your blog's front page: Your new post will appear on your weblog's front page, as shown in the following screenshot: You can logout from Roller and close your web browser now.

Using videos in your posts It's time to learn how to insert video files in your posts. You can just insert one as an HTML link, but who does that anymore? It's a good way to drive your prospective readers away! In today's world, you need to offer your spectators the easiest, quickest, and most attractive way to see what you have to offer. My job is to show you how to do that with your Roller weblog, so let's get to it! Time for action – uploading and inserting videos on your posts In this exercise, I'll show you how to upload a video file to your blog server and then insert it into a post using Apache Roller: Open your web browser and log into Roller. The New Entry page will appear. Click on the File Uploads link from the Create & Edit tab. Scroll down the File Uploads page until you locate the Manage Uploaded Files section. Type video in the New Directory field and click on the Create button, as shown in the following screenshot:  Roller will show the following success message: Scroll down the page again until you locate the video folder in the Manage Uploaded Files section, and click on it: Roller will take you to the same File Uploads page, but this time you'll be inside the video directory. Now click on the first Browse... button of the Upload files for use in weblog main section. On the File Upload dialog, go to the folder where you downloaded the support files for this article, and double-click on the FirstFrame.png image to select it. The name of this file will show up on the first textbox of the File Uploads page. Now click on the second Browse... button and double-click on the showvbox.mp4 file, so that its name appears in the second textbox of the File Uploads page. Repeat the process with the third Browse... button and the showvbox_controller.swf file. Your File Uploads page must look like the following screenshot: Click on the Upload button to upload the three files to the video directory in your blog server. Roller will return the following success page: Don't forget to write down the three URLs from the previous Roller message; you'll need them when inserting the video into an entry (post). Click on the New Entry link from the Create & Edit tab to go to the New Entry page and create a new post for your blog. Type Ubuntu Linux Virtual Machine Inside a Windows XP PC in the Title field, select Open Source in the Category field, type virtualbox windows xp linux ubuntu in the Tags field. In the Content field, and type Here's a sample video of my Ubuntu Linux Virtual Machine, running inside a Windows XP PC with VirtualBox: as shown in the following screenshot:   Click on the Toggle HTML Source button from the HTML editor and write the following code below the text you typed in step 8 (the text in bold must correspond to the URLs from step 7's screenshot): <object height="498" width="640" id="csSWF" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/ cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,115,0"><param name="src" value="http://localhost/roller/main/ resource/video/showvbox_controller.swf" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#1a1a1a" /><param name="quality" value="best" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="scale" value="showall" /><param name="flashVars" value="autostart=false" /><embed height="498" width="640" name="csSWF" src="http://localhost/roller/main/resource/ video/showvbox_controller.swf" bgcolor="#1a1a1a" quality="best" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" scale="showall" flashvars="autostart=false&amp; thumb=http://localhost/roller/main/resource/ video/FirstFrame.png&amp; thumbscale=45&amp;color=0x000000,0x000000" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/ shockwave/download/ index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"/></object> Click on the Save as Draft button, to save a draft of your post. Then scroll down the page and click on the Full Preview button, to see how your post will look in your blog before publishing it. The preview will open in a new tab in your web browser:       Click on the play button and the video will begin to playback. When finished, close the preview tab and click on the Post to Weblog button to publish your new post. You can logout from Roller now. What just happened? The previous exercise showed you how to upload a video to your blog server and insert it in a post. As you can see, videos are a little more complicated than plain images. In this case, we used the following files: FirstFrame.png: This is the thumbnail image that shows up before the video begins to playback showvbox.mp4: The video file showvbox_controller.swf: The controller that plays back theshowvbox.mp4 file      The video was produced with Camtasia Studio, an excellent screen recording software application from TechSmith (http://www.techsmith.com). If you want to practice with your own videos, you can download a 30-day free trial version of Camtasia Studio from the following URL: http://www.techsmith.com/download/camtasiatrial.asp. What would happen if you wanted to embed a video from your camera or cell phone? Well, you can embed it directly in your blog, but the best thing to do is use a software application such as Camtasia Studio to create the .swf controller and the HTML code to embed into your post automatically. Then you just need to change the .swf controller and thumbnail URLs, as you did in step 9 of the previous exercise. You can use the same embed code to insert a different video in your blog; just be sure to change the URL in bold text. You could also upload your video to YouTube instead of uploading it into Roller, as we'll see later in this article.

