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Joomla Hints and Tips

Hints and Tips on Joomla and its usage.

Geoffrey Chapman

Experiences with CSS and a table style

Whilst working on presenting a sample table style for our Issue Tracker component one particular colour combination was creating a few problems. The main problem was the colour of the links in the table header.  These would be used to sort the list and due to the choice of colour scheme the link colours were taking the settings from an earlier (in the tree)  DIV style.

This resulted in us temporarily shelving the table style until such time as we had to investigate further.  With the release of 1.3 of Issue Tracker we have now turned our attention back to the style sheet. The investigation was interesting and it is likely that others might benefit from our experiences hence the decision to make it a Blog post.

The resolution was to make use of the  !important declaration which been around since CSS1 but should still be used with caution.

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Tags:
Tools tables joomla Issue Tracker CSS
Geoffrey Chapman

Experiences using DocBook XML

This summaries a few of the lessons learned using DocBook XML for documentation.

Upcast: The conversion from Microsoft Word to DocBook XML introduced a few opportunities for changes:

1. Media objects (figures) are all converted to ‘inlinemediaobject’, and even when the image is on its own it always is surrounded by ‘para’ and results up positioned on the left hand side of the page. The best approach we found was to convert them to simple ‘mediaobject’ and change then to become ‘figures’ and in this way also enable the creation of a ‘List of Figures’. We also tended to change the specified exact image size to use scaling so that the width of 14cm was most appropriate. [This did impact the fact that all html screen images come out at a standard width.]

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Tags:
XML documentation DocBook
Geoffrey Chapman

DocBook XML to PDF

The Apache FOP ProjectThe next stage in our documentation changes was the creation of PDF documents from the DocBook XML formats.  [See previous posts for other blogs on our documentation changes.]

There is a need to use a XSLT transform to convert the XML document to a FO (formatted object) which can then be processed to create the PDF output.

The DocBook distribution have available a set of XSL transforms for converting the XML files into a variety of different formats, so the first step was to download these. This is not strictly necessary since it is possible to access the XSL transforms over the web, but having a local copy speeds up the transformation process.

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Tags:
DocBook XML Tools developers
Geoffrey Chapman

Custom CSS and DocBook XML documents

docimport-48We have previously mentioned using XML documents in DocBook format. We now turn our attention to the question of the format of the tables. A previous blog on DocBook table format mentioned the two types of  tables supported by DocBook, but not every document table necessarily has to be in the same format. We have an ‘in-house’ style used for some time and the desire was to retain a similar format with our web pages.

We are using a Joomla component named DocImport written by Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos and are very pleased with its behaviour even though it is still in an ‘alpha’ release form. A credit to the authors abilities. The component presents each web page with headers and footers which are using a ‘table style’ which does not display column separators. This is understandable since the standard format for tables is basic to put it bluntly. 

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Tags:
XML tables documentation DocBook
Geoffrey Chapman

Animated Gifs in banners stopped working

lg-1and1
Noticed a little while ago that the banner we use for our affiliate link to 1&1 Internet was not being displayed in our page footer.

Further inspection revealed that 1&1 Internet had changed their affiliate specification slightly (not that we were informed but there you are!).  Anyway they now provide animated GIFs to use so replaced our 'old' configuration with the suggested new details.

That was fine apart from the link still refused to display. So we had to investigate further. What didn't help was that we were unsure exactly when the link first exhibited problems, so were unsure whether this was caused by a change of ours, or just by 1&1.

To cut a long story short, we discovered that it was the animated GIFs that were causing the problem, since a static image displays fine. For our purposes a static GIF is fine, and until we have more time to see if the animated GIF problem is more widespread than just banners it will suffice.

Tags:
joomla images
Geoffrey Chapman

Joomla and JTableNested

joomla
We recently started addressing a small concern that we had with the handling of Projects in our Issue Tracker component.  Not I hasten to add, a bug, but more a lack of functionality that was desired.  The search functionality was a little limited, and we has implemented some code to sort the projects in the desired order.  Whilst it worked it was not what we would describe as ‘pretty’.  We took the bullet and decided to convert the table from a ‘hierarchical’ format to a ‘nested’ format.

