How-To Tutorials

WordPress As I mentioned before, WordPress is the biggest scoring free service that you can use. It is also the only one that doesn't allow you to spam their system and use it just for promotional actions. All the other services mentioned earlier allow you to monetize your blog or web site. Some share a portion of their revenue as well. So, if you want to make some money on the side, these services will provide you with the possibility to do so. WordPress doesn't allow you to build blogs just for Search Engine Optimization and I quote: We have a very low tolerance for blogs created purely for Search Engine Optimization or commercial purposes, machine-generated blogs, and will continue to nuke them. So if that's what you're interested in, WordPress is not for you. A self-hosted solution would be much more appropriate for you; suitable hosts can be found at http://www.wordpress.org/ hosting. Also see the following text taken from http://support.wordpress.com/advertising: This might be just one of the reasons that Google loves WORDPRESS.COM blogs. So how is it possible to use WORDPRESS.COM to promote your website? Actually, you don't. On this service you are not going the promote your site in a way that you can do on the other services. On WORDPRESS.COM you truly build a blog or site containing pages with true value to the visitors of that blog. You can create an About page where you put a link to your main website and in that way show the readers where to get more information. You can also put a link to your website in the link section (Blogroll) together with a few other relevant links that contain valid information. Blogging on WordPress and your ranking If you cannot promote your web site in a big way then what is the point of creating a blog on WORDPRESS.COM? A blog on WordPress can rank highly for the topic that you are blogging about and will give you some SEO love through those rankings. What is more important is the fact that you can take a special topic from your main web site's topic and create a blog around that. If you write your blog posts well and start to rank on that topic you will be seen as an authority on that topic and people will want to know more about you. That is the main reason to invest time to blog on WORDPRESS.COM to be recognized as an authority in your field of expertise. As you took only one topic out of all the topics that your site is about, you can do it again for another topic as well. You could also see these blogs as a collection of topic silos that create an array of highly related web sites that point to yours. This kind of link building takes time, and a lot of it! Is it worth it? Yes most certainly, and in more ways than one. With blogging you can achieve the following: An authority status if you do it right More traffic to your web site Better rankings in the search engines More insight into what the visitors of your web site are looking for To interact with other people having interest in the same topic as you Fun in writing and that will reflect on your site as you want to create more content on that site as well There is also a downside that you have to consider—it takes time away from building content on your main site and you have to cover more locations to maintain in the beginning. If you use that blog to write some timeless quality content on a niche part of your main site you will find out that you can stop maintaining those blogs after a short period of time. Remember, these are valid blogs to build incoming links to your main site! Digging deeper into WORDPRESS.COM blogs Creating a blog on WordPress is also very simple, go to WORDPRESS.COM and get a blog. Wait! Don't go yet! You need a few guidelines to start. Your initial user account name is going to be the first part of your URL, so name it right and remember, you cannot use a "-" in your username. My first account was seo4joomla so what I got was seo4joomla.wordpress.com. When you are logged in to WORDPRESS.COM and you type in the URL with a new keyword that you want (if it is not taken); you will get the option to add that blog to your account so that you can manage all of your WordPress.COM blogs from one place. Think about the title of your blog, if you want to change it later you can do that in the settings panel. Once you have your new blog, start cleaning. Delete the sample post and the comment along with it. Delete all the links in the blogroll (unless you are going to write about WordPress). Change the base post category from Uncategorized to a relevant topic name. Change the name of the links category from Blogroll to your most relevant keyword. Delete the About page and create a new one with the keywords of your blog in the title. That way your URL (page slug in WordPress) is containing the same keywords. Choose a nice theme layout that fits your topic, and if possible use a customized header. Using a customized header will give your site a slightly different look from the other WORDPRESS.COM web sites. Change the tagline in the general settings and start writing the way you do on your web site!   Using free blogging services As you saw, there are several blogging platforms and free web site building platforms that you can use to promote your web site. There are a lot more out there on the Internet, but you need to look for the ones that rank well in the search engines before you put your valued time into building a linking "empire". These services are free of charge and sometimes live on the revenue that comes from the blog content they host. If you don't want to be on such a platform where there are advertisements around your writing, don't use them. If you are afraid that you can lose your blog on such sites look for a way to make backups (for example, on WORDPRESS.COM you can use the Export function). How to minimize your blog writing time Keeping content fresh and up-to-date on all the blogs that you build is not that difficult. If you focus on blogging on your own web site, you should try to integrate the RSS Feed from your web site into those blog pages. RSS Feeds are the best possible automatic way of updating one-to-many, so use it to your advantage. Using your best content for link building Use the best articles from your web site to get into the picture of social bookmarking web sites. Find the most visited pages and the pages with the greatest number of comments, if you have a blog on your Joomla! site. Go to bookmarking sites and bookmark your pages using your own account. There are a lot of bookmarking web sites that you can use, just make sure you send your bookmarks to at least the following: Delicous Digg Reddit Newsvine Bloglines StumbleUpon These are some of the most influential ones that count towards your search engine ranking and are a great way to get traffic. Traffic from this kind of web site will come in bursts and mostly will not span a longer time period than a few days. The real power lies in the long term effect. Writing articles for links If you like writing about your passion, you can consider writing articles and submitting them to article publishing services. People are always looking for information and, if you can provide that to them in a smart way, it will help you to gain recognition as a field expert. You don't have to write long articles, but they must be informative and should give the reader an answer to a question they might have. Write those articles and submit them to services such as: www.thewhir.com www.ideamarketers.com www.goarticles.com www.ezinearticles.com Each of those services have their own "Terms of Service" that you should read before submitting your articles. They have their quality guidelines as well. The length of the article might need to be of a certain minimum or maximum number of characters. You might not be permitted to link deeper into your web site than the top level. Get that information before you choose a service to work with. Depending on the number of webmasters that will use your articles to republish, you could get a lot more incoming links from just a few well-written articles. What you should NOT do is take an old article from your site and send it as an article to be republished. That could backfire, as the services mentioned have a clause in their "Terms of Service" stating that the article is original and not published before. You should really not republish an already submitted article on your own web site, it could give your site a duplicate content penalty as that article will be published all over the Internet (with your link in it). An alternative could be that you publish some of your articles combined and rewritten into an e-book in PDF format that you give away for free from your web site.  

eZ Webin For this article it is assumed that the eZ Webin package is installed as a frontend for our site. This package is very flexible and is usually used as a starting point for developing a new site. By default, it includes: A flexible layout Some useful custom content classes (blog, event, forum, article, and so on) Web 2.0 features, such as a tag cloud and comment functions Custom template operators In our project, we will extend and override the eZ Webin template in order to create the Packtmedia Magazine site and add some features needed for the project. We will see this step-by-step as we understand better how eZ Publish works. Overriding the standard page layout The page layout is the main template and defines the style of the entire site. To create a page layout template, we need to create a file named pagelayout.tpl and place it inside the templates folder of our design extension. As we said, we will work with eZ Webin. This extension doesn't use the standard page layout but overrides the standard page layout with its own custom behavior. We need to do the same overriding from the eZ Webin pagelayout.tpl. To override the template, we have to copy it in our design's extension folder placed in extension/packtmedia/design/magazine/templates/. Now open a shell and execute this: # cd /var/www/packtmediaproject/extension# cp /ezwebin/design/ezwebin/templates/pagelayout.tpl /packtmedia/design/magazine/templates/ We will use this new pagelayout.tpl file to implement the wireframe that we developed in the previous sections. Section for our project eZ Publish includes features for creating a particular view in order to add content objects inside specified sections. For example, if we take a look at our wireframe, we need to assign a different layout for rendering the Issue archive folder and its subfolders. To do this, we have to create a new section in the administration panel and associate it to the entire Issue archive subtree. After that, we can use the fetch functions to select the correct view for that section. Creating a new section To create a new section, we have to open our browser and from the site's backend, select the Setup tab from the top menu. We then need to navigate to the Sections link in the left-hand menu, and then click on the New section button. Next, we will create a new section called Archive and select the default Content structure value in the select menu. Now, a new Archive link will appear in the Sections list. We have to click on the + button to the left of the Archive link, and then select the Issue archive node, by selecting the relevant checkbox. After we have saved, click on the Select button. All of the Issue archive subfolders will be placed inside the Archive section. We have to remember the ID of this section, which we'll use to create the override rules. In this case, the section ID number is 6, as seen in the first screenshot in the Creating a new section section. Setting up the section permission access By default, eZ Publish creates private sections that only an administrator can access. To make a section public, we need to give read permission to anonymous users. To set up the rules, we have to go back to Setup tab on the top menu, and then click on the Role and policies link on the left-hand menu. Here, we have to click on the Edit button on the right-hand side of the Anonymous link, and then click on the New policy button. Next, select the content option in the Module field, and then click on the Grant access to one function button. Select the read option in the Function field, and then click on the Grant limited access button. Next, select the Anonymous option for the Section field. Click on the OK button, and then click on the OK button on the Edit <Anonymous> Role page. Now, the anonymous user can access the Archive section. In the next paragraph, we will use this section to create custom override rules. Customizing the page layout After we copy the pagelayout.tpl template into the new path, we have to work on it in order to create the three columns inside the content layout of the eZ Webin template. To do this, first of all, we have to remove the leftmost sidebar, along with the secondary navigation menu, inside the Archive section that we have created. Open the pagelayout.tpl file that you have copied into your favorite IDE, and take a look at the code. At line 62 we will find the following code: {if and( is_set( $content_info.class_identifier ), ezini('MenuSettings', 'HideLeftMenuClasses', 'menu.ini' )|contains($content_info.class_identifier ) )}{set $pagestyle = 'nosidemenu noextrainfo'} Here, eZ Webin hides the side menu if the content class belongs to the array returned by the ezini operator. We now need to extend the IF sentence and add a control to the section ID, by using the following code: {if or(and( is_set( $content_info.class_identifier ), ezini('MenuSettings', 'HideLeftMenuClasses', 'menu.ini' )|contains($content_info.class_identifier ) ), $module_result.section_id|eq(6))}{set $pagestyle = 'nosidemenu noextrainfo'} As we can see, this code will now check to see if the browsed section has an ID equal to 6 (that is, the archive section ID that we previously created) and if it has, will hide the unnecessary sidebar. CSS editing Luckily, the entire template code of eZ Webin is strongly semantic and all of the elements have their own IDs and classes. Thanks to this, we can change a lot of things by simply working on the CSS. By default, the CMS uses six CSSes. These are: core.css: this is the global stylesheet where all of the standard tag styles for eZ Publish are defined; usually, this file is overridden by all of the others webstyletoolbar.css: this stylesheet is imported for the frontend web toolbar that is used for editing the content pagelayout.css: this is where all of the default styles of the global pagelayout are defined content.css: this is where all the default styles of the content classes are defined site-colors.css: this file is used to override the pagelayout.css to skin a site differently classes-colors.css: this file is used to override the default styles defined by the content.css file To edit the CSS, we have to copy the original eZ Webin stylesheet from the /var/www/packtmediaproject/extension/ezwebin/design/ezwebin/stylesheets folder to our design directory and then to execute the following commands: # cd /var/www/packtmediaproject/extension/# cp -rf ezwebin/design/ezwebin/stylesheets/* packtmedia/design/magazine/stylesheets/ Now, every time that we want to change the stylesheet, we have to remember to edit the CSS files in the design/magazine/stylesheets/ directory of our extension. Creating a new style package In eZ Publish, as we did for extension, it's possible to create a portable style package, so we can share and reuse our custom style in other sites. We can do this by navigating to the backend admin site and uploading the new stylesheet that we want to use. First, we have to create our CSS files by using our favorite CSS editor; we have to remember that they will override the default styles, so we only need to add the lines that we want to change. After we create the new stylesheet files, we have to open the browser, click on the Setup tab, and then click on the Package link in the left-hand sidebar. The system will ask us where we want to create our new package. We will select the local repository and click on the Create new package button. eZ Publish will then ask us which kind of package we want to create. We have to select the Site style wizard, and then click on the Create new package button. We can now choose a thumbnail for the style that we are uploading, or continue without it. After selecting the thumbnail, the wizard will ask us to choose the CSS file that we previously created. Select it, and then click on the Next button. With the wizard, we will also upload one or more images, for example a new logo file, or other images related to the CSS. To not upload files, we simply have to click on the Next button without selecting a file in the form. We have to remember that all of the images that we upload will be saved in a subfolder named images, which will be placed in the same directory as the stylesheet. This will be useful when we need to set the relative path of the images used inside the CSS. We can now add the package information and export it to our PC (if required). The new style package will automatically be installed in the eZ Publish package folder. It will be accessible from the Design tab, via the sidebar's Look and Feel link. If we select the package and clear the cache automatically, it will be applied to the frontend. Summary In this article, we learned the basics of the templating system of eZ Publish. We worked on template's function and operator, and also learned how to extend the default WYSIWYG editor of eZ Publish. Moreover, we created the site wireframe and learned how the design overriding feature works. We also created a new stylesheet package, and applied it to our extension.