Integrating data into applications or reports is one of the most important, expensive and exacting activities in building enterprise data warehousing applications. SQL Server Integration Services which first appeared in MS SQL Server 2005 and continued into MS SQL Server 2008 provides a one-stop solution to the ETL Process. The ETL Process consists of extracting data from a data source, transforming the data so that it can get in cleanly into the destination followed by loading the transformed data to the destination source. Enterprise data can be of very different kinds ranging from flat files to data stored in relational databases. Recently storing data in XML data sources has become common as exchanging data in XML format has many advantages. Creating a stored procedure that retrieves XML In the present example it is assumed that you have a copy of the Northwind database. You could use any other database. We will be creating a stored procedure that selects a number of columns from a table in the database using the For XML clause. The Select query would return an XML fragment from the database. The next listing shows the stored procedure. Create procedure [dbo].[tst]asSelect FirstName, LastName, City from Employeesfor XML raw The result of executing this stored procedure[exec tst] in the SQL Server Management Studio is shown in the next listing. <row FirstName="Nancy" LastName="Davolio" City="Seattle"/><row FirstName="Andrew" LastName="Fuller" City="Tacoma"/><row FirstName="Janet" LastName="Leverling" City="Kirkland"/><row FirstName="Margaret" LastName="Peacock" City="Redmond"/><row FirstName="Steven" LastName="Buchanan" City="London"/><row FirstName="Michael" LastName="Suyama" City="London"/><row FirstName="Robert" LastName="King" City="London"/><row FirstName="Laura" LastName="Callahan" City="Seattle"/><row FirstName="Anne" LastName="Dodsworth" City="London"/> Creating a package in BIDS or Visual Studio 2008 You require SQL Server 2008 installed to create a package. In either of these programs, File | New | Projects... brings up New Project window where you can choose to create a business intelligence project with a Integration Services Project template. You create a project by providing a name for the project. Herein it was named XMLquery. After providing a name and closing the New Project window the XMLquery project will be created with a default package with the file name, Package.dtsx. The file name can be renamed by right clicking the file and clicking OK to the window that pops up regarding the change you are making. Herein the package was named XmlToFile.dtsx. The following figure shows the project created by the program. When the program is created the package designer surface will be open with a tabbed page where you can configure control flow tasks, Data Flow Tasks and Event handlers. You can also look at the package explorer to review the contents of the package. The reader may benefit by reviewing my book, Beginners Guide to SQL Server Integration Services, on this site. Adding and configuring a ExecuteSQL task Using an ExecuteSQL Task component the stored procedure on the SQL Server 2008 will be executed. The result of this will be stored in a package variable which will then be retrieved using a Script Task. In this section you will be configuring the ExecuteSQL Task. Drag and drop a Execute SQL Task under Control Flow items in the Toolbox on to the Control Flow tabbed page of the package designer. Double click Execute SQL Task component in the package designer to display the Execute SQL Task Editor as shown. It is a good practice to provide a description to the task. Herein it is, "Retrieving XML from the SQL Server" as shown. The result set can be of any of those shown in the next figure. Since the information that is retrieved running the stored procedure is XML, XML choice is the correct one to choose. The stored procedure is on the SQL Server 2008 and therefore a connection needs to be established. Leave the connection type as OLE DB and click on an empty area along the line item, Connection. This brings up the Configure OLE DB Connection Manager window where you can select an existing connection, or create a new connection. Hit the New... button to bring the Connection Manager window as shown. The window comes up with just the right provider [Native OLE DBSQL Server Native Client10.0]. You can choose the server by browsing with the drop-down handler as shown. In the present case the Windows Authentication is used with the current user as the database administrator. If this information is correct you can browse the database objects to choose the correct database which hosts the stored procedure as shown. You may also test the connection with the Test Connection button. You must close the Connection Manager window which will bring you back to the Configure OLE DB Connection Manager window which now displays the connection you just made. To proceed further you need to close this window as well. This will bring in the connection information into the Execute SQL Task editor window. The type of input is chosen to be a direct input (the others are file and variable). The query to be executed is the stored procedure, tst described early in the tutorial. The BypassPrepare is set to false. The General page of the Execute SQL Task editor is as shown here.

