iris lines designs

I'm preparing notes for the html / css class I teach at the Marlboro College Graduate School and at the same time helping a colleague troubleshoot a ready-made Joomla! template.  

Needing to override a styling rule, there are many possible ways to make a rule more specific without using !important!

Firebug (Firefox extension) and CSSEdit (part of Espresso package from MacRabbit) are two tools that will help you identify the style rules currently  in play.   Of course, you could just edit the stylesheet and make changes to the rule directly,  but sometimes you want to keep all of your custom styles separate, in which case you may need to increase the specificity of the selector.

It happens sometimes that you just need one or two old addresses , or shortened addresses to be mapped to a current url.

Adding a few lines of code to the .htaccess file just might be the fix you need.  These might be actual file names for a static website, or a Joomla  generated url or Wordpress permalink.

Here's the syntax:

I'm working on a project where Google currently has over 9000 indexed entries,  most of which are comments on a K2 article accidentally left open to comments by the previous developer.

According to the instructions at Google Webmaster Tools, the "remove url" tool is not to be used except in urgent situations where private data has been shared and that using the "remove url" tool otherwise may hurt the site.

How then to get Google to crawl the indexed pages (which were removed months ago!)  and discover that they return 404 errors?

On a site using the Joomla Bamboo template Pure, I was having trouble with footer not clearing the sidebar.  I discovered that a custom html module with just a non-breaking space in the bottom position would fix the problem.  I didn't mind the dark banner that stretched across the screen and I was willing to live with this work around  (having tried all kinds of clears, etc. on the footer module.)

Then I discovered that that "fix"  didn't fix it in PC browsers:  Firefox and IE8.   Consulting the joomla bamboo forum I found a similar issue with a suggestion to be sure images had explicit heights.   I added heights to my flickr and facebook modules and the problem was solved.   The PC browsers were apparently not reading the heights declared for the iframes used by these modules.    And the template seemed to need to calculate a total height for the sidebar.

I have a site that started its life in 1.7.0.  After upgrading to 1.7.3 I lost control of the order of menu items.   Numbering and saving didn't work.  Tweaking with the blue arrows only worked in some places, and then didn't seem to stick.  I "solved" the problem by using the MOVE function at the bottom of the menu items manager page, selecting an item and moving it to the same menu -- this would add it at the bottom of the list.   I repeated until all were in the order they had been in before the upgrade to 1.7.3.

Searching the joomla forum I found a few related posts in this thread:

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=579&t=636152&p=2615670#p2615670

>>Infograf and I seem to have found the problem! It is a problem with JUpgrade - the column "ordering" in table "_menu" is filled with different numbers - it should be just zero's as the ordering of the menu items is drawn from the columns "lgt" and "rgt".

They then give the sql command to set all to zero.   I can't paste the code here just now.

Many in the forum were pointing at jUpgrade as the source of this problem and someone uploaded a mini component to do the above sql task.

I'm preparing a talk for JoomlaDay NYC on Alternative Layouts and Custom Menu Item Types.  There had been so many posts on the joomla.org forum about these new capabilites of Joomla 1.6 and 1.7,  and so many were complaining that the "feature" simply didn't work, I was getting a bit worried about the presentation.   I had proved them working back in the spring for a presenation at Joomla Day New England, but had things changed in the subsequent versions?

Finally last week I had a chance to put them all through their paces and the good news is that Alternative Layouts and Custom Menu Item Types DO indeed work --  for all kinds of Joomla items:   articles, contacts, weblinks, and category displays like blogs and lists.

The ONE Joomla entity where my template overrides (which worked) could not be turned into Alternative Layouts OR  Custom Menu Item Types  was the com_content layout for Categories.

The following rule was in the stylesheet for a Joomla component I use: 

    div.thumbs_div a:hover, a:active, a:focus{
    background-color: transparent !important;
    }

Do you spot the syntax error which caused me no end of grief?

I finally did!

Szaki Table is a Joomla Extension that allows sorting a table by any column header.

I used it on a client's site to make a list of educational opportunities sortable by date, location, type.   All was well until we added a column for cost and entered cost in US Dollars using the $ sign.

The entire table was replicated in the cell with the $!  

I've uploaded my PPT presentation "What's New in Templates with Joomla! 1.6"  as a .pdf file.

I've also uploaded a .txt file of all of the snippets for a basic template. 

This topic came up on the Joomla New England list and Terry posted the solution:

In case anyone needs to know, what worked was to split the FBML version of the code in two. That is, paste the script tag at the bottom of the head tag in the template HTML, then paste the rest of the code into the module (or article). In other words: