Macrotone Blogs

We have never really taken to using an Integrated Development Environment tool (IDE) for product development.  This is nothing against IDE’s per se, just that over the years we have used a lot of tools, some good, some bad, and have found that just when one starts getting productive with them, they suddenly stop being supported.  We could name (but won’t) numerous tools that fall into that category.  A lot end up being taken over by a certain well known ‘computer software vendor’ who then milks them for the support fees, but never develops them, before finally dropping them. This then leave one ‘high and dry’ and forced to change to another tools.

We have been looking at a small ‘opportunity’ which we discovered when we were emailing material such as an ‘article’ or Issue Tracker ‘issue’ from our Joomla system.

The problem is quite simple to explain since it can be caused by the content editor that is forced to use relative URLs.

This can be resolved by creating a new profile in the editor (such as JCE) which is configured to use absolute urls and then assign the profile to the particular component where absolute URLs are needed.

There is a small note on it for JCE which explains how to do this in more detail.

For some time I have been experiencing a few problems with the changing  of formatting within articles etc.  Typically these showed themselves as repeating space characters being converted to '’non breaking spaces’ (&nbsp). and then after saving a second time being converted to ‘A caret’ characters.

Web searches showed that many others have seen these types of problems as well, although there were no definitive solutions, despite many suggestions that didn’t work when we tried them.

Other examples we have seen include occurrences such as the removal of <br> tags by <p> tags enclosing a non breaking space character were also seen.

These tend to become very annoying over time so we think we might now have a solution that seems to work for us.

To resolve <br> & <br clear="all" /> tags getting deleted or converted to <p></p>

Go to components >> JCE >> Editor Global Configuration >> Formatting and Display >> Container element >> Change to : No container and parameter on enter

To resolve Contiguous (repeated) spaces getting deleted.

Go to components >> JCE >> Editor Global Configuration >> Cleanup and output >> Entity Encoding >> Change to Named

To ensure all <br> tags are retained over HTML cleanup.

Go to components >> JCE >> Editor Profile>>Default >> Editor Parameters >> Advanced>>Extended Elements>>Add: br

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.