In this article we will discuss why Office Live Small Business is the perfect site-building tool for you if you don't know (or don't want to learn) HTML, the language of web pages. And you'll certainly agree that it does a pretty decent job of it. But afer your site is functionally complete, it's only natural that you'd want to tweak little things here and there; move the text on some page a wee bit to the left, for example, or move a picture up by a pixel or two, so as to align it with the neighboring text. The trouble, though, is that Office Live Small Business doesn't allow such tweaks. You can't touch the HTML that it generates. But what if you're not very happy with this state of affairs? Don't worry! Office Live Small Business has it covered. It has two advanced features that give you a fine-grained control over the look and feel of your web pages as follows: Page Editor's HTML modules in which you can write your own HTML markup Off-the-shelf Solutions, which render customized web pages within Office Live Small Business's framework In this article, you'll explore both these advanced options. Let's get started then. About HTML modules An HTML module is a little editor that you can plop on to your page in the Page Editor, just like any other module. It holds HTML markup. With an HTML module, you can construct a web page with raw HTML markup just as the pros do. If you're conversant with HTML, the idea of having a fine-grained control over your HTML is likely to pump you up. And yet, I don't recommend using HTML modules. You read that right: I don't recommend using HTML modules. Why? Because Office Live  Small Business stores the markup in HTML modules separate from the page. When a person requests your page from his/her browser, Office Live Small Business fetches the separately-stored markup and embeds it into the rest of the page dynamically. The problem is that it does the embedding using something called frames, which happen to be little windows on a web page that display content that doesn't actually reside on that page. Why is this problematic? Because search engines can't index the content that doesn't physically reside on your web page. Therefore, people can't find it using search engines. Frankly, I don't see a point in building a site that people can't fnd. So, I strongly discourage you to build your entire site with HTML modules. Another reason to avoid HTML modules is that they load the content dynamically using JavaScript. This can be an excruciatingly slow process that can delay the loading of a page  in a user's browser. In fact, such dynamically loaded pages often tend to time out. Having said that, there are situations where they can come in handy. You may not care, for example, whether search engines index a certain page on your site, but you'd like to have great control over how that page looks. Or you may want to embed a YouTube video on your page, which search engines don't index any way. It's a good idea, therefore, to learn how to use the HTML module and that's what you'll do in this section. The first step, of course, is to add an HTML module to one of your pages. Let's use a Test page as a guinea pig. Time for action – adding an HTML module to your page Bring up the Test page in Page Editor. Place the cursor where you want to add the module. Click the Module button in the Insert group on the Page Editor's ribbon. Select HTML from the Modules menu that drops down. The HTML dialog pops up, as shown: The dialog contains a mini-editor where you can type your HTML markup. The Images and Hyperlink buttons just above the editor box help you add markup for embedding pictures and hyperlinks. As this is just a Test page, I'll type some simple HTML to show you how the module really works. I suggest that you do the same. Type the following markup in the mini-editor: <strong>Welcome to my web site.</strong> Click OK. The HTML dialog closes and you return to Page Editor, which renders the HTML you just typed as any browser would. Preview your website. The page should now look like this: Close the preview window and return to Page Editor. Editing your markup is equally easy. Right-click on the HTML module in Page Editor. A pop-up menu appears, as shown in the next image: Choose Properties…. The HTML dialog opens again with your markup in it. Change the markup to: <strong>Welcome</strong> to my web site. You'll be working with the HTML module a few more times in this article. From now on, I'll just say "Open the HTML module's HTML dialog" when I want you to edit a module's markup. Click OK. The HTML dialog closes and you return to Page Editor. Preview