I regularly develop GPL open source plugins, modules, and widgets for Joomla and WordPress. On ocassion, a users has asked if a donation would help support this development. The comment alone is a great compliment and incentive. Cash is always greatly appreciated but in this case, if you find one of my plugins useful please make a donation to one of these great organizations instead.
American Red Cross in Southeastern Wisconsin – Provides relief to victims of disasters and helps people prevent, prepare for, and respond to emergencies in Dodge, Kenosha, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Walworth, and Waukesha Counties.
Milwaukee Achiever Literacy Services – Inspires and empowers adult learners to gain the skills necessary to enrich their lives through education and training in an atmosphere of mutual acceptance and respect.
A 1.5 native plugin enabling you to display section or category descriptions within content. This is a very simple, single purpose plugin that does only and exactly what it claims. On occassion, an article may wish to include the description from a section or category. Copying that description means it may need to be updated in multiple places if changes are made. With this plugin, just update the section/category description and all of the articles remain current.
Module ggis-tabnews is a module developed for Joomla 1.5. Basically, it takes all articles in a category or section and outputs them to a tabbed box. It depends on the Joomla Works Tabs & Slides plugin for the tabbing javascript. A future release may remove that dependency.
Where to get it?
This is currently not a public release but if you are interested in it, please drop a comment on this article.
Expected Usage
This module was developed for a very specific usage and has not been developed or tested beyond that. I do however, see a wide variety of applications for this module. A client wished to display offsite class locations by county in a tabbed box. Additionally; the person editing the locations, while familiar with the basic editor interface on the front-end, was not expected to handle much complexity in layout. Read the rest of this entry →
Problem statement: I have inserted an image using the TinyMCE editor in a Joomla 1.5 article. How do I get the image to display both a caption and a border? I do not want borders on all images but only those I specify.
At first glance, the solution seems as though it would be simple and straightforward but it actually requires some tricks. This article will approach the issue in a somewhat backward approach; starting with what is required of the end-user editor, then going to changes required of the administrator, and finally touching on a little of the why.
Recently, I have started backing up my servers to Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) using Duplicity. So far, I am pleased with the process and the costs involved. I still do regular disk dumps to my own backup server but may slowly phase down the frequency of these dumps.
What is Amazon S3?
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.
What is Duplicity?
Duplicity backs up directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local file server. Because duplicity uses librsync, the incremental archives are space efficient and only record the parts of files that have changed since the last backup. Because duplicity uses GnuPG to encrypt and/or sign these archives, they will be safe from spying and/or modification by the server.
The insert tag starts with {ggis_iframe} and ends with {/ggis_iframe}. A number of parameters may be set in the openning tag. The URL of the iframe to insert goes between the tags.
A subscription form may be placed into the standard text widget using the methods above. For widget use, I suggest using only formtype=1, the short form.
Here are working examples of the plugin ggisSubscribe. You may subscribe to any of the lists shown here. Extra spaces were added between the [ ]and the -. The correct code should be of the form [-ggis... -].
I have noticed that many novice WordPress users try to build their site using Pages. This fights the WordPress system. These users are not using WordPress as a blogging platform but as an entry-level Content Management System. Now I know we use words such as ‘view a web page’ but page here has a different meaning.
One thing I push, is that 99% of the site’s content should be in posts. Write content to posts. They are much more flexible and easier for a developer to work with.
Pages have their place on a site but are limited to non-hierarchical, never-changing, organizational metadata (information about data). So what goes on a page? About, contact, history, jurisdiction, terms of use, privacy statements, and a sitemap. All the boring stuff.
Posts, on the other hand, can belong to multiple categories and have unlimited tags. Categories and tags automatically create the navigational structure of the site. The power of going with the flow is that most of the structure is done for you instead of needing to be created by you.
This is a very simple version of a Categories sub-menu implemented in the sidebar.php. Once a category is clicked, the sidebar should show the following:
Category description (this is useful other than the sidebar)