Managing your users: The User Manager The User Manager within the administration interface gives you an overview of all the registered users of your website and the ability to manage them as needed. Only users registered as Administrator or Super Administrator can make changes here. Creating a new user The Party People website has only one administration user and we want to add a new user who has backend manager access. As the administrator, you can do this by accessing the User Manager from within the administration. Click Site | User Manager in the top menu or click the User Manager icon on the front page of the administration page. To add a new user, click the New icon on the top right toolbar. Type in a name, a username, an e-mail address, and a password into the Name, Username, and New Password input boxes, as shown in the following screenshot. Verify the password to be sure you have entered the correct string. Click on the user group that you want to allocate them to from the selection in the Group window. Your choice will obviously depend upon the content and access level you want them to have. We'll select Manager for our site. Click No for Block User, as we are setting up a new one. Select Yes or No for Receive System E-mails. Save your new user. Adding a new user as a site contact Before you add your new user to your contact list, consider whether they fit into the established contact categories. If they don't, you can add a new Category. Do this before you add the new contact. Adding a new contact Category Create contact Categories based on what role the user is to take within your site. It is described in the following steps: Select Components from the top menu, then Contacts and Manage Contacts to see the Contact Manager. To add a new contact Category, select that link. In the new Category screen, give the category a name and complete the details as shown in the following screenshot. Add a brief description if you need to. Save your new category.

Introduction In this article we will discuss some simple promotion techniques that will make it easy for you and your site's users to bring in visitors to their blogs. You will learn how to offer RSS feeds that interested visitors can subscribe to, and how to "converse" with other bloggers via trackbacks. You will also learn how to use pings to tell blog directories that your blog has been updated and how to promote your blog on Twitter. Improved tagging Tags are a way to label content to make it easier to find later. Tags are a complement to the traditional "categories" way of organizing things. Blog owners can label a post with tags that describe the important content, making it easier for visitors and search engines to find those posts at a later date. You can add as many tags as you wish to a post, giving you extra freedom to tag subjects even if you don't think you'll be posting on that topic regularly. In this way, tags are less restrictive than categories. As an example, one of our Slayers may write a blog post on the Impending Apocalypse of 2009, where stuffed toys come to life and attempt to kill their owners. If this apocalypse was quickly averted, they may write only one blog post about it, which would be posted under the "Impending Apocalypses" category. There's no point making an entire new category for strange happenings surrounding stuffed toys, as it's unlikely to be a subject that would see many posts, but tagging the post with "apocalypse" and "stuffed toys" would help if any future Slayers encountered killer teddy bears at some point in the future. Time for action – tagging blog posts WordPress MU does have a simple, built-in form of tagging system, but it isn't very convenient to use, and many users may decide it's too much trouble to add new tags and figure out which tags to mark each blog post with. Let's offer them a more convenient and nicer looking way of doing things. Download WP Auto Tagger from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-auto-tagger/. Upload the contents of the ZIP file to your /wp-content/plugins directory. Enable the WP-Auto Tagger Plugin on your main blog via the Site Admin panel. Try creating a new post on the main blog. Beside the main post entry box you should see some new tag tools. Clicking on the Suggest Tags button should give you a list of appropriate tags. Submit the post and then look at the main blog. You should see some tags on the front page and tags on your new post, too. Using Plugin Commander, enable the plugin for your users. Suggest tags not working?If you get the curl not enabled message when you click on suggest tags or you simply see no suggested tags appear, you will need to have your web host enable curl for you. Some web hosts disable lib-curl by default because of security concerns, but most are willing to enable it if requested to do so. What just happened? We have set up an improved tagging system that our users may find very useful. The plugin will read new blog posts and suggest tags for them, saving our users the hassle of typing out tags for each post. Of course, our users can choose to type out the tags by hand if they prefer and can delete any tags that the plugin suggests if they don't like them; however, they should find that they get some very useful inspiration from the suggest tags feature. SlayerCafe displays a list of tags on the right-hand side of the blog. Tags that appear frequently show in a bigger font than tags that are used less often. This gives visitors an overview of the main focus of each blog. Sitewide tags Now that you have tags displaying for each individual user blog, let's offer a page with a tag cloud, which includes tags from all the blogs on the site. Time for action – sitewide tag clouds Download the WordPress MU Sitewide Tags application from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mu-sitewide-tags/ Upload the plugin to your /wp-content/plugins folder. Enable the plugin via the Site Admin panel. Go to Site Options, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and check the Tags Blog box to enable tags. Check the Tags can be indexed by Search Engines box. Make a post or two on your test blogs, and then visit the tags subdomain for your site; you should see something like this: What just happened? We have just set up an improved tagging system for our users. The WP Auto Tagger plugin pulls out words that it thinks are important from blog posts and uses them as tags. The plugin isn't perfect and it does sometimes come up with silly suggestions, but users can remove tags that they don't want, or replace them with their own. The Auto Tagger plugin ensures that even users who don't take the time to pick out their own tags will still have the option on of having some kind of tagging system. Why is this important? Well, think ahead to this time next year—imagine how many posts the average user will have on their blog. Now imagine trying to find those posts by category. Athena may have made a post on SlayerCafe about the apocalypse that Watcherlicious almost caused when she read the wrong spell from the Dark Magikus book, but finding that post in the category "Impending Apocalypses" would be a time-consuming task when you consider that Athena fights to stop an apocalypse almost every week! If Athena used a tagging system, then it is likely that this particular apocalypse related post would have been tagged with "Watcherlicious" and with "Dark Magikus", making it much easier to find. We also set up a sitewide tagging system. This adds a stream of all new posts to a central blog. Watchers can keep an eye on this blog to see what's happening on a broader level, that is, what are people talking about and what are the most important issues. The most commonly appearing tags appear in a bolder, bigger font. You can see that at the moment our biggest theme is Slayers. Obviously, there's not much exciting happening on the vampire slaying front at the moment, as the Slayers are just talking amongst themselves about general slayer stuff . If the theme of conversation suddenly changed to "demonic robots", then that tag would appear prominently and the Watchers would know very quickly that there is a global demonic robot problem. The sitewide tags page is useful from a search engine perspective too, as it presents the most recent content to the search engines in one convenient place. Have a go hero – styling the tags page Our tags page at the moment looks just like a normal blog and has a rather boring name—tags.slayercafe.com. You can rename the tags page in the Site Options panel on the main blog. A better name might be "pulse" or "live-stream". The default setting indexes the last 5000 posts. This number can be changed, but don't set it too high as it could tax the server. Try customizing the layout of the Tags blog. The blog network's admin account can be used to log into the Tags blog's admin panel so that you can change the theme and make some other tweaks such as adding widgets. If you want to take things a step further, take a look at http://www.wordpress.com/tags. Here you can see a great example of a streamlined "what's hot on our network" tags page. You may have noticed that the Tags blog appears under Recent User Posts, so new posts appear twice—once by the original poster and once under Tags. Check the blog ID number of the Tags blog, and try changing the code we created earlier so that the posts to the Tags blog don't display. Using pings WordPress MU is set up to ping a service called Ping-o-Matic when new posts are made. This service is useful for English language blogs and for bloggers in America in particular because most of the services that Ping-o-Matic works with are U.S. centric. But there are other services that may be more suitable for bloggers in other countries or even blogs in specific niches. Let's look at ways to add extra ping services to our list of sites to ping for each blog. Time for action – pings Open up /wp-admin/includes/schema.php Find the line that says add_option('ping_sites', 'http://rpc.pingomatic.com/'); Change that line so that it reads add_option('ping_sites', "http://rpc.pingomatic.com/nhttp://rpc.NEWPINGSITE.TLD"); You can add multiple sites as long as you separate each URL with a n. Save and upload the file. Any future blogs will be created with the new ping sites set in Site Options. You can update existing sites either via MySQL or by using the Site Admin panel. What just happened? We have added a few extra sites to the list of ping services that will be notified when a new post is made. A ping is an example of a push mechanism. Instead of blog aggregation services having to look at all the blogs, they are listed to see which ones have new content. The blogs themselves inform the aggregators that they have been updated by sending them a ping. Ping-o-Matic is a service that receives pings and then passes them on to multiple servers. This reduces the amount of servers you have to ping, saving you time when you publish an article. However, Ping-o-Matic may not cover every site you would want to ping. We have added only two sites to the ping list— WhiteWiccaBlogs and TheWatcherNetwork. We don't want to draw too much attention from normal people on sites such as NewsNow or the My Yahoo service. Try to keep the number of individual sites you ping to a minimum. Not only is there a possibility that pinging huge numbers of sites could make adding posts take longer, pinging sites that are outside the topic of your blog is unlikely to get you any valuable traffic. It is better to focus on gaining visits from people who are actually interested in your blog network's subject. For an English language blog, using Ping-o-Matic, Technorati , and Google would be a good start. If your network is aimed at people who speak a different language, pinging local news aggregators would be a good idea. Have a go hero – more sites to ping Take a look at the list of sites in the following table, and think about the type of blog you have and the people you want to reach. The sites in the table are very general ones. You may find that there are aggregator services out there for your niche—be that houses in Singapore, computer games, or travel. A Google search for "keyword aggregator" should help you find the right kind of sites. Once you've chosen the sites you would like to ping, remember that each URL is separated by the characters n and you need to surround the entire list in double quotes (" "), not single ones (' '). Site URL FeedBurner http://ping.feedburner.com My Yahoo http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping Syndic8 http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php Myblog.jp (Japanese) http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/ Newsgator http://rpc.newsgator.com/ Blogg.de (German) http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/ Blogshares.com http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

Loading form data from the server An important part of working with forms is loading the data that a form will display. Here's how to create a sample contact form and populate it with data sent from the server. How to do it... Declare the name and company panel: var nameAndCompany = { columnWidth: .5, layout: 'form', items: [ { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'First Name', name: 'firstName', anchor: '95%' }, { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Last Name', name: 'lastName', anchor: '95%' }, { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Company', name: 'company', anchor: '95%' }, { xtype: 'textfield', fieldLabel: 'Title', name: 'title', anchor: '95%' } ]} Declare the picture box panel: var picBox = { columnWidth: .5, bodyStyle: 'padding:0px 0px 0px 40px', items: [ { xtype: 'box', autoEl: { tag: 'div', style: 'padding-bottom:20px', html: '<img id="pic" src="' + Ext.BLANK_IMAGE_URL + '" class="img-contact" />' } }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Change Picture' } ]} Define the Internet panel: var internet = { columnWidth: .5, layout: 'form', items: [ { xtype: 'fieldset', title: 'Internet', autoHeight: true, defaultType: 'textfield', items: [{ fieldLabel: 'Email', name: 'email', vtype: 'email', anchor: '95%' }, { fieldLabel: 'Web page', name: 'webPage', vtype: 'url', anchor: '95%' }, { fieldLabel: 'IM', name: 'imAddress', anchor: '95%' }] }]} Declare the phone panel: var phones = { columnWidth: .5, layout: 'form', items: [{ xtype: 'fieldset', title: 'Phone Numbers', autoHeight: true, defaultType: 'textfield', items: [{ fieldLabel: 'Home', name: 'homePhone', anchor: '95%' }, { fieldLabel: 'Business', name: 'busPhone', anchor: '95%' }, { fieldLabel: 'Mobile', name: 'mobPhone', anchor: '95%' }, { fieldLabel: 'Fax', name: 'fax', anchor: '95%' }] }]} Define the business address panel: var busAddress = { columnWidth: .5, layout: 'form', labelAlign: 'top', defaultType: 'textarea', items: [{ fieldLabel: 'Business', labelSeparator:'', name: 'bAddress', anchor: '95%' }, { xtype: 'radio', boxLabel: 'Mailing Address', hideLabel: true, name: 'mailingAddress', value:'bAddress', id:'mailToBAddress' }]} Define the home address panel: var homeAddress = { columnWidth: .5, layout: 'form', labelAlign: 'top', defaultType: 'textarea', items: [{ fieldLabel: 'Home', labelSeparator:'', name: 'hAddress', anchor: '95%' }, { xtype: 'radio', boxLabel: 'Mailing Address', hideLabel: true, name: 'mailingAddress', value:'hAddress', id:'mailToHAddress' }]} Create the contact form: var contactForm = new Ext.FormPanel({ frame: true, title: 'TODO: Load title dynamically', bodyStyle: 'padding:5px', width: 650, items: [{ bodyStyle: { margin: '0px 0px 15px 0px' }, items: [{ layout: 'column', items: [nameAndCompany, picBox] }] }, { items: [{ layout: 'column', items: [phones, internet] }] }, { xtype: 'fieldset', title: 'Addresses', autoHeight: true, hideBorders: true, layout: 'column', items: [busAddress, homeAddress] }], buttons: [{ text: 'Save' }, { text: 'Cancel' }]}); Handle the form's actioncomplete event: contactForm.on({ actioncomplete: function(form, action){ if(action.type == 'load'){ var contact = action.result.data; Ext.getCmp(contact.mailingAddress).setValue(true); contactForm.setTitle(contact.firstName + ' ' + contact.lastName); Ext.getDom('pic').src = contact.pic; } }}); Render the form: contactForm.render(document.body); Finally, load the form: contactForm.getForm().load({ url: 'contact.php', params:{id:'contact1'}, waitMsg: 'Loading'}); How it works... The contact form's building sequence consists of defining each of the contained panels, and then defining a form panel that will serve as a host. The following screenshot shows the resulting form, with the placement of each of the panels pinpointed: Moving on to how the form is populated, the JSON-encoded response to a request to provide form data has a structure similar to this: {success:true,data:{id:'1',firstName:'Jorge',lastName:'Ramon',company:'MiamiCoder',title:'Mr',pic:'img/jorger.jpg',email:'ramonj@miamicoder.net',webPage:'http://www.miamicoder.com',imAddress:'',homePhone:'',busPhone:'555 555-5555',mobPhone:'',fax:'',bAddress:'123 Acme Rd #001nMiami, FL 33133',hAddress:'',mailingAddress:'mailToBAddress'}} The success property indicates whether the request has succeeded or not. If the request succeeds, success is accompanied by a data property, which contains the contact's information. Although some fields are automatically populated after a call to load(), the form's title, the contact's picture, and the mailing address radio button require further processing. This can be done in the handler for the actioncomplete event: contactForm.on({ actioncomplete: function(form, action){ if(action.type == 'load'){} }}); As already mentioned, the contact's information arrives in the data property of the action's result: var contact = action.result.data; The default mailing address comes in the contact's mailingAddress property. Hence, the radio button for the default mailing address is set as shown in the following line of code: Ext.getCmp(contact.mailingAddress).setValue(true); The source for the contact's photo is the value of contact.pic: Ext.getDom('pic').src = contact.pic; And finally, the title of the form: contactForm.setTitle(contact.firstName + ' ' + contact.lastName); There's more... Although this recipe's focus is on loading form data, you should also pay attention to the layout techniques used—multiple rows, multiple columns, fieldsets—that allow you to achieve rich and flexible user interfaces for your forms. See Also... The next recipe, Serving the XML data to a form, explains how to use a form to load the XML data sent from the server.

Placing buttons in a toolbar You can embed different types of components in a toolbar. This topic teaches you how to build a toolbar that contains image-only, text-only and image/text buttons, a toggle button, and a combo box. How to do it Create the styles for the toolbar items: #tbar{ width:600px;}.icon-data{ background:url(img/data.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-chart{ background:url(img/pie-chart.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-table{ background:url(img/table.png) 0 no-repeat !important;} Define a data store for the combo box: Ext.onReady(function() { Ext.QuickTips.init(); var makesStore = new Ext.data.ArrayStore({ fields: ['make'], data: makes // from cars.js }); Create a toolbar and define the buttons and combo box inline: var tb = new Ext.Toolbar({ renderTo: 'tbar', items: [{ iconCls: 'icon-data', tooltip: 'Icon only button', handler:clickHandler }, '-', { text: 'Text Button' }, '-', { text: 'Image/Text Button', iconCls: 'icon-chart' }, '-', { text: 'Toggle Button', iconCls: 'icon-table', enableToggle: true, toggleHandler: toggleHandler, pressed: true }, '->', 'Make: ', { xtype: 'combo', store: makesStore, displayField: 'make', typeAhead: true, mode: 'local', triggerAction: 'all', emptyText: 'Select a make...', selectOnFocus: true, width: 135 }]}); Finally, create handlers for the push button and the toggle button: function clickHandler(btn) { Ext.Msg.alert('clickHandler', 'button pressed');}function toggleHandler(item, pressed) { Ext.Msg.alert('toggleHandler', 'toggle pressed');} How it works The buttons and the combo box are declared inline. While the standard button uses a click handler through the handler config option, the toggle button requires the toggleHandler config option.The button icons are set with the iconCls option, using the classes declared in the first step of the topic. As an example, note the use of the Toolbar.Separator instances in this fragment: }, '-', { text: 'Text Button'}, '-', { text: 'Image/Text Button', iconCls: 'icon-chart'}, '-', { Using '-' to declare a Toolbar.Separator is equivalent to using xtype: 'tbseparator'. Similarly, using '->' to declare Toolbar.Fill is equivalent to using xtype:'tbfill'. See also... The next recipe, Working with the new ButtonGroup component, explains how to use the ButtonGroup class to organize a series of related buttons Working with the new ButtonGroup component A welcome addition to Ext JS is the ability to organize buttons in groups. Here's how to create a panel with a toolbar that contains two button groups: How to do it Create the styles for the buttons: #tbar{ width:600px;}.icon-data{ background:url(img/data.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-chart{ background:url(img/pie-chart.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-table{ background:url(img/table.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-sort-asc{ background:url(img/sort-asc.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-sort-desc{ background:url(img/sort-desc.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-filter{ background:url(img/funnel.png) 0 no-repeat !important;} Define a panel that will host the toolbar: Ext.onReady(function() { var pnl = new Ext.Panel({ title: 'My Application', renderTo:'pnl-div', height: 300, width: 500, bodyStyle: 'padding:10px', autoScroll: true, Define a toolbar inline and create two button groups: tbar: [{ xtype: 'buttongroup', title: 'Data Connections', columns: 1, defaults: { scale: 'small' }, items: [{ xtype:'button', text: 'Data Sources', iconCls:'icon-data' }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Tables', iconCls: 'icon-table' }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Reports', iconCls: 'icon-chart' }]}, { xtype: 'buttongroup', title: 'Sort & Filter', columns: 1, defaults: { scale: 'small' }, items: [{ xtype: 'button', text: 'Sort Ascending', iconCls: 'icon-sort-asc' }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Sort Descending', iconCls: 'icon-sort-desc' }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Filter', iconCls: 'icon-filter' }]}] How it works Using a button group consists of adding a step to the process of adding buttons, or other items, to a toolbar. Instead of adding the items directly to the toolbar, you need to firstly define the group and then add the items to the group: tbar: [{ xtype: 'buttongroup', title: 'Data Connections', columns: 1, defaults: { scale: 'small' }, items: [{ xtype:'button', text: 'Data Sources', iconCls:'icon-data' }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Tables', iconCls: 'icon-table' }, { xtype: 'button', text: 'Reports', iconCls: 'icon-chart' }]} See also... The next recipe, Placing buttons in a toolbar, illustrates how you can embed different types of components in a toolbar Placing menus in a toolbar In this topic, you will see how simple it is to use menus inside a toolbar. The panel's toolbar that we will build, contains a standard button and a split button, both with menus: How to do it Create the styles for the buttons: #tbar{ width:600px;}.icon-data{ background:url(img/data.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-chart{ background:url(img/pie-chart.png) 0 no-repeat !important;}.icon-table{ background:url(img/table.png) 0 no-repeat !important;} Create a click handler for the menus: Ext.onReady(function() { Ext.QuickTips.init(); var clickHandler = function(action) { alert('Menu clicked: "' + action + '"');}; Create a window to host the toolbar: var wnd = new Ext.Window({ title: 'Toolbar with menus', closable: false, height: 300, width: 500, bodyStyle: 'padding:10px', autoScroll: true, Define the window's toolbar inline, and add the buttons and their respective menus: tbar: [{ text: 'Button with menu', iconCls: 'icon-table', menu: [ { text: 'Menu 1', handler:clickHandler.createCallback('Menu 1'), iconCls: 'icon-data' }, { text: 'Menu 1', handler: clickHandler.createCallback('Menu 2'), iconCls: 'icon-data'}]}, '-',{ xtype: 'splitbutton', text: 'Split button with menu', iconCls: 'icon-chart', handler: clickHandler.createCallback('Split button with menu'), menu: [ { text: 'Menu 3', handler: clickHandler.createCallback('Menu 3'), iconCls: 'icon-data' }, { text: 'Menu 4', handler: clickHandler.createCallback('Menu 4'), iconCls: 'icon-data'}] }]}); Finally, show the window: wnd.show(); How it works This is a simple procedure. Note how the split button is declared with the xtype: 'splitbutton' config option. Also, observe how the createCallback() function is used to invoke the clickHandler() function with the correct arguments for each button. See also... The next recipe, Commonly used menu items, shows the different items that can be used in a menu Commonly used menu items To show you the different items that can be used in a menu, we will build a menu that contains radio items, a checkbox menu, a date menu, and a color menu.This is how the radio options and checkbox menu will look: The Pick a Date menu item will display a date picker, as shown in the next screenshot: The Pick a Color menu item displays a color picker, as seen here: How to do it Create a handler for the checkbox menu: Ext.onReady(function() { Ext.QuickTips.init(); var onCheckHandler = function(item, checked) { Ext.Msg.alert('Menu checked', item.text + ', checked: ' + (checked ? 'checked' : 'unchecked')); }; Define a date menu: var dateMenu = new Ext.menu.DateMenu({ handler: function(dp, date) { Ext.Msg.alert('Date picker', date); }}); Define a color menu: var colorMenu = new Ext.menu.ColorMenu({ handler: function(cm, color) { Ext.Msg.alert('Color picker', String.format('You picked {0}.', color)); }}); Create a main menu. Now add the date and color menus, as well as a few inline menus: var menu = new Ext.menu.Menu({ id: 'mainMenu', items: [{ text: 'Radio Options', menu: { items: [ '<b>Choose a Theme</b>', { text: 'Aero Glass', checked: true, group: 'theme', checkHandler: onCheckHandler }, { text: 'Vista Black', checked: false, group: 'theme', checkHandler: onCheckHandler }, { text: 'Gray Theme', checked: false, group: 'theme', checkHandler: onCheckHandler }, { text: 'Default Theme', checked: false, group: 'theme', checkHandler: onCheckHandler } ] } }, { text: 'Pick a Date', iconCls: 'calendar', menu: dateMenu }, { text: 'Pick a Color', menu: colorMenu }, { text: 'The last menu', checked: true, checkHandler: onCheckHandler }]}); Create a toolbar and add the main menu: var tb = new Ext.Toolbar({ renderTo: 'tbar', items: [{ text: 'Menu Items', menu: menu }]}); How it works After defining the date and color pickers, the main menu is built. This menu contains the pickers, as well as a few more items that are defined inline. To display checked items (see the checked: true config option) with a radio button instead of a checkbox, the menu items need to be defined using the group config option. This is how the theme selector menu is built: menu: { items: [ '<b>Choose a Theme</b>', { text: 'Aero Glass', checked: true, group: 'theme', checkHandler: onCheckHandler }, { text: 'Vista Black', checked: false, group: 'theme', checkHandler: onCheckHandler See also... The Placing buttons in a toolbar recipe (covered earlier in this article) illustrates how you can embed different types of components in a toolbar >> Continue Reading Making Progress with Menus and Toolbars using Ext JS 3.0: Part 2 [ 1 | 2 ]   If you have read this article you may be interested to view : Making Progress with Menus and Toolbars using Ext JS 3.0: Part 2 Load, Validate, and Submit Forms using Ext JS 3.0: Part 1 Load, Validate, and Submit Forms using Ext JS 3.0: Part 2 Load, Validate, and Submit Forms using Ext JS 3.0: Part 3

Activity 3: Investigating texts using Quiz Aim: Using quiz to investigate texts Moodle modules: Quiz Extra programs: None Ease of setup: *** As noted elsewhere, Quiz can be a useful module for practicing different language skills. This is primarily because we can build in helpful feedback and because we can allow students to spend as much time as they want practicing. There are various ways that Quiz can help students listen. Here are some examples: Listening and matching: students listen for gist information and match answers to general questions about the text. Ordering task for arranging events in a sequence. Multiple-choice for information transfer, identifying speakers' attitudes, and identifying numbers. Gap-fill tasks: Students listen to a song, poem, or other text, and fill in the missing words. It's worth thinking carefully about what sorts of words you want to blank out. Do you want to focus on grammar words (prepositions, pronouns, and conjunctions, etc.), words that are difficult to spell, or keywords (words that convey the main meaning of the text)? To exemplify each of these examples, we'll make one quiz with four different question types. You could choose to have quizzes with any number of different question types. We'll take as our listening text a story which we recorded ourselves. We could record it in a recording program like Audacity. The story is about a rather special trip to the zoo. Here is a possible transcript abridged from http://www.onlyfunnystories.com/ZooJob.asp: One day an out of work mime artist is visiting the zoo and attempts to earn some money as a street performer monkey. As soon as he starts to draw a crowd, a zoo keeper grabs him and drags him into his office. The zoo keeper explains to the mime artist that the zoo's most popular attraction, a gorilla, has died suddenly and the keeper fears that attendance at the zoo will fall off. He offers the mime artist a job to dress up as the gorilla until they can get another one. The mime artist accepts. So the next morning the mime artist puts on the gorilla suit and enters the cage before the crowd comes. He discovers that it's a great job. He can sleep all he wants, play and make fun of people and he draws bigger crowds than he ever did as a mime. However, eventually the crowds tire of him and he tires of just swinging on trees. He begins to notice that the people are paying more attention to the lion in the cage next to his. Not wanting to lose the attention of his audience, he climbs to the top of his cage, crawls across a partition, and dangles from the top to the lion's cage. Of course, this makes the lion furious, but the crowd loves it. At the end of the day the zoo keeper comes and gives the mime artist a raise for being such a good attraction. Well, this goes on for some time, the mime keeps taunting the lion, the crowds grow larger, and his salary keeps going up. Then one terrible day when he is dangling over the furious lion he slips and falls. The mime artist is terrified. The lion gathers itself and prepares to pounce. The mime artist is so scared that he begins to run round and round the cage with the lion close behind. Finally, the mime artist starts screaming and yelling, "Help me, help me!", but the lion is quick and pounces. The mime artist soon finds himself flat on his back looking up at the angry lion and the lion says, "Shut up you idiot! Do you want to get us both fired?" The questions start with general gist questions (matching). Then comes an ordering question, which requires slightly more attention to detail. The last two are multiple-choice and gap-fill questions, which get students to focus on detailed aspects of the listening text. Here's how to do it The following sections refer you to the activities and point out any major differences. Setting up the quiz Listening and matching question Use NanoGong to create sound clips which replace pictures and texts. Here are some examples of the matching questions you could set up. These are general questions which help students get the gist of the story. Question Answer How many animals are there in the story?. Three Where does this take place? The zoo Where does the zoo keeper find the mime artist? On the street How many animals are there in the cages? Two This is what your matching question might look like: Here are a few more matching questions you could consider: Match recordings to pictures. Students could hear a description of an image (painting, photo) and identify the description. The easiest way to do this would be to take some photos of similar scenes. Match individual words to sounds. Students hear the recording and decide which words they are hearing. Recording Choice A. "I hear you're coming"   B."It's over here" hear/here   hear/here Ordering question In this variation students listen to a story and then order events in sequence. We need to make sure that the sequence is not guessable without hearing the story. Here are the stages from our story that you could include in the question: The zookeeper grabs the mime artist. The zookeeper offers the mime artist a job. The gorilla lies on top of the neighboring cage. The lion tries to attack the gorilla. The lion tells the gorilla off. This is what the ordering question would look like: Multiple-choice question Multiple-choice questions are a good way of getting students to investigate texts in more detail. Here are some possible questions we could include in this activity. Question 1 According to the story, why does the mime artist accept a job as a gorilla? Answer 1 His work on the street isn't going well. Answer 2 The zookeeper has an urgent need for a gorilla. Answer 3 He always wanted to work as a gorilla in a zoo. Answer 4 The last gorilla quit the job.

In this article, we will mainly focus on the visual design of our site. To acquire the information presented here, it is assumed that you have some basic understanding of Joomla!'s visual design including templates, components, module position, and so on. Adding Flash in templates If you are familiar with Joomla! templates, then you will understand that there are two ways to display Flash in a template: By hardcoded embedding of Flash items By dynamically loading Flash objects at module positions We have seen many modules that can display Flash objects. Therefore, in this section, we will be looking into the embedding of Flash objects within templates. It will also be helpful if we understand the structure of Joomla! templates. Generally templates for Joomla! include headers in Flash. Flash animations are included in the header area of a Joomla! template. Some templates include the mechanism to show images from a specific directory. For example, the template shown in the following screenshot, available for download at http://joomlatp.com/joomla-1.5-templates/Templates-has-flash-header.html, is designed to show a Flash header comprised of the images kept in a directory: The following sections briefly describe the structure of a Joomla! template and the ways to embed a Flash object in this template. Structure of a Joomla! template The look and feel of Joomla! is determined by templates. You can apply a template to the frontend as well as to the backend. Templates for the Joomla! frontend reside in the /templates directory of the Joomla! webroot, while those for the administration panel are found in the /administrator/templates directory. You can install multiple templates and apply one or more templates to the different sections. However, you must designate one default template for the site. To designate a default template, go to Extensions | Template Manager. Select the desired template and click on the Default button on the toolbar. For assigning a template to a specific section of the site, click on a template, except the default template, and then select the section or the menu item for which you want to assign the template from the Menu Assignment section. If you examine the directory structure of a Joomla! template, you will find at least the following subdirectories in the templates directory: Directory Description mx_joofree2 This is the main template directory. It contains some subdirectories and at least the following files under its root: index.php: This is the main file for a template. The basic structure of a Joomla! template is defined in this file. We will examine this file later. templateDetails.xml: This XML file defines the template by mentioning its designer, the different files bundled with it, the positions and parameters available, and so on. params.ini: This file contains the parameters and their default values. For example, a template may use several colors for theming, but users can select a preferred color as a parameter for this template, and that information is stored in this file. mx_joofree2/css This directory contains all the cascading stylesheets to be used for a Joomla! site. This directory will contain at least one stylesheet named template_css.css. It may also contain a stylesheet named template_ie6.css and other stylesheets. mx_joofree2/html This folder may contain some definitions for the custom rendering of certain parts of the site. For example, the mx_joofree2 template contains two files-module.php and pagination.php. These two files define custom module rendering and pagination for Joomla!. For more information on using HTML overrides, refer to http://docs.joomla.org/How_to_override_the_content_from_the_Joomla!_core. mx_joofree2/images This folder contains the images for the template. It may contain a logo image, a background image, and so on. It may also contain some subdirectories, for example, the mx_joofree2 template contains a subdirectory images/headers, where the header images for the template are stored.

Though this implies multi-user environment client/server setup, this article could still be of use to a single user. If you are a lone developer working in a stand-alone environment (sometimes referred to as a single-user environment), you may want to just skip straight to the section Exporting and importing content, at the end of this article. Sorry, but version management in a stand-alone environment is almost nonexistent, so you're largely on your own. In a client/server environment, all content objects are stored on a central server. Developers create and edit content on their own workstation (typically, a PC), and then send this content to a database on the central server for storage when they have finished with it. This is referred to as checking in a content object. If they subsequently want to change a content object that is on the server, they need to check out the content object, change it, and then check it back in. Checking in a content object When you create a content object in a client/server environment, the content object is stored in your local repository (that is, on the client side of the client/server set-up). It is important to understand that your local repository is located on your local workstation. This means that if you have a content object in your local repository, and then move to another workstation, you will not see your local version of this content object on the new workstation. This is because they are located on the workstation on which you created them or checked them out. You should, therefore, always use the same workstation, or check in all of your content objects before moving to a new workstation. Version Difference In UPK 3.5.1 client/server edition, it is possible to choose a specific location for your local repository. Documents that are checked out to your local repository are identified by a green check-mark () to the left of the object details in the Library. You will need to check these objects in if you want them to be stored in the central library so they will be accessible to other developers. Generally, you should do this whenever you have finished working on a content object. However, there are good reasons for checking in objects more frequently. Your local repository is (typically) in the C: drive of your computer, whereas the central library is on a central server. Unless you are very fastidious about backing up your PC, the chances are that the server is backed up more often than your PC, and is usually backed up automatically. Placing your files in the central library will, therefore, provide greater security in terms of having a backup that you can revert to in the event of a disaster. In addition to this, whenever you check in a content object, a back-up of the previous version is taken. Should you need to back out your changes, you can simply revert to a back-up version of the content object. Related to this, content objects are never really deleted from the server library. Actually, they can be deleted, but only by an Administrator, and typically as part of a cleanup. However, if you delete an object (that has never been checked in to the central server) from your local repository, it is gone. Forever! Finally, it is not unheard of that for a local repository to simply disappear when UPK crashes (which thankfully doesn't happen that often, but it has been known to happen). If this does happen to you, then you may again lose all of the content that you currently have checked out even though the Lost documents view, introduced in UPK 3.5, may save you. For all of these reasons, and more, it is recommended that you check in all of the content that is stored in your local repository to the server at least at the end of each work day. Fortunately, UPK provides a quick way of doing this. If you click the Check In All button (), then all of the content objects that you currently have checked out will be checked in again. The downside of this is that if you do check in all of the documents that you are currently working on at the end of the day, you need to remember which objects these are so that you can check them out again the next day. Before checking the documents in, you can use the All Checked Out view to identify all of the documents that you currently have checked out. You can then print this list, and will know which files you need to check out again the next day. There is one further thing to bear in mind when deciding how often you are going to check in your content objects. As mentioned above, UPK retains every version of a content that has been checked in. These are accessible via the Document History, as we will see later. This means that if you check in a content object ten times, then UPK will retain ten versions of it. This can also make it difficult to identify the "released" versions of the content object in the Document History, should you subsequently need to roll back to the last-released version. The Administrator can clean up the database periodically, but the only way of differentiating between versioned drafts and versioned released content objects is by using the check-in comments. These are explained in the section Step 2: Confirming the scope of the check-in, ahead. UPK Workflow The down-side to checking in content objects that you may not have finished working on is that these objects could be mis-perceived as being final, and actually used or published. In some cases, you may have checked some of them out not because you want to change them, but specifically to stop anyone else from changing them. UPK does not provide you with a simple, automatic solution to these shortcomings, but there is a manual workaround that you can use. This is to use the Workflow properties of the objects. UPK does not have a "real" workflow, it does not have "routing" of content objects based on their status, or automatic email notification of content objects that are due for review, or any of the things that you'd expect from workflow functionality. Of course users can use a Custom View to display content objects according to their Workflow properties, but this is still not really "workflow". If you display the Properties for a content object, by clicking on the Properties button (), the last category of properties (at the end of the Properties list) is the Workflow category. Within this, there are two properties: Assigned To: This property allows you to select (from a drop-down list) the user ID of any developer who is authorized to access the content object. If you select your own user ID in this field, then this is an indication to the other developers that they should not work on this content object themselves. State: This property can be used to specify the current status of a content object. The default values are (blank), Not Started, Draft, In Review, and Final. If you select a status of Draft, then this is an indication that you have not finished with the object. An example of the Properties pane, showing the Workflow category, is in the following screenshot: Of course, these Properties do not provide "hard checks". You still rely on people seeing, and then paying attention to, these Properties but it is a start. Some strong guidance from your Project Manager or Team Leader would help, here. Administrators can add, remove, or rename statuses. It is recommended that a suitable set of statuses are established and defined prior to any development work starting, and that these statuses and their meaning are communicated to all developers. Step 1: Selecting the content objects To select content objects for checking in, carry out the steps described below: In the Library, select the content objects that you want to check in. Normally, you will want to check in specific content objects, so you would only select these. As always, you click on a content object to select it. You can Ctrl-click to select multiple objects, or Shift-click to select a series of objects. You can also select a folder in the Library to check in all of the content objects in that folder. Do not worry if some of the objects that are included in your selection are not checked out; UPK will simply ignore these objects during check-in (it will not "error-out"). You can also check in content objects by selecting them in an Outline Element. Once you have selected all of the content objects that you want to check in, click the Check In button (). Step 2: Confirming the scope of the check-in When you check in one or more specific content objects and have not selected a folder in the Library to check in, UPK will automatically check for any content objects that are related to the object that you are checking in. You will be prompted to check these in, as well. An example of this prompt is shown in the following screenshot: What are related documents? In general, they are Web Pages and Packages used by the content object that you are checking in. For example: If you have created, or changed, an Outline Element (Module or Section) then UPK will automatically select all of the content objects (Modules, Lessons, and Topics) included in this Outline Element, along with any Web Pages used by any of these content objects will be selected as well. If you are checking in a Topic for which you have also created a Web Page that is linked to the Concepts pane, then UPK will automatically select this Web Page as a related document during check-in. If you have created a Glossary and are checking this in, the related documents will be all of the Web Pages for the content definitions used by the Glossary. An example of the Related Documents dialog box is shown in the following screenshot: This list of related documents can be confusing, as it does not match the list that you see in the Related Documents pane for the content object that you are checking in. The list will include Web Pages that have been explicitly linked to from the content object that you are checking, but will not include Glossaries, Templates, Packages, or icons, all of which are listed in the Related Documents pane. This limitation is important to understand. If you checked out, and updated, a Glossary and as a result UPK checked out several content objects during the glossary link regeneration, UPK will not identify all of the Glossary elements (Web Pages) as "related documents". You will need to locate these and check them in separately using custom views. Adding to the confusion, the list of related documents will include all of the explicitly-linked content objects, and not only those objects that are currently checked out to you. Do not worry about this – UPK will only physically check in the content objects that you do have checked out (these are the ones that have your User ID in the Checked Out To column of the Related Documents dialog box). In the example above, we are checking in an Outline Element that contains one Topic, which in turn contains a Web Page. The Topic is checked out, but the Web Page is not. Step 3: Specifying a reason for the change When you check in one or more content objects, you will be prompted to enter a short description of the change, as shown in the following screenshot: The title of the content object that you are checking in is shown above the comment text box. If you are checking in multiple content objects, then this will initially specify the first object and (assuming that you deselect the Apply same comments to all documents option) will specify the next object when you click OK. It then moves on to the next object. In this way, you can provide separate comments for each content object, even though you are checking them all in at the same time. Although it is entirely optional, it is a very good practice to always enter a comment. This comment will appear in the object History, and therefore serves as a useful audit log. Specify a reason for the change by carrying out the steps described below: Enter a suitable comment in the space provided. Note that you do not need to specify the date and time of the change, or your user ID. These are captured automatically by UPK. If you are checking in multiple objects, then UPK will initially suggest applying the same comments to all of the objects. You will see that the Apply same comments to all documents checkbox toward the bottom of the dialog box is selected. If you do not want to use the same comment for all objects that you are checking in, then deselect this checkbox. Now, when you click on OK, the Check In Comment dialog box for the next content object in the check-in selection will be displayed. You can repeat the above processing from Step 3. Once you have entered your description of the change (or reason for the change), click on OK. Once you have specified a comment, and clicked on OK for the last time, then the content objects are checked in, and the Library screen is redisplayed.  

This article covers the following: Modeling for Papervision3D Preparing for loading models Creating and loading models using Autodesk 3ds Max Loading an animation from Autodesk 3ds Max Creating and loading models using SketchUp Creating and loading models using Blender Controlling loaded materials Let's start off by having a look at some general practices to keep in mind when modeling for Papervision3D. Modeling for Papervision3D In this section, we will discuss several techniques that relate to modeling for Papervision3D. As Papervision3D is commonly used for web-based projects, modeling requires a different mindset than modeling for an animated movie, visualization, or game. Most of the techniques discussed relate to improving performance. This section is especially useful for modelers who need to create models for Papervision3D. Papervision3D PreviewerPapervision3D Previewer is a small program that should be part of every modeller's toolbox. This tool comes in handy for testing purposes. It allows a modeler to render an exported model in Papervision3D, and it displays some statistics that show how the model performs. At the time of writing, this tool was not compatible with Papervision3D 2.1, which could result in small problems when loading external models.Papervision3D Previewer can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/mrdoob/wiki/pv3dpreviewer Keep your polygon count low Papervision3D is a cutting edge technology that brings 3D to the Flash Player. It does this at an amazing speed relative to the capabilities of the Flash player. However, performance of Papervision3D is just a fraction of the performance that can be achieved with hardware-accelerated engines such as used by console games. Even with hardware-accelerated games there is a limit to the number of polygons that can be rendered, meaning there is always a compromise between detail and performance. This counts even more for Papervision3D, so always try to model using as few polygons as possible. Papervision3D users often wonder what the maximum number of triangles is that the Flash player can handle. There is no generic answer to this question, as performance depends on more factors than just the number of triangles. On average, the total triangle count should be no more than 3000, which equals 1500 polygons (remember that one polygon is made of two triangles). Unlike most 3D modeling programs, Papervision3D is triangle based and not polygon based. Add polygons to resolve artifacts Although this seems to contradict the previous suggestion to keep your polygon count low, sometimes you need more polygons to get rid of texture distortion or to reduce z-sorting artifacts. z-sorting artifacts will often occur in areas where objects intersect or closely intersect each other. Subdividing polygons in those areas can make z-sorting more accurate. Often this needs to be done by creating new polygons for the intersecting triangles of approximately the same size. There are several approaches to prevent z-sorting problems. Depending on the object you're using, it can be very time consuming to tweak and find the optimal amount and location of polygons. The amount of polygons you add in order to solve the problem should still be kept as low as possible. Finding the optimal values for your model will often result in switching a lot between Papervision3D and the 3D modeling program. Keep your textures small Textures used in the 3D modeling tool can be exported along with the model to a format that is readable for Papervision3D. This is a valuable feature as the texture will automatically be loaded by Papervision3D. However, the image, which was defined in the 3D authoring tool, will be used exactly as provided by Papervision3D. If you choose a 1024 by 1024 pixels image as the texture, for example the wheels of a car, Papervision3D loads the entire image and draws it on the wheel of a car that appears on screen at a size of 50 by 50 pixels for example. There are several problems related to this: It's a waste of bandwidth to load such a large image. Loading any image takes time, which should be kept as short as possible. It's a waste of capacity. Papervision3D needs to resize the image from 1024 by 1024 pixels to an image, which will be, for example, maximal 50 by 50 pixels on screen. Always choose texture dimensions that make sense for the application using it, and keep in mind that they have to be power of two. This will enable mipmapping and smoothing, which come without extra performance costs. Use textures that Flash can read 3D modeling programs usually read a variety of image sources. Some even support reading Adobe Photoshop's native file-format PSD. Flash can load only GIF, JPG, or PNG files at run time. Therefore, stick to these formats in your model so that you do not have to convert the textures when the model needs to be exported to Papervision3D. Use UV maps If your model is made up of several objects and textures, it's a good idea to use UV mapping, which is the process of unwrapping the model and defining all its textures into one single image. This way we can speed up initial loading of an application by making one request from Flash to load this image instead of loading dozens of images. UV mapping can also be used to tile or reuse parts of the image. The more parts of the UV-mapped image you can reuse, the more bandwidth you'll save. Always try to keep your UV-mapped image as small as possible, just as with keeping your normal textures small. In case you have a lot of objects sharing the same UV map and you need a large canvas to unwrap the UV map, be aware of the fact that the maximum image size supported by Flash Player 9 is 2880x2880 pixels. With the benefits of power of two textures in mind, the maximum width and height is 2048x2048 pixels. Baking textures Baking textures is the process of integrating shadows, lighting, reflection, or entire 3D objects into a single image. Most 3D modeling tools support this. This contradicts what has been said about tiling images in UV maps, as baking results in images that usually can only be used once because of the baked information on the texture. However, it can increase the level of realism of your application, just like shading does, but without the loss of performance caused by calculating shading in real time. Never use them in combination with a tiling image, as repeated shading, for instance, will result in unnatural looking renders. Therefore, each texture needs to be unique, which will cause longer loading times before you can show a scene. Use recognizable names for objects and materials It is always a good convention to use recognizable names for all your objects. This counts for the classes, methods, and properties in your code, and also for the names of the 3D objects in your modeling tool. Always think twice before renaming an object that is used by an application. The application might use the name of an object as the identifier to do something with it—for example, making it clickable. When working in a team of modelers and programmers, you really need to make this clear to the modelers as changing the name of an object can easily break your application. Size and positioning Maintaining the same relative size for your modeled objects, as you would use for instantiating primitives in your scene, is a good convention. Although you could always adjust the scale property of a loaded 3D model, it is very convenient when both Papervision3D and your modeling tool use the same scale. Remember that Papervision3D doesn't have a metric system defining units of a certain value such as meters, yards, pixels, and so on. It just uses units. Another convention is to position your object or objects at the origin of the 3D space in the modeling tool. Especially when exporting a single object from a 3D modeling tool, it is really helpful if it is located at a position of 0 on all axes. This way you can position the 3D object in Papervision3D by using absolute values, without needing to take the offset into account. You can compare this with adding movie clips to your library in Flash. In most cases, it is pretty useful when the elements of a movie clip are centered on their registration point. Finding the balance between quality and performance For each project you should try to find the balance between lightweight modeling and quality. Because each project is different in requirements, scale, and quality, there is no rule that applies for all. Keep the tips mentioned in the previous sections in mind and try to be creative with them. If you see a way to optimize your model, then do not hesitate to use it. Before we have a look at how to create and export models for Papervision3D, we will create a basic application for this purpose. Creating a template class to load models In order to show an imported 3D model using Papervision3D, we will create a basic application. Based on the orbit example (code bundle-chapter 6, click the following link to download: http://www.packtpub.com/files/code/5722_Code.zip) we create the following class. Each time we load a new model we just have to alter the init() method. First, have a look at the following base code for this example: package { import flash.events.Event; import org.papervision3d.materials.WireframeMaterial; import org.papervision3d.materials.utils.MaterialsList; import org.papervision3d.objects.DisplayObject3D; import org.papervision3d.objects.primitives.Cube; import org.papervision3d.view.BasicView; public class ExternalModelsExample extends BasicView { private var model:DisplayObject3D; private var rotX:Number = 0.1; private var rotY:Number = 0.1; private var camPitch:Number = 90; private var camYaw:Number = 270; private var easeOut:Number = 0.1; public function ExternalModelsExample() { stage.frameRate = 40; init(); startRendering(); } private function init():void { model = new Plane(); scene.addChild(model); } private function modelLoaded(e:FileLoadEvent):void { //To be added } override protected function onRenderTick(e:Event=null):void { var xDist:Number = mouseX - stage.stageWidth * 0.5; var yDist:Number = mouseY - stage.stageHeight * 0.5; camPitch += ((yDist * rotX) - camPitch + 90) * easeOut; camYaw += ((xDist * rotY) - camYaw + 270) * easeOut; camera.orbit(camPitch, camYaw); super.onRenderTick(); } }} We have created a new plane using a wireframe as its material. The plane is assigned to a class property named model, which is of the DisplayObject3D type. In fact, any external model is a do3D. No matter what type of model we load in the following examples, we can always assign it to the model property. The classes that we'll use for loading 3D models all inherit from DisplayObject3D. Now that we have created a default application, we are ready to create our first model in 3D Studio Max, export it, and then import it into Papervison3D. Creating models in Autodesk 3ds Max and loading them into Papervision3D Autodesk 3ds Max (also known as 3D Studio Max or 3ds Max) is one of the widely-known commercial 3D modeling and animation programs. This is a good authoring tool to start with, as it can save to two of the file formats Papervision3D can handle. These are: COLLADA (extension *.dae): An open source 3D file type, which is supported by Papervision3D. This is the most advanced format and has been supported since Papervision3D's first release. It also supports animations and is actually just a plain text XML file. 3D Studio (extension *.3ds): As the name suggests, this is one of the formats that 3ds Max natively supports. Generally speaking it is also one of the most common formats to save 3D models in. As of 3ds Max version 9, there is a built-in exporter plugin available that supports exporting to COLLADA. However, you should avoid using this, as at the time of writing, the models it exports are not suitable for Papervision3D. Don't have a license of 3ds Max and want to get along with the following examples? Go to www.autodesk.com to download a 30-day trial. Installing COLLADA Max An exporter that does support COLLADA files suitable for Papervision3D is called COLLADA Max. This is a free and open source exporter that works with all versions of 3ds Max 7 and higher. Installing this exporter is easy. Just follow the steps mentioned below: Make sure you have installed 3ds Max version 7 or higher. Go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/colladamaya/. Click on View all files and select the latest COLLADA Max version. (At the time of writing this is COLLADA Max NextGen 0.9.5, which is still in beta, but is the only version that works with 3ds Max 2010). Save the download somewhere on your computer. Run the installer. Click Next, until the installer confirms that the exporter is installed. Start 3ds Max and double check if we can export using the COLLADA or COLLADA NextGen filetype, as shown in the following screenshot: If the only COLLADA export option is Autodesk Collada, then something went wrong during the installation of COLLADA Max, as this is not the exporter that works with Papervision3D. Now that 3ds Max is configured correctly for exporting a file format that can be read by Papervision3D, we will have a look at how to create a basic textured model in 3ds Max and export it to Papervision3D. Creating the Utah teapot and export it for Papervision3D If you already know how to work with 3ds Max, this step is quite easy. All we need to do is create the Utah teapot, add UV mapping, add a material to it, and export it as COLLADA. However, if you are new to 3ds Max, the following steps needs to be clarified. First, we start 3ds Max and create a new scene. The creation of a new scene happens by default on startup. The Utah teapot is one of the objects that comes as a standard primitive in 3ds Max. This means you can select it from the default primitives menu and draw it in one of the viewports. Draw it in the top viewport so that the teapot will not appear rotated over one of its axes. Give it a Radius of 250 in the properties panel on the right, in order to make it match with the units that we'll use in Papervision3D. Position the teapot at the origin of the scene. You can do this by selecting it and changing the x, y, and z properties at the bottom of your screen. You would expect that you need to set all axes to 0, although this is not the case. In this respect, the teapot differs from other primitives in 3ds Max, as the pivot point is located at the bottom of the teapot. Therefore, we need to define a different value for the teapot on the z-axis. Setting it to approximately -175 is a good value. To map a material to the teapot, we need to define a UV map first. UV mapping is also known as UVW mapping. Some call it UV mapping and others call it UVW mapping. 3ds Max uses the term UVW mapping. While having the teapot still selected, go to modify and then select UVW Mapping from the modifier list. Select Shrink Wrap and click Fit in the Alignment section. This will create a UVW map for us. Open the material editor using keyboard shortcut m. Here we define the materials that we use in 3ds Max. Give the new material a name. Replace 01 – Default with a material name of your choice—for example, teapotMaterial. Provide a bitmap as the diffuse material. You can do this by clicking on the square button, at the right of the Diffuse value within Blinn Basic Parameters section. A new window called Material/Map Browser will open. Double-click Bitmap to load an external image. Select an image of your choice. We will use teapotMaterial.jpg The material editor will now update and show the selected material on an illustrative sphere. This is your newly-created material, which you need to drag on the created teapot. The teapot model can now be exported. Depending on the version of the installed COLLADA exporter, select COLLADA or COLLADA NextGen. Note that you should not export using Autodesk Collada, as this exporter doesn't work properly for Papervision3D. Give it a filename of your choice, for example teapot, and hit Save. The exporter window will pop up. The default settings are fine for exporting to Papervision3D, so click OK to save the file. Save the model in the default 3ds Max file format (.max) somewhere on your local disk, so we can use it later when discussing other ways to export this model to Papervision3D. The model that we have created and exported is now ready to be imported by Papervision3D. Let's take a look at how this works. Importing the Utah teapot into Papervision3D To work with the exported Utah teapot, we will use the ExternalModelsExample project that we created previously in this article. Browse to the folder inside your project where you have saved your document class. Create a new folder called assets and copy to this folder, the created COLLADA file along with the image used as the material of the teapot. The class used to load an external COLLADA file is called DAE, so let's import it. import org.papervision3d.objects.parsers.DAE; This type of class is also known as a parser, as it parses the model from a loaded file. When you have a closer look at the source files of Papervision3D and its model parsers, you will probably find out about the Collada class. This might be a little confusing as we use the DAE parser to load a COLLADA file and we do not use the Collada parser. Although you could use either, this article uses the DAE parser exclusively, as it is a more recent class, supporting more features such as animation. There is no feature that is supported by the Collada parser, and is not supported by the DAE parser. Replace all code inside the init() method with the following code that loads a COLLADA file: model = new DAE();model.addEventListener(FileLoadEvent.LOAD_COMPLETE,modelLoaded);DAE(model).load("assets/teapot.DAE"); Because model is defined as a DisplayObject3D class type, we need to cast it to DAE to make use of its methods so that we can call the load() method. An event listener is defined, waiting for the model to be completely loaded and parsed. Once it is loaded, the modelLoaded() method will be triggered. It is a good convention to add models only to the scene once the model is completely loaded. Add the following line of code to the modelLoaded() method: scene.addChild(model); COLLADA Utah Teapot Example Publishing this code will result in the teapot with the texture as created in 3ds Max. In real-world applications it is good practice to keep your models in one folder and your textures in another. You might want to organize the files similar to the following structure: Models in /assets/models/ Textures in /assets/textures/ By default, textures are loaded from the same folder as the model is loaded from, or optionally from the location as specified in the COLLADA file. To include the /assets/textures/ folder we can add a file search path, which defines to have a look in the specified folder, to see if the file is located there, in case none can be found on the default paths. This can be defined as follows: daeModel.addFileSearchPath("assets/textures"); You can call this method multiple times, in order to have multiple folders defined. Internally, in Papervision3D, it will loop through an array of file paths. Exporting and importing the Utah teapot in 3ds format Now that we have seen how to get an object from 3ds Max into a Papervision3D project, we have a look at another format that is supported by both 3ds Max and Papervision3D. This format is called 3D Studio, using a 3ds extension. It is one of the established 3D file formats that are supported by most 3D modeling tools. Exporting and importing is very similar to COLLADA. Let's first export the file to the 3D Studio format. Open the Utah teapot, which we've modeled earlier in this article. Leave the model as it is, and go straight to export. This time we select 3D Studio (*.3DS) as the file type. Save it into your project folder and name it teapot. Click OK when asked whether to preserve Max's texture coordinates. If your model uses teapotMaterial.jpg, or an image with more than eight characters in its filename, the exporter will output a warning. You can close this warning, but you need to be aware of the output message. It says that the bitmap filename is a non-8.3 filename, that is, a maximum amount of 8 characters for the filename and a 3-character extension. The 3D Studio file is an old format, released at the time when there was a DOS version of 3ds Max. Back then it was an OS naming convention to use short filenames, known as 8.3 filenames. This convention still applies to the 3D Studio format, for the sake of backward compatibility. Therefore, the reference to the bitmap has been renamed inside the exported 3D Studio file. Because the exported 3D Studio file changed only the reference to the bitmap filename internally and it did not affect the file it refers to, we need to create a file using this renamed file reference. Otherwise, it won't be able to find the image. In this case we need to create a version of the image called teapotMa.jpg. Save this file in the same folder as the exported 3D Studio file. As you can see, it is very easy to export a model from 3ds Max to a format Papervision3D can read. Modeling the 3D object is definitely the hardest and most time consuming part, simply because creating models takes a lot of time. Loading the model into Papervision3D is just as easy as exporting it. First, copy the 3D Studio file plus the renamed image to the assets folder of your project. We can then alter the document class in order to load the 3ds file. The class that is used to parse a 3D Studio file is called Max3DS and needs to be imported. import org.papervision3d.objects.parsers.Max3DS; In the init() method you should replace or comment the code that loads the COLLADA model from our previous example, with the following: model = new Max3DS();model.addEventListener(FileLoadEvent.LOAD_COMPLETE,modelLoaded);Max3DS(model).load("assets/teapot.3ds", null, "./assets/"); As the first parameter of the load method, we pass a file reference to the model we want to load. The second parameter defines a materials list, which we will not use for this example. The third and final parameter defines the texture folder. This folder is relative to the location of the published SWF. Note that this works slightly different than the DAE parser, which loads referenced images from the path relative to the folder in which the COLLADA file is located or loads images as specified by the addFileSearchPath() method. ExternalModelsExample Publish the code and you'll see the same teapot. However, this time it's using the 3D Studio file format as its source. Importing animated models The teapot is a static model that we exported from a 3D program and loaded into Papervision3D. It is also possible to load animated models, which contain one or multiple animations. 3ds Max is one of the programs in which you can create an animation for use in Papervision3D. Animating doesn't require any additional steps. You can just create the animation and export it. This also goes for other modeling tools that support exporting animations to COLLADA. For the sake of simplicity, this example will make use of a model that is already animated in 3ds Max. The model contains two animations, which together make up one long animation on a shared timeline. We will export this model and its animation to COLLADA, load it into Papervision3D, and play the two animations. Open animatedMill.max in 3ds Max. This file can be found in the zip file that can be downloaded from: http://www.packtpub.com/files/code/5722_Code.zip. You can see the animation of the model directly in 3ds Max by clicking the play button in the menu at the bottom right corner, which will animate the blades of the mill. The first 180 frames animate the blades from left to right. Frames 181 to 360 animate the blades from right to left. As the model is already animated, we can go ahead with exporting, without making any changes to the model. Export it using the COLLADA filetype and save it somewhere on your computer. When the COLLADA Max exporter settings window pops up, we need to check the Sample animation checkbox. By default Start and End are set to the length of the timeline as it is defined in 3ds Max. In case you just want to export a part of it, you can define the start and end frames you want to export. For this example we leave them as they are: 0 and 360. By completing these steps you have successfully exported an animation in the COLLADA format for Papervision3D. Now, have a look at how we can load the animated model into Papervision3D. First, you need to copy the exported COLLADA and the applied material—Blades.jpg, House.jpg, and Stand.jpg—to the assets folder of your project. To load an animated COLLADA, we can use the DAE class again. We only need to define some parameters at instantiation, so the animation will loop. model = new DAE(true,null,true);model.addEventListener(FileLoadEvent.LOAD_COMPLETE,modelLoaded);DAE(model).load("assets/animatedMill.dae"); Take a look at what these parameters stand for.