your website. The page should now display only the word Welcome in bold letters. Close the preview window and return to Page Editor. What just happened? You added an HTML module to a web page and typed some basic HTML in it. Before this exercise, you simply typed text on to your web pages as you would in a word processor, and Office Live Small Business took care of converting it to HTML. With an HTML module, you're writing your own HTML. Naturally, you'll have a more fine-grained control over how you want it to appear. But to make use of this newfound power, you must know HTML. So, let me give you a brief tutorial on it. There are several hundred excellent HTML tutorials on the Web (not to mention several thousand lousy ones). If you take into account the hundreds of books on the subject, you'd think that everything that needs to be said about HTML has, perhaps, already been said. Many times over, at that. Yet, I have good reason to write this brief tutorial: writing HTML for Office Live Small Business web pages is an entirely different beast. Why? Because: You don't write an entire HTML document with Office Live Small Business's design tools. All you do is write little chunks of HTML in HTML modules placed strategically on your web pages. Office Live Small Business's Page Editor combines the basic framework of your web page with these chunks of HTML and presents a finished web page to your browser. An HTML module doesn't store the HTML you type verbatim. It encodes what you type and lets the browser handle the decoding. Therefore, the page may not look exactly as you intend it to, after the browser renders it. The page on which you drop an HTML module already has a Cascaded Style Sheet (CSS) associated with it. You may be able to take advantage of the fact and minimize manual formatting. Therefore, you don't have to be an HTML guru to use Office Live Small Business's HTML module. All you need to know is a small subset of HTML that leverages the web page's features. This tutorial introduces that subset. It won't make you a fully-fledged web designer, but it will arm you with enough knowledge to impress unsuspecting folks at cocktail parties. HTML 101 Contrary to what many people believe, HTML is not a programming language. It's a markup language. Unlike programming languages, it doesn't contain step-by-step instructions that tell a computer what to do. Instead, it contains instructions that tell a browser how to format and decorate web page content. The instructions are written as Tags. Tags are keywords that reside within a pair of angular brackets (< and >). Typically, you enclose some content between a pair of tags. For example, the <strong> and </strong> in the markup you just tried out is tag pair. The pair consists of an opening tag and a closing tag. The difference between an opening tag and the corresponding closing tag is usually a forward slash (/). So, <strong> is the opening tag and </strong> is the corresponding closing tag. If you want to make some text bold, you enclose it between <strong> and </strong> tags like this: This is some text. <strong>This sentence is bold.</strong> This one isn't. And the browser displays it like this: Most HTML tags are paired like the <strong> tag. But some are not. An example is the  <br /> tag. It adds a line break to your text like this: This is some text. <br /> This is some more text but it's on the next line. And the browser displays it like this: The character < opens the tag and the character sequence /> closes it. Such tags that close themselves without corresponding closing tags are called self-closing tags. It's not mandatory to close the self-closing tags. So, if you write <br> instead of <br />, your page will work just fine. But I recommend closing all tags. I'll do so in this tutorial and so will you. Notice, by the way, that simply typing the second line of text on a new line in the editor doesn't make the text appear on the next line (go ahead, try it!). It's the <br /> tag that actually does the trick and displays the subsequent text on the next line, although you typed it as a single line in the editor. In other words, the tags determine the appearance of your web page, not how you type the text in the editor. HTML is not case sensitve. So, you can write a <br /> tag as <BR />, <Br />, or even  <bR />, if you insist, and your page won't look any different. But, I strongly advise against it. As a matter of convention, I recommend sticking to lowercase letters, as I've done throughout this tutorial. That's just about all the dirt that you really need to know on HTML. There's more,  of course, but as this is not a complete HTML tutorial, we'll look into the finer details  on a need-to-know basis. So, let's proceed to some useful HTML tags. Working with paragraphs Most writing is structured as a collection of paragraphs. While writing HTML, you must enclose the text in a paragraph between the <p> and </p> tag pair like this: <p>This is the first paragraph. It has this filler text to make it rather long so that it looks like a real paragraph.