More Questions Than Answers

Joomla security article

This just appeared in the Joomla Community Magazine: 777 The Number of the Beast by Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

It’s an extremely helpful article explaining security issues when installing and working with Joomla.

New DJA website

London-based website development company DJA has launched their 2011 website. Offerings include WordPress and Joomla website development. Check it out at www.djaonline.co.uk

Educational books online

We helped launch the Essential Reading Plus e-commerce website today. There’s nearly 500 titles including best selling educational author Bill Rogers. Designed by Hughes Design, built by DJA Online Services.

Take a look now at www.essentialreadingplus.co.uk

Tags: e-commerce, educational books

Create an RSS feed from a Joomla category

I’ve spent the afternoon looking for an answer to how to create an RSS feed from a Joomla category. Almost every search yields the same answer, use a feed aggregator / reader to load the feed onto your site. No, I want it the other way round. Feed results via RSS from a category on my Joomla site.

Well it’s possible. This article tells you how: How To Create RSS Feed For Joomla

The basic gist is to create a menu item that remains unpublished with a section blog list link to the category you want to feed from. Adding &format=feed&type=rss to the full url of the category will format it correctly.

Usual xml rules apply – page titles with ampersands need to be written as an entity & amp ;

Hope it’s easier in Joomla 1.6

Cashmere scarf highlight – support your clients

It might seem like a shameless plug, but I’d like to think that if my client Wholly Goat can get themselves featured in The Guardian, then the least I can do is make sure that other people know about it too.

So in their Christmas Gift Ideas section you too can see an example of the beautiful cashmere scarves they are selling at the Christmas-themed  www.whollygoat.com/shop/ – get shopping before they sell out!

Tags: cashmere scarves, cashmere wraps, dja online, The Guardian

Updating text descenders getting cut off in IE

OK – so I am updating text in a page by using jQuery cycle. There’s 3 divs contained within another div that show one after another as per the jquery settings.

Anyway, the problem was, as the text updated the descending characters disappeared, but only in Internet Explorer. I found a few references, especially this one from Typekit: Descenders cut of in IE

So, the solution seems to be if the text is updating in a div, give a height and vertical space in the div to allow for the descenders even when they’re updating.

Wholly Goat website and store launched

DJA has played a big part in the build and launch of the new website for a company called Wholly Goat who launched their product range this week. The site at www.whollygoat.com features lots of high quality photography by Amy Murrell and Nathan Pask which can be seen from the front page through to the store which offers a range of cashmere scarves and shawls imported from Nepal. The website is built on Cubecart and WordPress.

Tags: blog, cashmere, cubecart, e-commerce, store, wordpress

WordPress white screen

I just spent two hours trying to get a new WordPress installation working on a test server. After reinstalling “everything” I checked back with tail -f /var/log/php_error.log and started to see some familiar messages about missing includes files:

PHP Fatal error:  require() [<a href='function.require'>function.require</a>]: Failed opening required

Relating to /wp-includes/load.php’ and wp_settings

To cut a long story short, if you get a white screen on a new WordPress installation it’s probably *not* showing you the error that’s appearing in a logfile. And if that’s the case, try re-uploading all your files first before giving up.

Tags: error, installation, wordpress, wordpress 3.01

Vary WordPress templates for different pages

It never hurts to read a manual, an FAQ or a Help page now and again. Whatever you know about a piece of software you’d be surprised what you can find out by going back over some instructions, maybe with a specific task in mind. My task was to create a number of templates for a WordPress-based website. Each template differed slightly from the other and would be used for pages in different categories.

So in WordPress it’s common to work with one theme or layout, with the front page possibly showing a newsfeed and then some other “pages” displaying less time-dependent content. So you might add a differing layout to the index and page elements of the theme. But then it’s possible to add other themed pages. reading the WordPress Codex page on Pages – http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages a useful tip is to add a couple of lines of code at the top of the file:

<?php

/*
Template Name: TemplateFile
*/

?>

Where TemplateFile is the name of your template. Add some other code and formatting such as the content, then the magic. Go into Pages > Add New and there’s now an option in Page Attributes for a Template in the dropdown list.

Tags: faq, template, theme development, web development, wordpress

WordPress 3.0 menus

I’ve been working with several websites that have upgraded to WordPress 3.o and I’m loving the menu options that you get now. As with every bit of software, what is difficult in one version quickly improves in subsequent versions. I started using Flash when it was at version 3 and though I still use Flash CS3, it’s a much improved program. And so with WordPress. There’s a whole raft of improvements that you can read about at the WordPress Codex Version3.0 page.

The questions people always ask are about making navigation that highlights when on a particular page, and making navigation for pages that have been created. So in WordPress 3.0 this is possible, using a combination of methods.

This article at Think Vitamin ( http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/getting-started-with-wordpress-custom-menus/ ) goes into a lot of detail, but I’ll go into a little of what I know here.

With WordPress 3.0 it’s possible to create a theme which is menu-enabled. This can be as simple as inserting something like the following in the functions.php script file for the theme:

add_action( 'init', 'register_my_menus' );
   function register_my_menus() {
         register_nav_menus(
            array(
                 'menu-1' => __( 'Menu 1' ),
                 'menu-2' => __( 'Menu 2' ),
                 'menu-3' => __( 'Menu 3' )
           )
      );
}

Within the header, or wherever you want to place the menu add something like:

<?php
     wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'menu-1' ) );
?>

This refers back to the menu you’re going to create in WordPress.

Finally, in WordPress, goto Appearance > Menus and create your menu. Some advantages also lie in using the new Custom Menu widget from Appearances > Widget whereby it’s possible to create menu groups and hierarchies. And with some CMS – specifically using the current-menu-item and current-page-item classes, you can start contextual formatting so the user knows which page they’re on from the selected menu item.

There’s a lot more to WordPress 3.0 I’m still exploring, but this has been an exciting development.

Don’t forget to read the article at http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/getting-started-with-wordpress-custom-menus/ as well!

Tags: creating menus, menu, menu howto, menu widget, wordpress 3.0