The desire was to

  • improve the search facility
  • to clean up the existing code making better use of supplied Joomla functionality
  • to provide an improved sort ability
  • to introduce ACL group control of the projects (we had already implemented ACL controls upon the issues in an earlier release).
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Geoffrey Chapman

DocBook XML tables


We have been studying  the DocBook DTD and in particular the table specifications.  There are two separate and distinct formats supported, the originals CALS format and the ‘newer’ HTML format since DocBook version 4.3. CALS is an SGML standard developed by the U.S. military, and their set of table tags was one of the first to be developed that included complex features for tables.

Some confusion was encountered since one source claimed that both table formats could not be used in the same document, whilst another source claimed that the two forms cannot be mixed within  the same definition, which makes more sense.

Later, because of widespread familiarity with HTML tables, DocBook added HTML table elements. Now you can use tr and td instead of row and entry in a table.  They cannot be mixed within one table. Also, the content of each table cell has to be valid DocBook, so you cannot usually just cut and paste an HTML table into your DocBook document. But the DTD does permit a document to contain both CALS tables and HTML tables. The tgroup element is the distinguishing characteristic between them. A CALS table requires a tgroup, and an HTML table does not permit one.

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Tags:
XML tables DocBook
Geoffrey Chapman

Using XXE as an XML editor

XMLmind logo
We have been using the evaluation edition of XMLMind XML editor commonly known as XXE for a little while and discovered a a document on the web from the O’Reilly stable.

The link is for an older version of the software (Standard Edition 2.10 I think) but in the main it is still applicable with the latest evaluation edition (5.4.1).  The authors hope that it is found useful or as a starting point for your own work.

Note:  Reloading a later evaluation version resets the usage counter back to 30 days.

Tags:
XML editor DocBook documentation
Geoffrey Chapman

Documentation Formats and Joomla

Historically we used to create our documentation using ‘Word Perfect’ but changed to using Microsoft Word, soon after Adobe ‘took over’ Word Perfect.  This has served us well for many years, but unfortunately Word has not kept up with the changes in the Web and the need for short pages of documentation easily accessible by users.  Yes, Word can generate HTML documents but anyone who has every looked at the created output will be struck by the obvious bloated code and its use of strangely named variables making it almost unreadable in its raw form.  This necessitates a cleanup operation on the code before it can really be used.

So the search was on to see it there is anything ‘better’ out there.

The obvious candidate was something known as DocBook which is written in XML, which means that it can be created and edited by virtually any editor upon any platform.  However to ensure good structure that meets the requirements of the DTD, something more robust is required.  It also raises the question of how one retains the investment in existing documents and how one can convert them to the ‘new’ format.  One advantage of the XML format is that it is reasonably easy to use XSL transforms to convert it to PDF, HTML  or indeed many other formats.

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Tags:
XML Tools joomla documentation DocBook
Geoffrey Chapman

Invoking window.onload multiple time.

Whilst developing our latest component ‘IP Mapper’ I encountered a problem that is possibly known to many but not previously to me.  For that reason decided to make this blog entry.

I was generating javascript code which made a call at the end to the ‘window.load event’.  The code worked perfectly when it was only present once.  However when present more than once only the last call actually worked.

Why did I need it more than once?  Well the code was generated for a specific module, and because the modules could each have very different parameters specified, I had to tailor the javascript for each specific module hence the slightly different code, but each has a different ‘window.onload event’ function call.

I discovered this post by Robert Hahn which describes a solution which I have implemented.

The solution:

function makeDoubleDelegate(function1, function2) {
    return function() {
        if (function1)
            function1();
        if (function2)
            function2();
    }
}
window.onload = makeDoubleDelegate(window.onload, myNewFunction );
Works a treat.
Tags:
joomla Javascript
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