</p><p>Here is the second paragraph.</p> And the browser renders it like this: As you can see, there's no space between the paragraphs in the markup. But the <p></p> tag pair automatically introduces breaks that makes the text look like paragraphs in the browser. Because of a bug in the HTML module, it doesn't seem to treat <p> and </p> tags correctly. As a result, you don't see intended paragraph breaks in the browser. In the picture above, I sneaked in our old friend, the <br /> tag, between the two paragraphs as in <p>...</p> <br /> <p>...</p>.You may have to resort to this workaround as well. But remember that if Microsoft fixes the bug, you'll get an extra line-break on your page.Also, remember that you can add text to an HTML module without the paragraph tag pair; you can use <br /> tags instead, for example, where you want a break in text. However, I recommend that you enclose all of your text in paragraph tags. If you don't, Office Live Small Business's stylesheets may hijack the formatting of your text. Not enclosing text in paragraphs is one of the main reasons why text on so many web pages is misaligned and displayed in the wrong font. Working with horizontal rules You can draw a horizontal line across your web page simply by clicking the Horizontal line button on Page Editor's ribbon. To draw a similar line while working with the HTML module, you'll need—you guessed it—a tag! Web designers call a horizontal line a horizontal rule and so the corresponding tag is the <hr /> tag, like the <br /> tag, the <hr /> tag. Simply type <hr /> wherever you want a horizontal line  to appear. If you want it to appear between the two paragraphs in the previous example, your markup will look like this: <p>This is the first paragraph. It has this filler text to make it rather long so that it looks like a real paragraph.</p><hr /><p>Here is the second paragraph.</p> And your page will appear in the browser like this: Working with headings Headings are an important part of the text. Books, for example, use headings with varying importance. The more important a heading, the bigger its font size is. This scheme makes  it easy for readers to quickly grasp the scope of topics and sub-topics within the text. HTML uses a similar scheme. There are six levels of heading tag pairs in HTML that you can put around heading text like this: <h1>Heading 1</h1><h2>Heading 2</h2><h3>Heading 3</h3><h4>Heading 4</h4><h5>Heading 5</h5><h6>Heading 6</h6> Text included between beginning and ending tags at each level looks like this: As you can see, <h1> has the largest font size. Naturally, it's used for the most important heading on a web page. As the number inside the tag increases, its font size decreases.  So, among headings, <h6> has the smallest font size. What if you need more than six levels of headings? Well, you shouldn't; a six level deep topic hierarchy is deep enough for most people to keep track of. If you have seven or more levels, you should seriously consider rewritng your text. Generally, it's a good idea to start a page with the <h1> tag. It identifies the most important heading on the page, and it is used by search engines to take an educated guess at what  the page is all about. So, a good convention to follow is to have only one <h1> tag on every web page. But, you're better off flouting this convention when working with Office Live Small Business. Why? Because you don't write entire web pages in HTML modules; you just write individual chunks of HTML. Office Live Small Business automatically adds a <h1></h1> tag pair  to your web pages and places the title of your site between them. Similarly, it uses the <h2></h2> tag pair for your site's tag line. So, you're better off starting with a <h3> tag in every HTML module on a web page. That way, you won't drive Google's spider nuts by forcing it to wrestle with 23 <h1> tags on a single web page. When you need a sub-heading on the page, you should use the next tag downin the hierarchy; in our example, <h4>. Avoid the temptaton to skip levels. Don't jump from <h3> to <h6>, for example. And it's a good idea to use these heading tags. Don't just write plain text with large fonts instead.

