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If you have ever wanted to use images as menu items without hacking the main menu module this is for you. You can do this all in the template. First turn on output buffering, then send the buffer to a callback function which will find the menu links and swap them out for your image links. Here are the steps. Open the index.php file for the template you want to use and right before the HTML tag put in the php function ob_start(”callback”) – callback being the name of the function you will use – and at the very end of the file put in ob_end_flush(). Now just include the callback function somewhere before you start the buffer and you’re done. Here’s what the function does: First it will load info on every menu item. Then for each menu item it will check the parameters to see if a menu image has been assigned – in the administrator, choose to edit the menu item and under parameters assign an image from the images/stories directory. Usually if an image is assigned to that parameter it will show up to either the left or right of the link. This changes that. If an image is assigned the function will create the text link to search for and the new image link then it executes the swap. After it runs through every menu item it just returns the buffer which prints out to the browser. Pretty basic and you’ll probably have to do some tweaking to get it just right for yourself but it’s a nice way to use images without hacking any core files. Oh, and if you’re just looking to use non web safe fonts then couple this method with a text-to-image conversion script and dynamically generate images from the menu item name. You could also use this with content headings or module headings or just about anything. Have fun. Here’s the callback function, put it above ob_start():
Congratulations to PICnetters Pradeep Suthram and Ryan Belisle for all their hard work, and Anu Palan and Phoebe Lee from the Women’s Edge Coalition!
For more information about their pricing for organizations of all shapes and sizes, check out their pricing page here. We at PICnet are pretty strong open source supporters. Now, I wouldn’t call any of us open source evangelists, which would describe some open source proponents that believe in using open source technology for its own sake. Instead, we believe that there’s often tools needed for different jobs, and open source tools tend to be tools that can help both the individual organization as well as the larger community. When it comes to business mentors, I wouldn’t put Robert Kiyosaki (aka Rich Dad’s son) at the top of my list. However, in cruising the iTunes store recently I came across his podcast and found an interesting segment from a focus group of his. In this clip, he brings forward the discussion of the information economy, and how it differs from the industrial economy. More specifically, he talks about the differences between castle builders and canon builders. For instance, if we put Microsoft into the castle, who tries hard to build walls to protect their intellectual property rights, then the people firing the canons at the castle are the open source developers who are throwing away the old ideas of intellectual property rights. If people continue to fire canons at the castles, the castles are forced to spend more time protecting their investments (i.e. hiring lawyers, patent attorneys, etc), whereas smaller and more nible canon builders can focus on the cutting edge technology to keep feeding the market’s needs. I’m not sure I’d put PICnet in either boat, but it’s an interesting clip to watch and think about. What does your organization or company do? Build castles or canons? Where’s the future? As a the newest of the PICnetters, my blog postings are bound to be a little pedestrian, at least until I get up to speed. But one thing has struck me immediately about the Joomla system: its philosophy. As an internet user — and, in a distant previous life, programmer — I always thought that a web site was a collection of web pages, and that those web pages, as a set, constituted the content. Think about pages, I figured, and the content would flow therefrom. But Joomla! works better. Forget individual web pages. The internet is about delivering content to users — showing stuff to people — and focusing on the delivery vessel, the page, is wrongheaded. We all know that “form follows function” — or, as Frank Lloyd Wright claimed, “Form follows function — that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.” Within Joomla!, architecture is driven by content; pages exist because the content does; you decide on what the content should be, and the pages follow naturally. At the risk of sounding overblown, they are “one, joined in a spiritual union.” There comes a time when your designer decides its time to dive into learning Joomla templates. One of the things that will likely confuse any designer right away is understanding what options are available for loading content into the template. Below is a handy reference list of all the functions available to designers.
Now these functions are good to know, but what’s even more confusing is figuring out how the modules you embed in your template will be displayed. For this, look no further than the Joomla help manual. The different parameters for displaying module can be found in the help manual and below. Take this: mosLoadModules( $position_name [, $style] ) …and add the following in place of $style:
We encourage you all to take a look at the new site and learn more about this wonderful organization. This site is fully loaded with Flash, multi-lingual components, a variety of user interaction points, and much more. We hope you enjoy viewing as much as we enjoyed building it.
This is problematic though, because now mosCE is going to make your WYSIWYG background the same color of the body tag in your template: bright orange! Before your administrator goes crazy trying to type white text on an orange background, PICnetter Chris Garvis found an awesome solution: add the following to your template_css.css file: /* Style of mosCE editor */ Viola, your editor now has a nice white background to drop your text on. After a few minutes of banging heads against walls trying to determine why a blogcategory was not showing a category’s beautiful description we’d created for it, we determined that in order to show category descriptions in Joomla, you need to have at least one item in the category. Give your category some content articles, and it will give you a description.
Laura collaborated with Brett Bonfield to create Comparing Open Source CMSes: Joomla, Drupal, and Plone which was released this morning. This is a great read, an even keel and unbiased reporting of their views on the big three. I think we in Joomla can learn a lot from this report, and look forward to your comments and further review. I think they hit the Joomla difference on the head when they wrote: Joomla strives for power in simplicity. Its programmers believe that anyone with a bit of technical know-how should have no problem setting up and maintaining a website. They have created a tool that is friendly, comparatively easy to get started with, and prioritizes ease of use. |
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