Macrotone June 2014 Newsletter
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| Newsletter June 2014 | ||
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Planning the site for the futureAs we prepare this newsletter we are already planning a new site update and a move to using a new template. With the move of Joomla and the industry in general to using Bootstrap, we have decided that we will follow the trend. However we will be using Bootstrap 3, rather than the 'older' version 2 of the products. It seemed sensible that if one is going to migrate, one should use the latest version, rather than an older one. It does place one more at the bleeding edge of course, but that is part of the learning process.
One of the things we soon discovered when creating Joomla components was that the front end of the site required specific care since there was a variety of different templates and template 'platforms' in use and that it was very difficult to have a 'display' that was suitable for them all. There have also been several recent 'requests for assistance' that specifically are related to the template that is in use on the users' site. There are two ways in which one can address this problem. The first is to implement a sub set of a 'framework' such that is called independently of what ever front end template was in use. This approach is adopted by a few vendors, usually adopting a Bootstrap (sub) framework to ensure that their products display correctly. This can lead to a 'larger' footprint, something that may not necessarily be desirable for some sites. The second way is to use template overrides. We have carried out a number of tests and have all our products displaying nicely with a few template overrides. We intend to product a short article upon template overrides and add a section in the Issue Tracker design guide specifically related to Issue Tracker overrides.
We anticipate that by the time the next Newsletter is dispatched (August 2014) we will have migrated to the new site template, assuming that we do not find anything unexpected in our tests..
Use of a front end EditorWe encountered a problem after a recent Joomla upgrade that resulted in problems using a front end editor in Joomla. This impacted anything that one would use a WYSIWIG editor for, including the editing of articles as well as editing Issue Tracker issues. As the problem was not specific to our component(s) we know that it is a generic problem. The problem is observed with almost all of the 'standard' Joomla editors, but TinyMCE is/was particularly impacted, and also JCE, which is build on top of TinyMCE. Typically Javascript errors such as 'TinyMCE not defined' or 'WFEditor not defined' are seen in the Java console. Extensive tests involving the changing of various setting, re-installation, changing profiles etc. all failed to produce a resolution. There are many similar reported problems on the web, and having tried them all (even the ones that we were sure wouldn't have any impact) were getting very frustrated.
The strange thing is that within the back end all of the editors work as expected. It also only seemed to impact certain users, and it was also peculiar in that this only occurred on our live site. If we took a backup of the live site and restored it upon a different machine, the front end editors would work perfectly, indicating something strange perhaps with our live site system configuration. This is something that we cannot really modify since it is located upon a hosted system, over which we have little control.
We decided to look at this problem from a different viewpoint and have investigated a separate 3rd Party editor and this has proved very productive, so we have decided to share this with our readers. The editor we (thus) currently use is named RedactorJS. It is listed in the JED, and has proved to be a very productive and fast javascript editor. Our users can choose this editor by editing their user profiles. If you are looking for a good editor for your site then this is one I would recommend as worthy of investigation.
Removal of sh404SEF plug-in for DiscussionsAs announced in an earlier newsletter we have removed our listing for our sh404SEF plug-in for the Discussions component. This decision is a direct result of our ceasing to use the Discussions component upon our site, thus at the same time removing any reason for any continued support. The plug-in has been downloaded several hundred times and we never received a single report, good or bad in the two years since it was written. We will, for the time being leave it available for download on our site, but will at some time in the future remove it.
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Issue Tracker News Release 1.6.2 announced.A little bit later than originally planned due to the complexity of some of the changes, this release builds upon the earlier 1.6.1 release and adds more requested changes.
There are numerous small changes implemented resulting in improved usability and functionality.The list is quite long and they are listed in the 'Changelog'. The Design documentation has been updated, specifically with more information about the alternative 'alias' formats and the changes as a result of a complete review of the handling of date/time fields.
The changes include the following:
The fixes included in the release are mainly minor and impacting some of the lesser used features. These include
The above is a small selection of the changes made in the release, which due to some code simplification has also been reduced its size.
Work has already started on a planned 1.6.3 release which will continue to implement more user requested enhancements. It will also address any new problems discovered after the current release was made available.
IP Mapping News Releases 1.2.2 and 1.2.3 made available.The 1.2.2 minor release implemented a few extra features such as the extending the recent change for truncating Akeeba log to web invoked cron task and adding some additional DEBUG logging entries to the mapping module. One other change was to automatically update any other records with unset location data for a specified IP addresses, when one of the IP address location is manually updated.
A small opportunity was also discovered and fixed when a Bootstrap template is being used for the front end of the site, and the mapper module is being displayed within tabs. Other changes include making use of the latest version of the Google Cluster Marker javascript code.
There were also a few specific fixes in this release. The most important of which was resolving a back end URL problem when the IE browser is used. Other fixes included correcting the list views 'check-all' toggle for Joomla 3.x installations and also correct a problem when trying to delete individual log items.
The 1.2.3 release update corrected a problem with the update of other records introduced in the 1.2.2 release (see above). It also added a few new module options.
The first of these was a new a 'debug' logging ability used to track down some of the more 'hard to find' problems, particularly with modules.Its usage is suggested to be only at the specific request of the 'support team', or for those of an adventurous nature.
One requested feature was for finer control of the columns displayed in the table, which is optionally displayed below the generated maps. It is now possible to define which columns one wished to display,and is particularly useful when the module is located in a side bar upon the screen. Onother option is to display the 'referrer' field as a link, instead of just as text.
One problem resolved was the use of the component upon sites that,for possible security reasons, do not enable the use of the PHP 'allow_url_fopen' function. The component now detects this parameter setting and if not enabled will use the Curl mechanism to populate the geolocation information from the IPInfoDB database.
The documentation has been updated for this release.
EU Cookie Plugin News Release 1.1.2.This minor update announced just after our last newsletter was sent, adds a new option to specify the height of the image over the acceptance button, a change to the image specifications so that they are now relative rather than absolute addresses and a tidy up of the plug-in credits.
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MiscellaneousTranslations
We are pleased to announce a new Spanish translation for Password Control since the last newsletter. In addition we would like to thank Stefan Froschauer for his work on the German translation of Password Control.
There is also a new German translation courtesy of Klaus Gebhardt for the IP Mapping component.
Lastly but not least we would like to personally mention extradragon, and thank them for working on new Romanian translations not only for our Password Control Plug-in, but also for IP Mapping, Issue Tracker and JAudit components..
For current details of availability of translations, please check our web site. A list of all our translators can be seen here.
We would like to repeat that all our translators provide their services free of charge, and to thank them on behalf of all our users who make use of their work.
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER This newsletter is published by Macrotone Consulting Ltd, which provides IT services to its clients and creates business tools: Copyright 2014 Macrotone Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. Designated trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.
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