Creating a Roller theme from scratch Now things are going to get a little rough; just kidding! In Apache Roller, it's very easy to create your own themes, and in this section I'm going to show you how. For the following exercises, you'll need to download http://www.packtpub.com/files/code/9508_Code.zip. Extract the chapter07.zip file's contents into a directory in your hard disk. For example, I used Ubuntu Linux in the exercises, created a chapter07 directory inside my Desktop directory, and copied the mytheme directory inside Desktop/chapter07. All the steps in the exercises are based on these assumptions. Creating a directory for your theme Every Roller theme has a directory and some required files such as weblog.vm, _day.vm, and theme.xml. The next exercise will show you how to create a directory for your new theme inside Roller's themes directory, and how to copy these required files from the support files. Time for action – creating a directory for your theme Now, I'll show you all the necessary steps to create your new theme directory inside Roller's themes directory in a Linux Ubuntu system, and then copy all the required files. If you're using Windows or any other flavor of Linux, the procedure is very similar: Go to your Roller themes directory and create a directory named mytheme: Open a terminal window, go to the themes subdirectory inside Desktop/chapter07, and type sudo cp * /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/roller/ themes/mytheme to copy all the mytheme files to your Roller installation: In the end, your mytheme directory will have four files, as shown in the following screenshot: Now restart Tomcat and wait until it's running again. Then open your web browser, log into Roller, and go to the Design tab to see the Weblog Theme page: Click on the Shared Theme option and select My First Roller Theme from the drop-down listbox: Click on the Update Theme button to change your current Roller theme, and then click on the See how your blog will look with this theme link: Roller will open a new web browser tab to show you a preview of the new theme you selected: Close the preview tab and leave the Front Page: Weblog Theme page open for the next exercise. What just happened? As you can see from the previous exercise, the mytheme theme has a very basic functionality. That's because the CSS stylesheet (mystylesheet.css) is empty, so I'm going to show you how to add styles to your headings, links, and all the other elements displayed in your weblog. However, first we need to see a quick introduction to the four files that every Roller theme must have in order to run without any trouble: File Definition Tip weblog.vm Describes the main page of your weblog In this file you set the structure for your weblog, using macros and elements from Roller and the Velocity template language. _day.vm Describes how to display one day's worth of entries in your weblog Here you can configure how to display each entry's title, content and comments, for example. You can set the font's color and size of each element, based on the CSS stylesheet definitions. mystylesheet.css Stylesheet override file that defines the CSS style code used by your weblog Here you define all your weblog's styles, like size and color for headings and fonts used in your posts. theme.xml Theme definition file that describes each file used in your weblog You need to include some basic data about your theme, the stylesheet file, the weblog and _day templates, and every other file and/or resource used in your weblog. In the next exercises, you'll learn how to edit these files to change your weblog's visual appearance and suit your needs. The stylesheet override file The first thing we need to do in order to change your new theme's visual appearance is edit the stylesheet override file: mystylesheet.css. We can do this in two ways: Edit the file directly from the mytheme directory inside Roller's themes directory, or use Roller's Custom Theme feature. If we use the first option, we'll need to restart Tomcat every time we make a modification to mystylesheet.css. On the other hand, if we choose the second option, we can edit the stylesheet inside Roller's admin interface and see how our changes affect our weblog's visual appearance immediately, so I'm going to show you how to use the second option. Time for action – editing the stylesheet override file It's very easy to edit the stylesheet override file for your custom theme inside Roller, and the next exercise will show you how to do it: Go to the Front Page: Weblog Theme tab in your web browser, select the Custom Theme option, click on the I want to copy the templates from an existing theme into my weblog checkbox, and click on the Update Theme button: Roller will show you the following success message: Now click on the Templates link to see a list of the templates you currently have in your custom space: Looking at the template list in the previous screenshot, there are some templates from the other custom theme which we need to remove. Click on the Remove link of the custom.css, mytemplate, and _css templates to delete them from your custom space, as we won't need them, and they don't belong to mytheme. After removing all the unneeded files, there should be only two templates inyour list: Now click on the Stylesheet link to see and start editing your mystylesheet.css file's code: As you can see, your custom stylesheet is empty. If you click on the Front Page link in Roller's menu bar, you'll see your weblog's current front page: Now click on your web browser's Back button to return to the stylesheet editing page, and add the following code to your custom stylesheet: div.dayTitle {color:brown;font-weight:bold;font-size:90%;text-transform:uppercase;border-bottom:1px dotted #666;}.entryTitle {font-weight: bold;} Your stylesheet should now contain the line beginning with /*, along with the code you've just entered: Click on the Save button to apply the changes to your stylesheet, and then select the Front Page link to see how the code you entered affects your weblog's visual appearance: If you compare the previous screenshot with the one from step 7, you'll see that the code you entered into the override stylesheet changed the way your weblog displays the day and entry titles. Now click on the Back button of your web browser to return to the stylesheet editing page, and add the following lines of code above the lines you entered in step 8: a {text-decoration: none;}a:link {color: blue;font-weight: medium;}a:visited {color: purple;font-weight: medium;}a:hover {text-decoration: underline overline;}body {font-family:"Lucida Grande", lucida, Geneva, Arial,sans-serif;background:#FFFFCC;} Your stylesheet should now look like this: Click on the Save button and then select the Front Page link to see your weblog's front page: Click on the Back button to return to your stylesheet editing page.

Velocity model and data objects in Apache Roller There are several standard model and data objects you can use in Apache Roller to access your weblog's data. Some of the most widely used are $config, $model, $url, $utils, $weblog, $weblogCategory, and $weblogPage. In the following exercise, you'll get to work with the $config object. The $config object This model is used to access Roller's site-wide configuration parameters, such as the e-mail address of Roller's administrator, the name of the Roller site, and so on. Time for action – properties of the $config model object The following exercise will show you how to use some properties of the $config model object inside your custom template: Go to your custom template editing page, and replace the six lines of code below the <body><html> line with the following lines: Welcome to my blog, <b>$model.weblog.name</b> --> <i>$config.siteDescription</i> </br>I'm using Apache Roller Version <b>$config.rollerVersion</b> </br>You can e-mail me at <b>$config.siteEmail</b> if you run into anyproblems in this site. </br>This is my first template </br>My weblog's absolute URL is: <b>$url.absoluteSite</b> </br></br> The entire code of your template should look like the following screenshot (the code you have to change is highlighted): Save your changes and click on your template's [launch] link to open a new tab in your web browser and see the results: Close the results tab if you like, but leave the Frontpage: Templates window open for the next exercise. What just happened? The following table summarizes the $config object properties you learned to use in the previous exercise, along with their value: Property Definition Value $config.siteDescription Shows your site's description. My First Installation of Apache Roller $config.rollerVersion Shows the Apache Roller version used. 4.0.1 $config.siteEmail Shows the site administrator's email. [email protected] You can find all $config parameters under Roller's Server Admin tab: The $model, $category, and $entry objects These objects are used to access all the data for a specific weblog: weblog entries, categories, comments, among others.

Your first template In essence, a theme is a set of templates, and a template is composed of HTML and Velocity code. You can make your own templates to access your weblog's data and show this to your visitors in any way you want. Creating and editing templates In Apache Roller, you can create, edit, or delete templates via the Frontpage: Templates page. Let's see how to use this wonderful tool to create and edit your own templates! Time for action – creating your first template In this exercise, you'll learn to create and edit your first custom template via Roller's admin interface: Open your web browser, log into Roller, and go to the Templates page, under the Design tab: On the Add a new template panel, type mytemplate in the Name field, leave the default custom value in the Action field, and click on the Add button: The mytemplate template you've just created will show up in the templates list: Now click on the mytemplate link under the Name field, to open the mytemplate file for editing: Leave the mytemplate value for the Name field, type mytemplate in the Link field, and type My First Template in Apache Roller! in the Description field: Then replace the <html><body></body></html> line with the following HTML code: <html><body>Welcome to my blog, <b>$model.weblog.name</b> </br>This is my first template </br>My weblog's absolute URL is: <b>$url.absoluteSite</b> </br></body></html> This is shown in the following screenshot: Scroll down the page and click on the Save button to apply the changes to your new template. Roller will show the Template updated successfully message inside a green box to confirm that your changes were saved: Now click on the [launch] link under the Link field to open a new tab in your web browser and see your template in action: You can close this tab now, but leave the Frontpage: Templates window open for the next exercise. What just happened? Now you know how to create your own templates! Although the previous example is very simple, you can use it as a starting point to create very complex templates. As I said before, templates are composed of HTML and Velocity code. The template we wrote in the previous exercise uses a few basic HTML elements, or tags: HTML Tag Definition Tip <html> , </html> Defines the start/end of an HTML document. You must write this tags at the beginning/end of each Roller template. <body>, </body> Defines the start/end of an HTML document's body. All the code you will write for your templates must go between the <body> and </body> tags. <b>, </b> Shows text in bold. Example: <b>Hello</b> shows up as Hello </br> Indicates a line break. Example: Hello</br>World shows up as Hello World Also, there are some elements from the Velocity Template Language, along with an example from the previous exercise:   Velocity Element Definition Example $model.weblog.name Shows the name of your weblog. <b>$model.weblog.name</b> shows up as Ibacsoft's Weblog $url.absoluteSite Shows the absolute URL of your weblog <b>$url.absoluteSite</b> shows up as http://alromero.no-ip.org/roller   These are just some of the basic HTML tags and Velocity elements you'll learn to use for your templates. In the following sections, we'll see some more, along with elements from the Velocity Template Language. The Velocity template language All templates in Roller use HTML tags, along with Velocity code. In the next subsections, you'll learn about some of the most widely used Velocity elements in your Roller templates. Using Velocity macros in your Roller weblog A macro in Velocity is a set of instructions that generate HTML code based on data from your weblog. They are very helpful when you need to do the same task more than once. In the following exercise, you'll learn to use some macros included in Roller in order to show your weblog data to your visitors. Time for action – showing your weblog's blogroll and most recent entries Now you will use the Velocity Template Language to show your weblog's bookmarks (blogroll) in your custom template, along with the most recent entries: Go to your custom template editing page, and type the following code just above the </body></html> line: </br>These are my favorite Web sites: </br>#set($rootFolder = $model.weblog.getBookmarkFolder("/"))#showBookmarkLinksList($rootFolder false false)

The Prime-Class-Modifier Words Pattern Prime words represent key business entities. In an insurance business, examples of prime word are policy and coverage. A class word is a category that qualifies a prime word; for example, in policy code name, code is a class word. policy code can further be qualified by a modifier word; for instance, previous policy code where previous is the modifier word. You can define your own naming pattern different from the above modifier prime class pattern for a specific modeling object, including the separator between words and if modifier word or class word in the pattern is optional. You can have, for instance, modifier?_prime_modifer?_class_modifier? pattern for attribute naming in a logical data model. The ? characters indicate the words are optional and the separators are _. An example name with that pattern is permanent employee last name, assuming we have defined in our standard that permanent as a modifier word, employee as a prime word, last a modifier word, and name as a class word. Note that we don’t have the last optional modifier word in this example. In a different business (not insurance), code might well be a prime word and policy might not be a prime word; hence the need to define your own specific list of prime, class and modifier words and naming patterns for their application, and that is what you build in glossary model. Building Glossary Model The InfoSphere Data Architect (IDA) allows you to build a glossary model from blank or from pre-defined enterprise model. Creating glossary model and selecting its template, blank or pre-built enterprise template The enterprise glossary model gives you a head start with its collection of words relevant across various business types, most of which would probably be applicable to your business too. You can customize the glossary: change or delete the existing words, or add new ones. Selecting an existing word or words in the list and then clicking the cross icon will delete the selected words   Clicking the plus icon allows you to add a new word into the glossary   When you add a new word, in addition to the name, you specify its Abbreviation, Alternate name, and most importantly its type (CLASS, PRIME) and if it is a Modifier word. When the glossary is applied for transforming a logical to physical model, the abbreviation is applied to the physical modeling object. Customizing a word being added   Selecting the type of a word   Before we can apply the words to naming our data model objects, we need to define the naming pattern. You can define the naming pattern for logical and physical modeling objects. The sequence of the word types in the pattern from top to bottom is left to right when you apply them in the names. You can also choose the separator for your naming pattern: space or title case for the logical model, and any character for the physical model (most preferred choice would be non alpha numeric character that is not used in any of the words in the glossary). Defining pattern for logical model objects (entity and attribute)   Defining pattern for physical model objects (table and column)   Specifying separator for logical model   Specifying separator for physical model You then choose the glossary model that you want to apply to your data models. Glossary Model.ndm in the packtpub directory is applied   When you have finished building your glossary model and defining naming pattern, you can then apply them for naming your modeling objects. (You can further adjust the words in the glossary them when such a need arises)