iris lines designs

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 long to load, will lose more viewers than one that loads quickly, even if they have to do some pinching and zooming to see the content.

For Joomla! sites a plugin can help with the speed thing:   JCH Optimize.  Here's a blog entry about that:  http://bit.ly/11oiaKA.

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.

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".

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 errors could not be eliminated, but they weren't breaking other pages.

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 disappeared.  The "toggle editor" link displayed, but wouldn't work.

Off to google and the JCE forums --   some people had success with other browsers -- indeed, Chrome and Safari were fine with JCE.   Someone suggested clearing the browser cache -- I did, but still no go in Firefox.

I uninstalled JCE,  reinstalled 2.2.9.1  and the File Manager but NOT the Image Manager Extended.  Still no go in Firefox.   Finally I  1.  Quit Firefox,  2.   Restarted Firefox,  3.  Cleared the Cache (again) and all was well.

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.

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 works as expected.

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.    In some cases this would be a better solution -- but banner images would have to have good content in the middle of the banner image and often that is NOT the composition we'd prefer for the larger images.

Tradeoffs!  

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 do we do on admin panel. This is quite stupid, because Joomla could simply hide options for permissions if that does not make any change.

Now, the solution:
Open file administrator/components/com_checkin/checkin.php and find  line 13

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: