Thursday, 13 December 2012

Adding confirmation dialog to cloaked email adress in Joomla’s Community Builders ComProfiler Pro

07:10 | Posted by | | Edit Post
Long title, yes. Easy solution? No. This bugger of a script takes a dash of re-engineering and a sprinkle of bravery. Community Builder’s plugin called ComProfiler Pro is a great add-on to make your joomla site have a beautiful directory of people (or employees) but it has an evil side where it will not agree well with hacks to it’s structure.

Recently I had to change this extension so that it would meet the Law Society of Canada’s requirement to have a disclaimer before emailing a law professional, basically stating that just because they emailed them, that it does not mean they are a client. We had to rush this before, so we added a simple old-fashion alert box to accomplish this. It was hard at first because you have to work around the built-in email cloaking of Community Builder, which is not related to the one built into Joomla.

So, to summarise I did this simple injection of code

$legal = "\'";
$legal .= "Please note that communication with the firm via email does not necessarily mean that you are a client of the firm. You are not a client of the firm until you have received a written agreement from the firm to perform legal services on your behalf. Accordingly, you should not send confidential information to the firm via email until such a written agreement is in place and the firm is under a duty to keep this information confidential. In rare cases, our e-mail filtering software may eliminate legitimate email from clients unnoticed. Therefore, if your email contains important instructions, please make sure that we acknowledge receipt of those instructions. ";
$legal .= "\'";
$replacement = '...';

$js = ' {'

. "\n var prefix='ma'+'il'+'to';"
. "\n var path = 'onclick=\"alert(" . $legal . ")\" hr'+ 'ef'+'=';"
. "\n var addy". $rand ."= '". @$mail[0] ."'+ '@' +'". implode( "' + '.' + '", $mail_parts ) ."';"
;

This did the job perfectly and gave us the simple dialogue box with-out any styling.


 

Now, I am a perfectionist and I did not like this at all and I needed to do better, so I went on a hunt for the best idea I could. I fell in love with a script called Noty, which uses JQuery to display elegant animated notification boxes. But it ran into a problem, it was not impacting enough. As much as I enjoyed adding it to the site, It needed to make sure people understood and did not miss the message. So the hunt continued.

Then I found an older but more impacting formula called Easy Confirm Dialog, again using the all powerful JQuery. Implementing it was Easy as it’s title says, and all I needed to do was add the Class to the same spot I did the alert and the cloaking picked it up perfectly. The I needed to make sure I was carrying over the url of the link, using the attr(‘href’) function after the window.open



$("#yesno").easyconfirm({locale: { title: 'Please note that communication with the firm via email does not necessarily mean that you are a client of the firm. You are not a client of the firm until you have received a written agreement from the firm to perform legal services on your behalf. Accordingly, you should not send confidential information to the firm via email until such a written agreement is in place and the firm is under a duty to keep this information confidential. In rare cases, our e-mail filtering software may eliminate legitimate email from clients unnoticed. Therefore, if your email contains important instructions, please make sure that we acknowledge receipt of those instructions.', button: ['No','Yes']}});
$("#yesno").click(function() {
window.open($(this).attr('href'),"_self")
});




js = ‘{'


. "\n var prefix='ma'+'il'+'to';"
. "\n var path = 'id=\"yesno\" hr'+ 'ef'+'=';"
. "\n var addy". $rand ."= '". @$mail[0] ."'+ '@' +'". implode( "' + '.' + '", $mail_parts ) ."';"


Without adding any CSS for this, the Default template worked perfectly, sizes with the window and you can’t miss it.
 

 

 
Monday, 10 December 2012

Cheese Flavored Snow

09:28 | Posted by | | Edit Post

So just for a little fun for the holidays and because we just got pounded with some, here are some good snow falling scripts to use with your websites. They may not be plugins for Wordpress or Joomla they should be easy enough to implement into your templates to add that bit of cheer for your viewers!

It’s so cheesy, but it's so much fun! Horray for JQuery Snow!



http://www.somethinghitme.com/2012/12/08/snowfall-1-6/
Great script with many options, I love how you can configure the snow to stay and collect on-top of a DIV. This could make a nice effect for creative designs.

http://www.schillmania.com/projects/snowstorm/
Nice big balls of snow, decent animation. Nice effect where the snow melts, but the downside is that the scripts pauses when click out of the page. So if you are dual monitor, looks wierd to see time freeze like that.

http://www.tutsgeek.com/download/jquery-Christmas-animation/index.html
Clean individual animations for each ball drawn. It's a nice script if you were to use it as a background effect behind a series of dividers.

http://www.wonderolie.nl/examples/jquerysnow/
Retro 8Bit Blocks. This one doesn't look much like snow, but I love it. If you are making a retro type of design it could have many uses. Even outside of the holiday season.

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex3/snow.htm
Many of have used or seen this over the years, and my list would not be complete without the Old School Dynamic Drive method.

Thursday, 6 December 2012

Picking a CMS (Content Management System)

04:32 | Posted by | | Edit Post

When you think of adding a website to your business, what is it that you think of? Most of my clients when we first talk about the elements of their website, the usual words that come out is “Easy to update” or “Something I can upload pictures too”.
I just recently got back into commercial website development. Back when I did it before in the late 90’s we did everything from scratch. Granted, web pages didn’t look as good back then and we didn’t have to worry about different CSS variants and the lack of forgiveness from Mozilla (I miss Netscape). So when I restarted working in this new environment I was resistant to use a Content Management System.
Then someone introduced me to Joomla and I fell in love, hours and hours I would have spent on coding were saved! And the features! And the Security! Needless to say I was sold, and it made websites easier to sell to clients.
Right now there are 3 big popular players. Although there are more, I will not cover them but please feel free to comment and let us know your thoughts about the others available out there. I also like to cover these ones because they are open source and GPL, which as a web developer brings our cost lower to the client.
Wordpress (Wordpress.org)
For the client side, Wordpress is the easiest to update. It is fairly idiot proof and full of fun components. Also on the developer side, it is also one of the simpler ones to program add-ons for so it becomes an over-all favourite and is more widely used. When it comes to moving from version to version the program is forgiving to previous components and relieves the need to constantly update the modules as you upgrade.
This CMS is designed for bloggers, but many have found the ways to manipulate it to be an excellent framework for websites. This is where Wordpress can be tedious. It has it specific format of how content should be displayed and can only be customized so much.
For people looking for one page sites, simple content or selling one product or service, this Is the way to go. This is also for people with less technical knowledge who plan on changing their content frequently.
Head over to this article to see popular sites built on wordpress
http://www.zoopmedia.com/websites-that-use-wordpress-1674/
Drupal (Drupal.org)
I can’t speak too much about Drupal because I have not used it much, but from what I do know about It, Drupal can be very powerful. It is more of a framework system than a CMS but still embraces the same concept.
Drupal is up there with Joomla as a more powerful system that was design to for making full websites, not blogs. I have seen some neat things done with Drupal, and although it is not my personal first choice it should never be underestimated. In-fact the only reason I did not get into it is because it was under a code freeze (http://drupal.org/node/578446) when I got back into web development, so it never came up as a framework candidate. But when Drupal 8 comes out next yet and will have all the advancements needed for mobile use I think I may revisit it.
Head over to this article for popular sites built with Drupal
http://artatm.com/2010/02/showcase-of-popular-website-developed-using-drupal/
Joomla (Joomla.org)
Although I am trying to give my fair opinions on each of these, I build most of my sites in Joomla. I find it developer friendly and the style of PHP it is written in matches mine so I find it very easy to manipulate. Just like Drupal, Joomla can be very powerful and you can build some beautiful sites on it. It also has the design that it can be a website with a blog implemented. I have done this for a couple of clients and it has worked well for this.
Joomla’s downside is when you need to move from version to version. The framework can change so much that your old components may or may not work when you upgrade. So you have to take a lot of caution. This becomes disappointing because the new version of Joomla (3.0 http://www.joomla.org/3/en) has exactly what every developer needs right now to make a modern, mobile friendly site but will need to go back to the drawing board and test everything before doing the upgrade.
Head over to this article to see popular sites built with Joomla
http://magazine.joomla.org/issues/Issue-July-2012/item/800-10-most-popular-websites-using-Joomla
 
Wednesday, 5 December 2012

Why use stock photos with your blog?

07:00 | Posted by | | Edit Post

When I think of stock photos, I always chuckle about the Family Guy cut away (http://youtu.be/ynvEwCxNpYM) where they make fun of them. As funny as I may think this is, it is important to have that pizazz added to your article.

I have read many of blog posts that the content is good, but there was no attraction to read the initial article. As a coder, I am usually only interested in the goods, but there are sites out there that will add that nice photo at the beginning of the “bore-storm” ahead that will at least get you reading the first paragraph.

This was recently discovered by me when I was in a course for social media and found that when we had to do the blog posts on the ning.com community, I was more prone to look at the ones with a pretty picture. So I did it with mine, and no matter how interesting or uninteresting my article was I was still getting readership.

Now for most bloggers out there, they will not go out and jump on a million-dollar membership with istockphoto.com or shuttershock.com. Although they do have a very nice selection, they are more for the money making websites and using it where paying the royalties for the image counts. For us, we are looking at that one time use and are not using it for any money making branding.

Free of charge, Royalty-free stock images sites is where we turn to now. Two great ones are stock.xchng (http://www.sxc.hu/) and stockvault.com. not only do they have a great selection of images to use in most categories, but they also come in nice high resolutions. And if you are handy with Photoshop, or even Microsoft Paint (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows7/Resize-a-picture-using-Paint) you can get them looking just the way you need for your post.

What is great about these free sites is that it is open to use for purposes such as this. The “free use” extends just to the point of you making money off it. If you were to use this to create your branding, sell a product or service, or my favourite is using it as a stock image in a template that you are selling this is where the red flag comes up and you need to pay to author some sort of royalty.

So the next time you are making a post, just make sure that you add something there to make it that little bit more attractive. In these days of short attention spans, it is a world of help to keep your readers interested.
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