How-To Tutorials

Creating a theme Drupal separates layout and styling information from processing code. HTML is usually stored in templates or theme functions. The CSS along with other styling information (including some images) are also stored separately from the functional code. A theme is a collection of resources, (usually template files, CSS, JavaScript, and images) that can be plugged into Drupal to provide layout and styling to a site. If we want to change the look and feel of a site, the best place to start is with a theme. We've already created a JavaScript file that provides additional printing functionality. In this section, we are going to create a new theme, and then incorporate our new script. Typically, a theme must provide the following things: HTML markup for common Drupal structures such as pages, blocks, comments, and nodes. This will include navigational elements. Any styles needed. This is typically done in the CSS files. Any necessary images or media elements that will play a substantial role in layout. Information about the theme, including a screenshot. In addition to these, many themes will also provide: JavaScript files that may be necessary for added functionality. Other sorts of media, such as Flash animations, may occasionally be needed. PHP code that performs complex layout tasks may sometimes be used. A theme must have at least one pre-defined file (the theme's .info file). Commonly though, full themes have eight or more files. Full themes and subthemes The first step in creating our theme is deciding whether we want to start from scratch or begin with an existing theme. If we were to start from scratch, we would create a full theme. But if we wanted to build on another theme, we could create another kind of theme called a subtheme. To create a full theme, we would need to implement all of the required features of a theme, and perhaps add on some other features as well. Typically, this would involve creating all of the necessary templates, a couple of CSS files, and a couple of helper files. Sometimes, it is more expedient to begin with an existing theme and just override the things we want to change. This is the capability that subthemes, a new addition in Drupal 6, provide. From a technical perspective, creating a full theme is not difficult, but it is time-consuming. In contrast, a subtheme can be created quickly. Since our focus is on JavaScript, and not theming, we will be creating a subtheme. That way, we can make the most of an existing project and keep our work to a minimum. As the name implies, a subtheme is derived from another theme. Therefore, we will need to pick a theme to start with. Drupal comes with six themes pre-installed, and these vary in method and complexity. For example, Garland is a complex theme with templates, JavaScript, CSS, and lots of special PHP. In contrast, Chameleon generates simpler HTML, but does all of this in pure PHP code, without reliance on template files. Since we want to focus our attention on JavaScript, it would be best to start with a simple theme. From there, we will selectively override only what we need. Our theme of choice will be the Bluemarine theme, which has a very basic PHPTemplate-based structure that is easy to customize. Looking for a good base theme to start with? Check out the Zen theme in the contributed themes at http://drupal.org/project/zen. It's built to enable subtheming. You will need to create some CSS content, but the HTML structure is all in place. We will with Bluemarine and create a new subtheme, borrowing as much as possible from the base theme. Creating a theme: first steps To create a theme, we will do the following: Create a directory for the theme. Create the theme's .info (dot-info) file. Add our first files. After we've finished these three short steps, we will add our JavaScript to the theme. A precaution for theme developersTo get build our theme correctly, we will need to be able to view it. But to view it, we will need to have it enabled. What if we make a mistake that prevents Drupal from rendering correctly? We could lock ourselves out of the administration page. To prevent this from happening, it is wise to set the administration theme to one of the default themes. This is done in Administer | Site configuration | Administration theme. Creating a theme directory Every theme should have its own directory. When you install Drupal, one of the directories created is called themes/. If you take a look inside that directory, you will see all of the top-level (non-subtheme) themes that Drupal provides. Do not put your themes in there. This directory is only for themes that come with Drupal's core. Themes, like modules, go inside the sites/ subtree. The sites/ area also appears inside the Drupal directory and is created when you install Drupal. Inside the sites/ directory, two folders are created by default: sites/all/ and sites/default/. To better understand these two directories, keep in mind that one installation of Drupal can serve multiple sites. For example, if I have a site called example.com and a site called anotherexample.com, I can use one installation of Drupal to serve both. The first site I install will be installed in sites/default/. The next site I install will need to go in its own folder (for example, sites/anotherexample.com/). Content that only belongs to a single site should go in that site's directory. For example, if I want to install a special theme for anotherexample.com, I should put the theme in sites/anotherexample.com/themes/. In other cases, I may want to share a theme or module across all sites. In these cases, files would go in sites/all/. In this article, we will be putting all of our themes and modules in sites/all/themes/ and sites/all/modules/. If in doubt, put files in sites/all/. This makes it easier to share your work between sites. With that background material behind us, let's create our theme directory. The name we give to this directory will be the name of our theme. Theme and module names should always be in a lower case, and may be composed only of letters, numbers, and underscores. In the .info file, we will be able to attach a human-readable name to the theme. That may use spaces, capital letters, and other special characters. Our first theme will be in sites/all/themes/frobnitz/ as seen in the following screehshot:. If this is the first theme you create, you may also need to create the sites/all/themes/ directory. Once the directory is created, we need to add a special file to tell Drupal about the theme. Creating the .info file Inside sites/all/themes/frobnitz/, we need to create a file to provide important information about our theme. The file will always be named after the theme, and end with the extension .info. Because of the extension, it is usually called the theme's dot-info file. We will create frobnitz.info, and add the following contents to the file: ; $Id$name = Frobnitzdescription = Table-based multi-column theme with JavaScriptenhancements.version = 1.0core = 6.xbase theme = bluemarine The .info file contains a handful of lines with the form name = value. These entries provide basic information about the theme. Some of this information is displayed to the user (for example, name and description). Some information is used by Drupal to make sure that this theme will work with the installed version of Drupal. The core parameter is used for that. Later in this article, we will see some other entries that contain information directly related to the display of the theme. With those parameters, we can change the way the theme looks and behaves just by altering the values. The name, description, version, and core fields are required for all themes. The name field is used to give our theme a human-friendly name. You can use capital letters and spaces in this field. The description parameter is used to provide a one-sentence explanation of what the theme does. The version field should indicate which version number of this theme is. As with most software, you typically start with 1.0. Finally, the core field should indicate what version of Drupal this theme works with. For us, it will always be 6.x. There's one additional parameter in our file: base theme = bluemarine The base theme parameter is what we use to inform Drupal that our theme is a subtheme, derived from bluemarine. If we were creating a theme from scratch, we would not include this line. For the time being, this is all we need in our theme file. Later, we will add more. Modifying .info files and clearing the cacheTo improve performance, Drupal caches theme information, particularly the theme's .info file. When you change the contents of that file (for example, when you add a new script or stylesheet), you will need to clear the theme information cache to force Drupal to re-read the .info file. The most reliable way to do this is through Administer | Site configuration | Performance. At the bottom of that page is a button labeled Clear cached data. Press that button to clear the cache. Adding files to the theme At this point, we've actually created a working theme. Only the theme's directory and .info file are required. With just those two elements, we can now go to Administer | Site building | Themes and select our Frobnitz theme. Of course, all Frobnitz will be at this point is an exact duplicate of Bluemarine The following screenshot shows a sample of the Frobnitz theme: The logo image, titles, and all other information in the screenshot is showing through the regular site configuration. The look and feel should be identical whether we choose Bluemarine or our new Frobnitz style. What we want to do now is add something new to our theme, and what better place to start than with a stylesheet. Our theme will import all of the stylesheets of its parent. So in our theme, we inherit style.css from Bluemarine. Looking at the HTML source for a page rendered with Frobnitz, we would see a line like this: <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="/drupal/themes/bluemarine/style.css" /> If we didn't want that style to be loaded from Bluemarine, we could simply create another file named style.css in our own theme's directory. This new file would override Bluemarine's. But we don't want to start over and rebuild the stylesheet. We just want to add a few extra styles. To do this, we will create a new stylesheet called frobnitz.css. This CSS file will also go inside our sites/all/themes/frobnitz/ folder. Like PHP and JavaScript, the Drupal project defines coding standards for CSS. You can learn more about these here: http://drupal.org/node/302199. To begin, all we will do is add a black, one-pixel border on the right side of the lefthand column. The stylesheet looks like this: #sidebar-left { border-right: 1px solid black;} Cascade: the 'C' in 'CSS'Drupal will add styles in a specific order, with theme styles added last. Because of this, you can predictably make use of the CSS cascading behavior. The previous declaration will be added to the declaration made in Bluemarine's style.css file. That means we will get the combination of styles in style.css and frobnitz.css, with frobnitz.css's declarations taking precedence. But before our new stylesheet will have any effect, we need to tell Drupal to include it as part of the theme. This is done with a simple addition to the frobnitz.info file: ; $Id$name = Frobnitzdescription = Table-based multi-column theme with JavaScript enhancements.version = 1.0core = 6.xbase theme = bluemarinestylesheets[all][] = frobnitz.css Only that last line, which is highlighted, is different. This informs Drupal that there is a stylesheet that should be used on all format types for this page, and is named frobnitz.css. The all keyword indicates that this stylesheet applies to all media format types. CSS format types include print (for printed media), screen (for screen displays), and other types. While this directive uses an array-like syntax, it does not function like an array. You cannot, for example, refer to stylesheets[all][1].

How SNMP Behaves in the CUPS Web Interface In the CUPS web interface under the Administration tab, the option Find New Printers is used to discover printers that support SNMPv1. This will search and list the available network printers. The discovery of printers is based on the directive configuration done in the /etc/cups/snmp.conf file. On the basis of the search list, you can add a printer using the Add This Printer option. The process is very similar to the Add Printer wizard. Overview of Basic Debugging in CUPS-SNMP In the snmp.conf, we started discussion about various debugging levels in CUPS support. If the directive DebugLevel is set to anything other than 0, you will get the output accordingly. The debugging mode can be made active using the following command. As the SNMP backend supports debugging mode, the command for setting up debugging mode changes depending on the shell prompt. The SNMP backend is located at /usr/lib/cups/backend/snmp when using the Bourne, Bash, Z, or Korn shells. The following command will output verbose debugging information into the cupssnmp.log file when using those shells: $CUPS_DEBUG_LEVEL=1 /usr/lib/cups/backend/snmp 2>&1 | tee cupssnmp.log On Mac OS X, the SNMP backend is located /usr/libexec/cups. The following command will be used: $CUPS_DEBUG_LEVEL=1 /usr/libexec/cups/backend/snmp 2>&1 | tee cupssnmp.log If you are using the C or Tcsh shells, you can use the following command. $(setenv CUPS_DEBUG_LEVEL 1; /usr/lib/cups/backend/snmp) |& tee cupssnmp.log An example of the output might look like this: DEBUG: Scanning for devices in "public" via "@LOCAL"... DEBUG: 0.000 Sending 46 bytes to 192.168.0.255... DEBUG: 0.001 Received 50 bytes from 192.168.0.250... DEBUG: community="public" DEBUG: request-id=1213875587 DEBUG: error-status=0 DEBUG: 1.001 Scan complete! The above output shows that doesn't find any printer at the specified DeviceURI. The above shows the output at the basic debugging level; more information can be found if we use level 2 or 3. Overview of mailto.conf The CUPS provides the facility to send notifications through email. It can be done by integrating the local mail server with CUPS. The configuration file is /etc/cups/mailto.conf, and contains several directives and the characteristics and behavior of the local mail server and email notification for CUPS. We normally use each of the following directives in our daily communication done through mail. The Cc Directive The directive Cc (carbon copy) is used to specify an additional recipient for all email notifications. By default, the value directive is not set and the email is sent only to the administrator. The following examples shows that how email IDs can be specified with this directive. Cc kajol@cupsgrp.com Cc Kajol Shah <ks@cupsgrp.com> The From Directive This directive is used to specify the sender's name in the email notifications. By default, the ServerAdmin address specified in the cupsd.conf file is used. The following are some examples that show how the sender's email is specified with this directive: From cupsadmin@cupsgrp.com From Your CUPS Printer <cupsadmin@cupsgrp.com> The Sendmail Directive The directive Sendmail specifies the command to run and deliver an email locally. If there is an SMTPServer directive, then this directive cannot be used. If both directives appear in the mailto.conf file, then only the last directive is used. The following example shows how this directive can be specified. The default value for this directive is /usr/sbin/sendmail. Sendmail /usr/sbin/sendmail Sendmail /usr/lib/sendmail -bm -i The SMTPServer Directive This directive is used to specify an IP address or hostname of an SMTP mail server. As we have seen previously, this directive cannot be used with the Sendmail directive, and if both Sendmail and SMTPServer directives don't appear in the mailto.conf file, then the default Sendmail will be considered. The following are examples of the SMTP server: SMTPServer mail.mailforcups.com SMTPServer 192.168.0.17 The Subject Directive The Subject directive is used if you want to prefix some text to the subject line in each email that CUPS sends out. The following examples show how a prefix can be specified with this directive. By default, no prefix string is added: Subject [CUPS_ALERTS] Subject URGENT CUPS NOTICE Monitoring SNMP Printers As discussed, CUPS supports SNMPv1 for discovering SNMP enabled printers. This Simple Network Management Protocol-SNMP is used for managing networking printers. We can use any network monitoring tools that supports SNMP for monitoring these SNMP-enabled printers. You can check various open-source network monitoring tools at: http://www.openxtra.co.uk/network-management/monitor/open-source/ I would recommend you to use Cacti, which is a frontend to an RRDTool (Round Robin Database Tool) that collects and stores data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely written in PHP. The advantage of Cacti over other network monitoring tool is that it has built-in SNMP capabilities and like other monitoring tools such as Nagios, it has its internal mechanism to check certain aspects of the infrastructure. It also provides a frontend for maintaining customized scripts, which an administrator normally creates. But the most important factor is that it is much easier to configure than Nagios. RRDTool is a system that stores high performance logging data and displays related time-series graphs. You can get more information about RRDTool from: http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/ Downloading and Installing Cacti The pre-requisites of Cacti include MySQL database, PHP, RRDTool, net-snmp, and PHP supported web servers such as Apache or IIS. You can get detailed information about the pre-requisites for Cacti installation at: http://www.cacti.net/downloads/docs/html/requirements.html The current stable release of Cacti is 0.8.7b. You can download various versions of Cacti for different platforms from: http://www.cacti.net/download_cacti.php You can get installation information for Cacti and its pre-requisites on the UNIX/Linux platform from: http://www.cacti.net/downloads/docs/html/install_unix.html The following URL will help you install Cacti on the Windows platform: http://www.cacti.net/downloads/docs/html/install_windows.html You can proceed further by clicking on Next. The next screen shows two options for a new install or an upgrade. If you want to do fresh installation, use the option New Install and click on Next. The screen also displays some useful information such as database user, database hostname, database name, and OS that was specified while configuring Cacti. If you want to upgrade the Cacti, follow the instructions mentioned here: http://www.cacti.net/downloads/docs/html/upgrade.html And then select the upgrade from cacti-current-version option and click on Next to proceed further. The following screen appears, which shows the recommended path of the binary files such as RRDTool, PHP, snmpwalk, snmpgetV, snmpbulkwalk, snmpgetnext, and information related to the Cacti log file and versions for net-snmp and RRDTool. If you found any change in the path with your installation, it should be modified first. Otherwise, Cacti may not work properly. Click on Finish to complete the installation procedure. Once the installation is finished and the next screen will ask for authentication. You need to use the username and the password mentioned in your database configuration to log into a Cacti application: You can use default login information to log in for the first time. Once you click on Login, the next screen will force you to change your password. Once the password is changed, you can see the main page of Cacti that contains two major tabs: console and graphs apart from other generalized options. The console tab contains various options related to the template and graphs management, whereas the graphs tab contains related graphs.  

There are exciting things ahead in this article, so let's get started. Adding content to our site Adding, updating, and deleting page content is at the heart of a CMS. We will use the Joomla! content management system for our examples in this article. Joomla! is a very popular and powerful CMS. Let's see how we can manage content with Joomla!. Time for action-adding a page Log in to the administration section of Joomla!. It is generally athttp://yoursite.com/joomla/administrator/. Click on the large icon that says Add New Article. We want to create a page about Surya Namaskara, or Sun Salutation, one of the most popular yoga postures. Enter Surya Namaskara in the Title field, and Sun Salutation in the Alias field. We have already created a few sections and categories in Joomla!. Select Posturesas Section, and Featured as Category from the drop downs. The Word-like area below is a content editor. It is also known as the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. Type in the following text in the area that looks like a white page. We took this text from Wikipedia, but you can type a statement of your choice. Surya Namaskara or Sun Salutation (lit. "salute to the sun"), is a common sequence of Hatha yoga asanas. Its origins lie in a worship of Surya, the Hindu solar deity. Don't see a Word-like editor? If you don't see a Word-like text editor, you may be missing some browser plug-ins. Your browser may warn you of missing plug-ins. In such a case, go ahead and install the missing plug-ins. If it still does not work, go toSite | Global Configuration | Site | Site Settings | Default WYSIWYG Editor and select TinyMCE or XStandard. You can also configure the editor per user from User Manager. Press Enter after the first paragraph. Add two more sentences like this: Surya Namaskara is an excellent exercise for the whole body. Mastering this asana will help you stay fit forever. "Asana" is the Sanskrit word for posture. Yoga postures are called Asanas. We want to highlight that Surya Namaskara is an excellent exercise for the whole body. Select that portion of text and click on the B icon to make it bold. You will immediately see the result in the editing window. At this stage, your editing window will look like this. If you want to write additional text, go ahead and add it. Click on the large Save icon at the top right of the page when you are done. Now our content is saved. Click on the Preview link in the Joomla! menu bar and you will see the content on the site's home page. Here's how it will look: What just happened? We used Joomla! to create our first content page. We added a page title, an alias, and the section and category this page belongs to. We then used a Word-like editor to enter text for our page. We emphasized keywords by making them bold. This was done by selecting the keywords, and clicking on the B icon button in the toolbar. Notice that we can use this editor to apply a variety of other formatting to selected text. This kind of text editor is called aWYSIWYG editor. What is WYSIWYG? Why is it important?  WYSIWYG (pronounced 'wize,wig) is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get.The Word-like content editor we saw is WYSIWYG because our page looks the same in the editor as it does on the site. The fonts, formatting, colors, and alignments—all work consistently between the editing interface and the actual site.  Most CMSs come with a WYSIWYG editor. Such editors make it very easy for authors to add content and the formatting style that they like. These formatting options look and behave in a way similar to Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer. But the complexity of options provided may vary between CMSs. The following image shows the WYSIWYG editor toolbars of Joomla! (top) and WordPress (bottom). As you see, WordPress offers a simpler editor, but with lesser options. An amateur user will find it easier to work with an editor with fewer choices. As a matter of fact, WordPress's editor toolbar shows only the first row of options by default. You can enable a second row by clicking on the last button in first row: Show / Hide Kitchen Sink. On the other hand, Joomla! comes ready with all options visible. This is useful for a professional who wants better control over content formatting. Evaluate how important is it for you to have a WYSIWYG editor. Also, see if the CMS comes with it by default, or you have to add it via a plug-in or extension. For example, Drupal does not have a WYSIWYG editor module by default; but you can easily add it via a module. This also means some CMSs may not have a WYSIWYG editor. So, if there is no WYSIWYG editor, how do you add content? Well, if your content does not require a fancy format, you can live with simple textual content. Else, you can always use HTML. Surya Namaskara or Sun Salutation (lit. "salute to the sun"), is a common sequence of Hatha yoga asanas. Its origins lie in a worship of Surya, the Hindu solar deity. Do I need to learn HTML?  