In the profile -> general tab, you can change the ‘image swap method’ to no hash in url.

Thanks, Matt!

DavidMillstoneDance.com is an updated Joomla site with a responsive version of a site design by another developer. Continue Reading

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.

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 again —

Examine that bit  and change word “update”  to “up-date” — Fine!

I remember this from A LONG TIME AGO – where the guilty word was “select”.

I’ve asked by hosting provider to help — will post again about the procedure to whitelist certain words.

 

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.

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.

Before beginning to attack the long content of the page, I decided to try making a new menu item for this page.  I did, but before trying the menu link, I copied the  Joomla link and tested viewing just the article (no menu id, no modules)  in IE8.   It worked  fine, but was missing a few styles.

Turns out I had styled a few things on this page with a  .menu-### selector, so of course those styles weren’t in play.

I went back and edited the article with a wrapping div with an ID  and replaced the .menu-### selector with the #new-id for these 8 rules.  

Now the page was broken again!  

Narrowing in, I disabled 4 of the 8 rules.  — OK.  I kept narrowing until only the rule with a :first-line selector was left.   Commenting this style out, the page was fine.  turn it on,  the page displays NOTHING!

I was able to use a :first-child selector to  achieve the same appearance  — without having to alter the html,  because the two line list items had been turned into links.

The JCE editor coded it as two separate links with the between them.

I was able to select     li  a:first-child  and apply the font-styles I wanted.

If any list items are NOT converted to links, they’ll lose the styling, but I’ll deal with that if I must.

 

 

 

 

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!

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!