Blog entries

Optimizing for mobile (and everybody else)

Barb Ackemann — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:17:51 +0100

I just attended a day-long workshop on Responsive Web Design at the User Interface Engineering (UIE.com) UX Immersion Mobile conference in Seattle.

A comment by the presenter, Jason Grigsby (of cloudfour.com) caught my attention. It was his opinion that if you had to choose between optimizing a site for speed in loading and making it responsive, that he'd go for the speed. A site that might FIT on a small screen, but that still takes too ...

Internal Service Error -- can't save certain Joomla! article

Barb Ackemann — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:21:03 +0100

This turned out to be a mod_security issue because the article in question included the word "update".

Troubleshooting: create and save a new article. Fine.

Copy and paste html from "guilty" article -- Internal Service Error message.

Copy and paste 1/2 of the html -- Internal Service Error Message.

Copy and paste the OTHER 1/2 of the html -- Fine!

Add bit by bit until the Error raised it's ugly head...

Love Fireworks CS6 preparation of CSS code snippets, but....

Barb Ackemann — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:14:49 +0100

the code for gradients is not correct!

When I observed that my gradients were going right to left instead of top to bottom, I went in and changed rotation -90deg to 180deg and things looked fine in Firefox --- but I wasn't REALLY understanding the problem -- Doing that made the gradients misbehave in Safari, which my client was using -- He thought I'd gone batty putting a gradient band on the right side of some home page widgets.

This morning I found this artic...

WordPress BigMailChimp pluggin caused conflict with Contact forms

Barb Ackemann — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:03:54 +0100

I tried multiple Contact forms and none of them would display Thank You message or redirect to a Thank You page. Forms were submitting data just fine as I got all the emails (sender and admin emails).

So... I began to disable other plugins to see if the conflict would be solved. Lucky me! The first plugin I disabled was BigMailChimp - a signup form plugin and with it gone, everything was fine.

New JCE and No Number plugins not happy with each other

Barb Ackemann — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:01:09 +0100

Beginning to work on an updated ScreenShots manual for a client, and my No Number plugin buttons would only work if I toggled the editor OFF.

Not Acceptable!

I found I had to set the JCE Profile "Editor Parameters" setting for Validate HTML to "No".

All is back as I expected.

IE Compatibility Mode triggered by :first-line selector.

Barb Ackemann — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:29:20 +0100

A certain page on a website was causing IE8 to switch into "compatibility" mode -- and to display as if it weren't paying attention to any media queries, which it otherwise could handle.

I found a meta tag to add to force it to stay out of compatibility mode -- and then it would just display NOTHING! View source, the content was all there, but just a big white screen!

Other pages with similar elements were displaying OK. A few pesky validation error...

JCE editor woes.. icons missing, toggle editor button won't work...

Barb Ackemann — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 21:23:12 +0100

Today I was working on a Joomla 2.5.7 site with a responsive template. Some image dimensions got saved in an article, so they wouldn't behave responsively. As I went looking for a setting I remembered seeing to set "Always include dimensions" to "NO" I discovered that this is an option for the standard Image Manager that is not available in the Image Manager Extended. I uninstalled the JCE pluggin and all of my editor icons disappear...

Moving WP to a new folder

Barb Ackemann — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 12:32:04 +0100

This is a topic I have to look up every time I need to do it and today OSTraining posted a tutorial. Thanks!

Moving a WP site to a new folder, rewriting urls with Velvet Blues plugin.

Extensions/Languages/Language Overrides

Barb Ackemann — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:51:58 +0100

Just posting this here to remind myself that when Joomla components are giving you things you don't want, you might be able to solve it with an override of the component's language file.

Recently a colleague Mark Madison was struggling to kill the display of the word Category: in as site that uses SobiPro. A language override was a quick and efficient way to deal with this, vs a full-blown template override.

Thanks to Andy Tarr for pointing this out.

Show title settings not working

Barb Ackemann — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 13:43:58 +0100

On a site migrated from joomla 1.5 to 2.5.7 the settings for showing titles are not being applied.

This has been a common complaint in th joomla forums and there has been some confusion about the multiple places that this parameter can be set.

What I found is that the way this is stored in the database is different. The 2.5 install uses JSON formatting for this field and when I open a menu item and save it, it gets put back in the database in the new format and then ...

Widgetkit provides responsive slideshow solution

Barb Ackemann — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 15:36:56 +0100

I had discovered widgetkit when I needed a great mp3 player that did not rely on flash. Widgetkit ALSO provides a pretty friendly slideshow solution that does not combine cropping and resizing as the ckslideshow extension does.