HTML is the language to layout and format web site pages. If you know HTML, it will be easier to manage your CMS. If HTML is not an option, a WYSIWYG editor can be really helpful. Here are some links for learning the basics of HTML:http://www.html.net/tutorials/html/http://www.w3schools.com/html/DEFAULT.asp Adding images We have added the basic content to our page. Now, we will try to include some pictures in our page. Images add a lot of meaning to the content, apart from adding a decorative value. Let's add an image to our page now. Time for action-adding images If you are not already logged in to the Joomla! administration, log in now. Click on Site in the main menu. That should open a submenu of site management options. Click on Media Manager. You will see previews of current images in Joomla!. Click on the stories folder to go into it. You will now see images within this folder. Let's create a new folder here to store images of different asanas/postures. In the Create Folder text box near the top right side, type in asanas and click on the button. This should create a new folder within stories. Click on it to move inside. We can now upload an image here. Click within the text box of the Upload File section at the page end. This will bring up a dialog window to select a file you want to upload. We want to upload an image for Surya Namaskara. Select an image of your choice. Now click on the Start Upload button.                                               File uploading requires correct permissions on the server To upload files to your site, you require correct permissions on yourserver. In technical terms, this is called making a folder world-writable or changing mode to 777. You can change folder permissions using an FTPapplication, or your site's control panel. Technically, it's sufficient to give a 666permission—read-and-write permission to the owner, group, and others—butnormally everyone gives a 777 permission, including execute permission for allthree. Here's a screenshot of setting these permissions using FireFTP, an FTPextension for the Firefox browser. The file upload operation may take a few seconds to complete, depending on image size. Once the image is uploaded, you will see its thumbnail in the list. Upload more images if you want to. Finally, your folder may look like this. We are now ready to insert an image in our page. Select Content  Article Manager  from the main menu. Click on the Surya Namaskara page to edit it. Inside our WYSIWYG editor, keep your cursor where you want to insert the image. Click on the Image button below the WYSIWYG editor. A window will open up with a thumbnail list of images available. Click on the b we created earlier. Click and select an image you want to insert. Add a description and title. Click on the Insert button at the top right. That will insert our image into the content area. Re-size it using the handles on the corners if you wish. Here's how it will look: Congratulations! You have successfully added an image to our page. What just happened?  We uploaded an image from our computer and added it to a page. In the process, we learned about the Media Manager, creating folders, and uploading files to Joomla!. We also learned how to select images to use on a page and even saw image insertion options.  Adding an image involved multiple activities. We had to first add it to the Media Manager.Because this was the first time we were adding an image, we also created a new folder. It was as simple as typing in a name and clicking a button.  We added images within folders since it will help us manage the images better. Once we add an image to the Media Manager, we can use that image on as many pages as we want. The Image button on the content editing screen allows us to select images to use on that page. It also helps us to add captions and correctly align inserted images with the text. You can also upload images using that image selection window itself.We took the Media Manager route to learn more. You can also upload images using that image selection window itself.We took the Media Manager route to learn more. Have a go hero-image formatting options  We have learned enough about inserting images to content now. It is time we try out something else. Once you insert an image, click on it, and then click on the small photo icon in the WYSIWYG editor's toolbar. Go ahead and try out different image properties, different alignment options, spacing, caption, and alternative text. See how the result changes in the preview.                                                       Don't let your images sink your site!                                                     Make sure your images are optimized and sized for web usage. Avoid changing the width and height via image properties. If you want to show a smaller image than the one you uploaded, resize it using photo editing software and use that new version. Large images take longer to load and can make your site slow.                                                      Have a go hero-adding a video  Our Yoga site may also require videos. Look around and find how a video can be added to the page.  Completed? Alright! We have now looked at how to edit a page and insert images/videos into it. Let's see the other options we have in editing and maintaining site content.

