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.

Not sure what the bug is,  but Firefox takes some extra TLC. 

Happy to have found a sequence that solved it for this site.   Now I’m off to a Joomla 1.5.27 site  where I had given up on JCE for similar symptoms.   Maybe I can get it back again!

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.

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.

What is needed is for this formatting to be accomplished in the migration process.  In the meantime I’ll try a SQL find and replace.  

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

This code causes the problem I was talking about. Change it with this to allow this component to be controlled by permissions settings.

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 format for entering items is this:    id1, id2, id3 (1,2,3)

where the numbers are the article item ids.

There’s another place to specify article order — and I was having trouble with this — some articles just wouldn’t show up, even though I knew the id was good.

What worked:   be sure list is in low to high order by ids   AND  set order to “random”.

OK.  I can live with that.

Another issue came up though with an article that had no associated menu item.  

The BT Content slider has a parameter for you to set a menu item “if the article id is not found” —  I figured this was a placeholder article to show if the content selection tool had no results.   But NO!    If an item is found, it will display the page header of the menu item set in this parameter.    Odd results — click to see a schedule of an event and get “Ways to Give”  as a heading over the schedule content.    NOT OK!

So… the MORAL of this story is to use that hidden menu — and be sure all articles exists in at least one menu — even if its only the hidden menu.

May I give a plug for NoNumber.nl‘s wonderful Add to Menu extension.   Create your menu item right from the article creation/edit screen!

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 blog, too — so I figure I’ll just link to the install we already have and all will be well.

Not.   Omeka’s htaccess includes code to disable any .php other than their own index.php and although I could SEE the blog,  I couldn’t access the wp-admin.

Omeka’s Google group archive revealed the solution:

I added this:

# suggested in Omeka google group # Disable URL rewriting within this directory
RewriteEngine Off

# Undo Omeka’s .php blocking

    Order Deny,Allow
    Allow from all

to the .htaccess in the wordpress  subdirectory  and — problem solved!

Let’s hear it for support groups,  and google for helping us find the relevant posts!

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.

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 created a ScreenSteps tutorial on how to handle an error like this and share it.

How to repair SQL database table