  Blogging is a great way to get more traffic to your site and communicate with the community interested in the same topics as you. Search engines such as Yahoo! and Google love blogs because of the fact that articles written in blogs are mostly up-to-date and they get the information about the update of a blog really fast using RSS Feeds and Pings. Articles posted on a blog with these two options in place can get into the search engine indexes within hours, sometimes even minutes. How is blogging good for SEO? Using a blog has some advantages that fair really well if you want to have more visibility in the search engines. We will be looking at some of those advantages and how they can affect your search engine rankings. I am not saying blogging is easy, but it is very rewarding. Creating fresh content Creating short articles about your favorite topic and publishing them on a regular basis is the best way to get into the search engine results pages faster. The number one thing about blogging is that you can write long articles or short articles. The combination of the two different formats won't break the flow of your site, unlike a normal web site, where you mostly write articles that are built with a certain length. You can also state an opinion about things that are going on in your community and write news items. All that in one web site without worrying too much about how to structure all the information. A structure is needed for SEO and Joomla! will force you to use the structure you have chosen for your site. Using Joomla! as a blog will make it easier for you as you will be using the categories created in advance to hold that information for you. Google and blog indexing If you set up a blog and start using the sites and services we will be looking at, like FeedBurner and Technorati, you will notice that the major search engines also use these services to index blog sites and find new posts really fast. Now Google even owns FeedBurner! You will not only syndicate your articles using options such as RSS Feeds, but you will also push your articles through Technorati, the number one site to show your blog to bloggers. Google has a special tool with some basic categorization in place for searching blogs; you can find it at http://blogsearch.google.com. One good thing about this blog search tools is that it will show you how "old" a blog post is. For example, under the title you will see a statement such as 10 hours ago just to prove how fast you can get an article indexed from a blog. Setting up Joomla! as a blog Joomla! was not built to be a blog in its basic form, unlike WordPress. However, Joomla! has a built-in layout function called Blog layout that can be used for sections and categories. RSS Feeds are also built in, but we need to put an extra component in place to get a commenting system. First things first, let's set up the basic structure of your Joomla! based blog. How to structure your blog section The first thing you need to do is to come up with a section name for your blog. You already have an extended keywords list, so it should not be difficult to set up a blog. In my example site I have set up a Section called Garden Pools Blog and the Alias I want to use is garden-pools. This alias is going to be included in the SEF URL and contains some of the keywords I want to target with the blog. Once that is ready, you need to create the main categories, which of course will be the main topics of your blog section. Choosing your blog categories Again you need to find the right keywords to put into your category names. The best thing you can do now is to focus on the topic you want to blog about. It is really essential that you think about these categories and name them the right way, or you will get into trouble later on. Once you know about the SEF URLs, you might find yourself in trouble if you have the same category names as in the main site. In my category for this blog I have used the category name Water Gardens, depending on my choice of URL construction in the sh404SEF component. It is possible that I may not use the same category name for the main topics of my site. If I were to use the same category name they both would get the URL http://www.cblandscapegardening/water-gardens/, leaving one of the categories not reachable. One workaround would be to change the alias of one of the categories, but that would still leave a duplicate title on your site which you would need to change. Google would show it as a possible duplicate title in its webmaster content analysis. You can prevent this by choosing your categories wisely. Therefore, it is important to think about these URL structures, when you start naming and creating the blog categories. Stay focused and limit yourself If you start naming the categories make sure you stay on the same blog topic and keep the terms as relevant as possible. Don't create too many categories as you are going to create a separate menu for the blog. Too many categories will fill your menu with a long list of topics, and the visitors will not be able to choose from this long list. It is also not a pretty sight to have such a long list in your sidebar. Limiting yourself to a smaller section of categories, which you want to connect your articles to, will help you to stay more relevant to the topic of your choice. Creating a blog menu Once you have set up your categories, it's time to create your blog menu. Start with creating a new menu and call it whatever you want to, give it a title like The Garden Blog as in my example site. To set this feature go to your administrator panel and choose Menus | Main Menu from the menu bar at the top. After that choose New. Make it short and to the point so that it is really easy to find it on your site. Go to the Extensions menu, choose Module Manager, and Publish the module in the location you want it to show on your site. The first thing you should do is create a link to the section in which you are going to put your blog posts, and change the Parameters(Basic) to match the layout you want:   #Leading is set to 1, which means one full length article to start with   #Intro is set the 6, so you have the introduction text (that is the text before the "read more" link) from six articles, getting a total of seven on the blog page   Columns is set to 1 to get a complete overview of the articles in a listing that is not broken into two columns after the first Intro article   #Links this is the number of links with the title of older articles that don't show on the blog page anymore After setting the Parameters(Basic) you need to set the Parameters(Advanced) as well:   Change the Category Order to Order and the Primary Order to Most recent first.   Make sure you have the Show a Feed Link set to Yes—only for this menu item. This option is set so that we can get a full RSS Feed over all the blog categories For a blog, you need to change some of the settings in the Parameters(Component):     For a blog you need to Show the Author Name, the Created Date and Time, the Show Navigation, and the Read more... Link   The Article Rating/Voting depends on you, for me its set to off, as I don't like the dotted rating icons. The commenting system will give your visitors the ability to share their thoughts about your article, rather than just rate them, unlike the rating system. You will learn more about such a commenting system later in this article.

