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'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:

Two years ago I blogged about a solution to have different "read-more" links for different sections of a website.

With Joomla! 1.6 it would be possible to have two variations of the php file that generates the blog,  one that would include the words "read-more" and one that wouldn't.   Since this affects the display in the blog "page", not the individual articles, this layout alternative would actually need to be an alternative menu item type.

Here's how you would do it: