JCalPro Multiple Recent Events

This isn't even worth writing about, but it took me forever to figure out, so it's just a reminder.

Using JCalPro and the latest events module is pretty much easy. Just have to keep track of your category IDs and calendar IDs. I wanted mine pretty short, so I turned off everything but Start Time, Category Name and Event Date. I turned on Show Month Separators cause I think it looks nice. I used a <br /> to separate events.

One thing cool I found out was at the bottom, the box for "Specific Itemid for displaying the module" is what controls where the link goes that says "View Full Calendar." Put the calendar ID in there if it's not going to the right one.

So my main problem was, my events weren't showing up! It would just say "There are no upcoming events currently scheduled." I read support forums and almost all said it was a problem with versions. Well, that wasn't it; I'm using Joomla 1.5.10, PHP 5 and JCalPro 2.1.5. I put in some more test dates, and guess what, they showed up! After thinking about it a while, I noticed it was only the recurring events that weren't showing up. Not even the parent events. Hmmm. I looked through the module settings again and saw my problem. I don't know how I passed over it so many times before:

Speed Site Design

Today was a practice in speed design. We found out this morning a group needs a site by Wednesday. We have monday off. It needs to go through QA first so today's the day! 

It's almost done. I did mostly content and a coworker did design. We have 3 pages of content, one page of videos (ustream), photo gallery (Simple Image Gallery), a blog (IDoBlog) and a forum (Kunena).

I had some issues with Kunena, but finally figured them out. At first, I was using an old version with Legacy mode turned on. It sucked, but the beta version wouldn't allow me to post announcements. I upgraded anyway cause I was having some user issues. Registration link gave me a 403 error! It took me forever to find it, but finally I realized since I'm just using Joomla's user management, I probably needed to enable registration in the Global Configurations. D'oh!

Since we had a blog and a forum, I learned a bit about Joomla's ACLs. It seems special will give access only to author level or above. Perfect. 

Get Your Head out of Your...

Department.

I just had a meeting with a HUGE group of people regarding their new website. I've put a lot of work into it, it's a pretty big department and their old site was so disorganized and convoluted. I've tried to find information myself on it in the past, and it was no easy task.

So at this meeting, these people could not get past the fact that the website wasn't designed the way their departments are. Every time I would show them a section, I was met with shaking heads and someone piping up "That's not how the department is organized." By the third or fourth time, I was ready to respond "You know what, lady, the user doesn't give two shits about your department! They just want their information." Luckily, I have an awesome boss who explained it to them in better terms.

Of the way too many people at that meeting, there was like on lady who gets it.

As a user of the internet, it was really hard for me. Have they never seen websites before? Have they never been frustrated because someone organized a website poorly. Apparently not.

On a related note, I've been following caseorganic on Twitter, who is/was at the webvisions conference tweeting about similar topics. It was pretty cool.

Template Overriding

I wanted to do a category list layout for these couple pages, but I didn't want them to be numbered. It looked really bad, especially for a list of only 8 or so articles. I found some code to remove the numbers, but I really wanted a bulleted lists. That guy's code is a little different than the original default_items.php file, but not too much. I managed to find the foreach section and replaced the table pieces with li s. I'm pretty sure it'll only work correctly in the instance where your category only shows titles, but blah blah blah. That's not really the point of the story.

The real point is that in that forum article, I learned about template overrides. I've done a lot of hacking apart code since I started using Joomla. Now I've learend I can do it on a per template basis without touching the core Joomla code. Yay! 

Revelation (aka: duh *facepalm*)

Yesterday, I was complaining about the lack of a good php module/plugin for Joomla. Today I realized I'm a moron.

To use php code, what I have been doing is making it in an editor with syntax highlighting, then copy/pasting it into the Custom Code module. It worked, but it was a pain.

It may have taken a while, but I finally figured out: I can just use the Custom Code module to INCLUDE THE PHP FILE!!! I know, brilliant right.

Ok, I'm gonna go hide now *ducks in shame*

Long Hiatus

So yeah. I actually pretty much forgot about this blog. Then one day, I had to look up something and remembered I'd done it before and "Oh yeah! I made a blog!" Anywho.. I'm back now. I have a new job (after the unceremonious departure from my old job. You know, one of those "oh hey, it's your last day today" "What?! it's 3:30! You couldn't have told me this morning... or yesterday... or TWO WEEKS AGO.") No no, I'm not bitter. Water under the bridge. 

So yes. New job. It's fun. Not as much playing as my old job, but still enjoyable. I'm not all alone! And I'm like, a webmaster. That's it. No server administration. No support. It's like a real job :o oh yeah, AND I have a cubicle. And old hardware/os. Still trying to get a replacement keyboard. This one is gross and the ctrl and shift keys often stick. Ewwww.

We use Joomla. I like and hate it. Sometimes it's hard not having complete freedom over your pages. But it's cool. I can usually figure out ways around it. It's nice having something we can train the secretaries to use. 

I'm working on a big project right now. One thing cool about Joomla is that it (obviously) already has a database, so it's no work to add new tables for, you know, table stuff. I saved myself having to make 200 pages that way. Good thing I got here, or there would have been 200 pages on this site. 

One thing that would be nice would be to either a) be able to put php code into an article page,b) have some freaking syntax highlighting in the Custom Code module or c) be able to include a php file into an article page. I'm ok with any of those options. There are some plugins or modules to do stuff like it, but they either do it poorly or insecurely. 

Ok. Back to work.