APIs (Application Programming Interface) are application-to-application programming interfaces that support harvesting information on the web using the known web standards. These APIs are provided by the entities who wish to expose parts of their resources that a third party can use. The APIs run transparent to the user and exposes just what they want to expose, with some providing access to material for public consumption with others giving access to resources based on authentication. In a sense they may be called a basic form of SAAS. Amazon.com, Google etc have exposed their APIs for some time. Twitter and New York Times have also exposed their API's which can be used to do some digging into the information contained in them, a kind of web mining. Many others such as Netflix have provided their own APIs described on their web sites. What is Twitter API? Twitter API is provided by the Social Networking and Micro-blogging service. Twitter API adheres to the web standards and one can talk to Twitter using HTTP. You can just about access anything on the Twitter web site. One example of creating a Microsoft SQL Server Report using Twitter API is available here - Tweets with Reporting Services, wherein the response from the Twitter API was in XML format. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is another format in which data is returned when an API call is made. In this article we will be looking at API call that returns a JSON response. Twitter exposes a large number methods through their API's such as API's for Search, Timeline, Status, User, Direct Message, Friendship and many more. As previously mentioned the responses will be in XML or JSON. Also while some APIs may take parameters others may not. The Twitter API used in this tutorial We will be looking at trends in Twitter API exposed by the url, http://search.twiiter.com/trends.format. We will be using the GET method and we will expect a JSON response. Since the volume of traffic may overwhelm, the calls that you can make to this in an hour are limited (also known as rate limiting) but not critical for the demo in this tutorial. Here is a typical call to the trends method on the Twitter API. Herein we will search for trends on the Twitter site and expect a response in JSON, if we use json instead of Format in the next URL address. Instead of:http://search.twitter.com/trends.Formattype-in, the following for URL address,http://search.twitter.com/trends.json When you plug the above in a web Brower you would get a response trends.json which you may save to your hard drive or, use it in any way you like. The next quoted text is what you get in response (note that this is what I got on Saturday 31, 2009 and what you get will be different), the content of the file trends.json you saved to your computer. Note that presently you get about top ten trends from this API call. {"as_of":"Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:44:46 +0000","trends":[{"name":"Happy Halloween", "url":"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22Happy+Halloween%22+OR+%22Feliz+ Halloween%22"},{"name":"#nxzerosetechaves","url":"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nxzerosetechaves"},{"name":"Danyl","url":"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Danyl"},{"name":"#HappyHalloween","url":"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23HappyHalloween"},{"name":"#potterday","url":"http://search.twitter.com/search?q =%23potterday"},{"name":"X Factor","url":"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22X+ Factor%22"},{"name":"It's Halloween","url":"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22It %27s+Halloween%22+OR+%22Its+Halloween%22"},{"name":"Trick","url":"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Trick+OR+%23trick"},{"name":"Paranormal Activity","url":"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22Paranormal+Activity%22"},{"name":"This Is It","url":"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22This+Is+It%22"}]} First of all what you see returned is a JSON object. If you are new to JSON review this article on my blog. The various elements that you see such as 'name', 'url' etc are fields in the response that are all described in the API documentation(look for Return Values). Some of the API calls can return a ton of information and you will have to know the API method so that you can correctly parse this data. Another thing you would notice is that the JSON object you get out is a nested object with many levels. You may need a JSON Parser to get a clearer picture of this nesting and I recommend using the online parser at this site. Using the above site, the JSON Object would appear as shown (only a portion is shown). New York Times API New York Times made available to the developers sometime in the middle of October 2008 APIs that can search New York Times for various kinds of information . Just like in Twitter there are a large number of APIs that you can use such as: Article Search; Best Sellers; Campaign Finance; Congress; and many others. Interested users can get on to this resource by signing up here requesting what APIs they would like to use. After signing up, New York Times would provide keys for the APIs that you want to access. It is important therefore, that the call should include the keys provided to you. For example, I received keys to access the following resources: Movie Reviews, Article Search, Best Sellers and Times Newswire. The key for the Movies Reviews API appears as shown here (the one shown here has been doctored and will not work). Movie Reviews API Key: b57378910b9fd80ecc73461547c93e8a:10:50673441 Using the New York Times API It is a valuable resource since you can get for example with the Article Search API access to more than 2.8 million articles from 1981. Using this is quite simple, just paste the URL shown below into the address box of your browser. Note that the key shown here is fake (but of correct format). http://api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v1/article?query=India&facets=publication_year&api-key=6c208890a4880093c30020be8fe17a40:0:50633441 This will display in the browser the JSON object that is returned as shown. You can use the previously mentioned site to parse it for more friendly display. {"facets" : {"publication_year" : [{"count" : 2724 , "term" : "2008"} , {"count" : 2345 , "term" : "2006"} , {"count" : 2311 , "term" : "2009"} , {"count" : 2282 , "term" : "2007"} , {"count" : 2144 , "term" : "2002"} ,{"count" : 2111 , "term" : "2001"} , {"count" : 1988 , "term" : "2005"} , {"count" : 1951 , "term" : "2004"} , {"count" : 1921 , "term" : "1985"} , {"count" : 1798 , "term" : "2003"} , {"count" : 1761 , "term" : "1999"} , {"count" : 1720 , "term" : "2000"} , {"count" : 1642 , "term" : "1998"} , {"count" : 1442 , "term" : "1984"} , {"count" : 1382 , "term" : "1986"}]} , "offset" : "0" , "results" : [{"body" : "BARSUR, India — At the edge of the Indravati River, hundreds of miles from the nearest international border, India effectively ends. Indian paramilitary officers point machine guns across the water. The dense jungles and mountains on the other side belong to Maoist rebels dedicated to overthrowing the government. "That is their liberated" , "byline" : "By JIM YARDLEY" , "date" : "20091101" , "title" : "Maoist Rebels Widen Deadly Reach Across India" , "url" : "http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/world/asia /01maoist.html"} ,.........(there is more of this but abbreviated here) Response Format As you can see the responses to the API calls return JSON objects in general of the form shown belo w (this one is of the form returned by the Twiiter API). What we propose to do is to use jQuery's GetJSON() method to get the JSON Objects and use Microsoft AJAX JavaScript files to display the data on the web page. Both jQuery javascript files and Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX files are both available on the Microsoft ECN (CDN). The GetJSON() method as well as the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX templates can be easily implemented in the Visual Studio 2008 IDE. Alternatively Microsoft AJAX can also be used to retrieve data from the web sites. In this article the GetJSON() method will be used. {"x":{"y":[{"a1":"b1", "c1":"d1"}, {"a2":"b2", "c2":"d2"}]},.... "f":"g",....}

Creating truly decoupled composite SOA applications requires a complete separation of the service consumer and the service provider.This is typically achieved through the use of asynchronous messaging.In an asynchronous messaging pattern, applications can perform in a"fire and forget" mode. This removes the need of an application to know details of the application on the other side. Additionally, it also improves resource utilization as applications are not holding onto resources until the interaction is complete. On the other hand, this introduces complexities of creating and managing message queues and topics. It requires that both the publisher of the message and the consumer use the same messaging technology. Each messaging system also has its own constraints on the types of programming languages and environments that can use the service. In a service-oriented world, this tight coupling to the implementation of the underlying messaging system is at odds with the fundamental requirement of implementation independence. What's needed is a level of abstraction that allows applications to generate an event using business terms and associate a business object in an implementation‑independent form. Oracle SOA Suite 11g addresses this with the introduction of anew feature in the form of the Event Delivery Network. Introducing events The Event Delivery Network (EDN) in Oracle SOA Suite 11g provides a declarative way to use a publish/subscribe model to generate and consume business events without worrying about the underlying message infrastructure. Developers only need to produce or consume events without having to deal with any particular messaging API like JMS, AQ, and MQ, and so on. Consuming an event means expressing an interest in the occurrence of a specific situation,while producing an event means advertising this occurrence. Using the same concepts that are used in Web Service Definition Language (WSDL), EDN uses an XML-based Event Definition Language, which allows you to define the event and its associated,strongly typed data. This definition is then registered with the SOA Infrastructure and is available to all composites to publish or subscribe.   SERVICES MESSAGING EDN WSDL:Standard service interface model JMS API:Application Programming Interface EDL:Event Definition Language XSD:Strong typing Handful of raw types XSD Business-oriented Developer-oriented Business-oriented Wealth of tools Mostly coding tools Fully declarative  

Basemap is a Matplotlib toolkit, a collection of application-specific functions that extends Matplotlib functionalities, and its complete documentation is available at http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/basemap/doc/html/index.html. Toolkits are not present in the default Matplotlib installation (in fact, they also have a different namespace, mpl_toolkits), so we have to install Basemap separately. We can download it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/matplotlib/, under the matplotlib-toolkits menu of the download section, and then install it following the instructions in the documentation link mentioned previously. Basemap is useful for scientists such as oceanographers and meteorologists, but other users may also find it interesting. For example, we could parse the Apache log and draw a point on a map using GeoIP localization for each connection. We use the 0.99.3 version of Basemap for our examples. First example Let's start playing with the library. It contains a lot of things that are very specific, so we're going to just give an introduction to the basic functions of Basemap. # pyplot module importimport matplotlib.pyplot as plt# basemap importfrom mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap# Numpy importimport numpy as np These are the usual imports along with the basemap module. # Lambert Conformal map of USA lower 48 statesm = Basemap(llcrnrlon=-119, llcrnrlat=22, urcrnrlon=-64, urcrnrlat=49, projection='lcc', lat_1=33, lat_2=45, lon_0=-95, resolution='h', area_thresh=10000) Here, we initialize a Basemap object, and we can see it has several parameters depending upon the projection chosen. Let's see what a projection is: In order to represent the curved surface of the Earth on a two-dimensional map, a map projection is needed. This conversion cannot be done without distortion. Therefore, there are many map projections available in Basemap, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Specifically, a projection can be: equal-area (the area of features is preserved) conformal (the shape of features is preserved) No projection can be both (equal-area and conformal) at the same time. In this example, we have used a Lambert Conformal map. This projection requires additional parameters to work with. In this case, they are lat_1, lat_2, and lon_0. Along with the projection, we have to provide the information about the portion of the Earth surface that the map projection will describe. This is done with the help of the following arguments: Argument Description llcrnrlon Longitude of lower-left corner of the desired map domain llcrnrlat Latitude of lower-left corner of the desired map domain urcrnrlon Longitude of upper-right corner of the desired map domain urcrnrlat Latitude of upper-right corner of the desired map domain     The last two arguments are:   Argument Description resolution Specifies what the resolution is of the features added to the map (such as coast lines, borders, and so on), here we have chosen high resolution (h), but crude, low, and intermediate are also available. area_thresh Specifies what the minimum size is for a feature to be plotted. In this case, only features bigger than 10,000 square kilometer

Blender particles In the last versions of Blender 3D, the particle system received a huge upgrade, making it more complex and powerful than before. This upgrade, however, made it necessary to create more parameters and options in order for the system to acts. What didn't change was the need for an object that works as emitter of the particles. The shape and look of this object will be directly related to the type of effects we want to create. Before we discuss the effects that we will be creating, let's look at how the particles work in Blender. To create any type of particle system, go to the Objects panel and find the Particles button. This is where we will set up and change our particles for a variety of effects. The first time we open this menu, nothing will be displayed. But, if we select a mesh object and press the Add New button, this object will immediately turn into a new emitter. When a new emitter is created, we have to choose the type of behavior this emitter has in the particle system. In the top-left part of the menu, we will find a selector that lets us choose the type of interaction of the emitter. These are the three types of emitters: Emitter: This is the standard type, which is a single object that emits particles according to the parameters and rules that we set up in the particles controls. Hair: Here, we have a type of particle emitter that creates particles as thin lines for representing hair and fur. Since this is more related to characters, we won't use this type of emitter in this book. Reactor: With this emitter, we can create particle systems that interact with each other. It works by setting up a particle system that interferes with the motion and changes the trajectories of other particles. In our projects, we will use only the emitter type. However, you can create indirect animations and use particles to interact with each other. For instance, if you want to create a set of asteroids that block the path of our spacecraft, we could create this type of animation easily with a reactor particle system. How particles work To create and use a particle system, we will look at the most important features and parameters of each menu and create some pre-systems to use later in this article for the spacecraft. To fully understand how particles work, we have to become familiar with the forces or parameters that control the look and feel of particles. For each of those parameters and forces, we have a corresponding menu in Blender. Here corresponding parameters that control the particle system: Quantity: This is a basic feature of any particle system that allows us to set up how many particles will be in the system. Life: As a particle system is based on animation parameters, we have to know from how many frames the particle will be visible in the 3D world. Mesh emitting: Our emitters are all meshes, and we have to determine from which part of those 3D objects the particles will be emitted. We have several options to choose from, such as vertices or parts of the objects delimited by vertex groups. Motion: If we set up our particle system and don't give it enough force to make the particles move, nothing will happen to the system. So, even more important than setting up the appearance of the particles is choosing the right forces for the initial velocity of the particles. Physics and forces: Along with the forces that we use in the motion option, we will also apply some force fields and deflectors to particles to simulate and change the trajectories of the objects based on physical reactions. Visualization: A standard particle system has only small dots as particles, but we can change the way particles look in a variety of ways. To create flares and special effects such as the ones we need, we can use mesh objects that have Halo effects and many more. Interaction: At the end of the particle life, we can use several types of actions and behaviors to control the destiny of a particle. Should it spawn a new particle or simply die when it hits a special object? These are the things we have to consider before we begin setting up the animation.