Blog entries tagged extensions

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 ...

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.

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...

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.

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. ...

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...

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...

Paypal RSForm that allows user to set quantity in Paypal Cart

Barb Ackemann — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:09:26 +0100

or...

How I spent my Valentines' Day while my musician husband was on the road....

working on a site that needed a form to collect information along with a paypal button for payment.

I had built the form in BreezingForms chosen in part because of their built in Paypal support, however, when I got the paypal account set up and put in the button, it led to a paypal payment form where the user could not alter the quantity. What if someone wanted to order two ...

Szaki Table (Joomla Extension)

Barb Ackemann — Fri, 20 May 2011 20:02:49 +0100

Szaki Table is a Joomla Extension that allows sorting a table by any column header.

I used it on a client's site to make a list of educational opportunities sortable by date, location, type. All was well until we added a column for cost and entered cost in US Dollars using the $ sign.

The entire table was replicated in the cell with the $!

Fortunately one only needs to "escape" the $ by including before the guilty character.

...

Imagesized revised...

Barb Ackemann — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:57:01 +0100

NEW version of Imagesized plugin includes more options, but forces a bg and border for all generated thumbnails. Set to white this could often just disappear on the page, but on the fbg site I needed thumbs to sometimes be on a background image for front page.

I was using very standard image sizes so I could predict that all thumbnails would be the actual size, and not need a "fudge-factor" so I modified the plugin code as follows:

In plg_imagesiz...