CK Slideshow might be a good solution if your slide images won't suffer from being cropped -- the smaller images delivered on a mobile device will be a vertical slice of your horizontal banner image, rather than just a proportionately reduced banner. ...

Permissions for global_checkin can't be set

Barb Ackemann — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 15:31:32 +0100

I tried to have administrators use the global checkin function on a Joomla 2.5 site and in spite of how the permissions were set, the administrators did not have access to use the global checkin.

I found this solution on the joomla forum (http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=616&t=642208)

"The reason why we can't give access to administrators is that Joomla team hardcoded permision for com_checkin (and some others) inside the component itself. So it is irrelevant what ...

BT Content Slider

Barb Ackemann — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:55:58 +0100

I'm upgrading a site from J1.5.26 to J2.5.6 and needed a replacement for an extension that will not work in 2.5: the Ultimate Content Display extension.

Today I found a free extension from bowthemes.com called BT Content Slider.

With persistence I got it to work but.... there are a few caveats:

I needed to be able to select article to display in a sidebar module -- one at a time, fade in effect as they rotate from one to another.

The f...

Omeka and Word Press on same server...

Barb Ackemann — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 18:14:13 +0100

I'm working on a project that started out as a word press blog with an installation of Omeka in a sub-directory. Once enough work was done in Omeka they wanted that at the root url. OK. Rather than uninstalling the WP site, I moved it to a sub-directory, moved Omeka up and all was well. I tested access the the WP site in its new location before moving Omeka, and all was well.

But... today they tell me they want a b...

Invalid entry

Barb Ackemann — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 18:12:14 +0100

Ever get the message "Invalid entry" when trying to access the Joomla! backend?

The url will be yoursite.com/administrator/index.php.

You know the password is correct, but maybe a session cookie is getting in the way...

Try deleting the /index.php from the url -- for me, I find that it let's me back in.

How to repair Joomla _session table.

Barb Ackemann — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 14:55:15 +0100

A recently launched Joomla 2.5 site was down this morning with the following error:

Table './xxxx_suffix/xxxx_session' is marked as crashed and should be repaired SQL=INSERT INTO `xxxx_session` (`session_id`, `client_id`, `time`) VALUES ('87b1b689ed654ea16833779add58ee44', 0, '1342450283')

Repairing a database table is not difficult, but the error causes panic for the clients and I am not always sitting at my computer....

I creat...

Joomla Bamboo template fix

Barb Ackemann — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 14:54:00 +0100

The center column of my site, using Joomla Bamboo's Meridian template was not behaving.

The template uses javascript to calculate the height of the columns and some tabs and sliders were causing problems.

Anthony wrote:

"The code at the bottom of the js/template.js file. The crucial bit is: jQuery('ul.jbtabs li,.moduletable-panelmenu span.mainlevel,h3.pane-toggler').click(function(){ setTimeout(calculateEQ,200); }); The 200 is the delay in ms for the script to cal...

Device detection to single out the ipad for special styling

Barb Ackemann — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:45:26 +0100

My friend and colleague Bill from Grumpy Engineering helped me with this one:

I added this to the php block at the head of my template:

$isIPad = preg_match('/ipad/i', trim($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']));
if ($isIPad) $device="ipad";
else $device="not-ipad";

and then could use

class="<(question mark)php echo $device; ?>" on the body element of the index.php file.

(Of course I also added a line to the template with...

Joomla solution for non-flash mp3 player

Barb Ackemann — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:37:23 +0100

I searched the JED and the best I could come up with was to use Allvideos to create simple, single mp3 players for a website I'm working on.

The syntax of this pluggin is nice and simple: {mp3}Name-of-file-without-extension{/mp3} or

{mp3remote}http://other-site.com/name-of-file-with-extension.mp3{/mp3remote}

But... Allvideos uses Quicktime as a fallback when flash is not available and on the ipad the Quicktime controller was clunky. I did get...

absolute positioning when you don't declare both offsets....

Barb Ackemann — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:12:59 +0100

As if absolute positioning isn't complicated enough.... I think I always assumed that an object would move to position 0,0 as soon as position:absolute was declared.

But in fact, all my tests of browsers today seemed to leave the element where it was and only adjust the position - relative to it's positioned containing block -- if the offset is specifically declared. (This is not very clear in the w3c specs.)

Thus, in two different students' work, I...