TYPO3 Extension Categories All TYPO3 extensions are classified into several predefined categories. These categories do not actually differentiate the extensions. They are more like hints for users about extension functionality. Often, it is difficult for the developer to decide which category an extension should belong to. The same extension can provide PHP code that fits into many categories. An extension can contain Frontend (FE) plugins, Backend (BE) modules, static data, and services, all at once. While it is not always the best solution to make such a monster extension, sometimes it is necessary. In this case, the extension author should choose the category that best fits the extension's purpose. For example, if an extension provides a reservation system for website visitors, it is probably FE related, even if it includes a BE module for viewing registrations. If an extension provides a service to log in users, it is most likely a service extension, even if it logs in FE users. It will be easier to decide where the extension fits after we review all the extension categories in this article. Choosing a category for an extension is mandatory. While the TYPO3 Extension Manager can still display extensions without a proper category, this may change and such extensions may be removed from TER (TYPO3 Extension Repository) in the future. The extension category is visible in several places. Firstly, extensions are sorted and grouped by category in the Extension Manager. Secondly, when an extension is clicked in the Extension Manager, its category is displayed in the extension details. If an extension's category is changed from one to another, it does not affect extension functionality. The Extension Manager will show the extension in a different category. So, categories are truly just hints for the user. They do not have any significant meaning in TYPO3. So, why do we care and talk about them? We do so because it is one of those things that make a good extension. If an extension developer starts making a new extension, they should do it properly from the very beginning. And one of the first things to do properly is to decide where an extension belongs. So, let's look into the various extension categories in more detail. Category: Frontend Extensions that belong to the Frontend category provide functionality related to the FE. It does not mean that they generate website output. Typically, extensions from the FE category extend FE functionality in other ways. For example, they can transform links from standard /index.php?id=12345 to /news/new-typo3-bookis-out.htm. Or, they can filter output and clean it up, compress, add or remove HTML comments, and so on. Often, these extensions use one or more hooks in the FE classes. For example, TSFE has hooks to process submitted data, or to post‑filter content (and many others). Examples of FE extensions are source_optimization and realurl. Category: Frontend plugins Frontend plugins is possibly the most popular extension category. Extensions from this category typically generate content for the website. They provide new content objects, or extend existing types of content objects. Typical examples of extensions from the Frontend plugins category are tt_news, comments, ratings, etc. Category: Backend Extensions from the Backend category provide additional functionality for TYPO3 Backend. Often, they are not seen inside TYPO3 BE, but they still do some work. Examples of such extensions are various debugging extensions (such as rlmp_ filedevlog) and extensions that add or change the pop-up menu in the BE (such as extra_page_cm_options system extension). This category is rarely used because extensions belonging to it are very special. Category: Backend module Extensions from this category provide additional modules for TYPO3 BE. Typical examples are system extensions such as beuser (provides Tools | Users module) or tstemplate (provides Web | Template module). Category: Services Services extend core TYPO3 functionality. Most known and most popular service extensions are authentication services. TYPO3 Extension Repository contains extensions to authenticate TYPO3 users over phpBB, vBulletine, or LDAP user databases. Services are somewhat special and will not be covered in this article. Extension developers who are interested in the development of services should consult appropriate documentation on the typo3.org website. Category: Examples Extensions from this category provide examples. There are not many, and are typically meant for beginners or for those who want to learn a specific feature of TYPO3, or features that another TYPO3 extension provides. Category: Templates Extensions from this category provide templates. Most often, they have preformatted HTML and CSS files in order to use them with the templateautoparser extension or map with TemplaVoila. Sometimes, they also contain TypoScript templates, for example, tmpl_andreas01 and tmpl_andreas09 extensions. Once installed, they provide pre‑mapped TemplaVoila templates for any website, making it easy to have a website up and running within minutes. Category: Documentation Documentation extensions provide TYPO3 documentation. Normally, TYPO3 extensions contain documentation within themselves, though sometimes, a document is too big to be shipped with extensions. In such cases, it is stored separately. There is an unofficial convention to start an extension key for such extensions with the doc_ prefix (that is, doc_indexed_search). Category: Miscellaneous Everything else that does not fit into any other category goes here; typical examples are skins. But do not put your extension here if you just cannot decide where it fits. In all probability, it should go into one of the other categories, not into Miscellaneous. Extension Files TYPO3 extensions consist of several files. Some of these files have predefined names, and serve a predefined purpose. Others provide code or data but also follow certain naming conventions. We will review all the predefined files in this article and see what purpose they serve. We will look into the files according to their logical grouping. While reading this section, you can take any extension from the typo3conf/ext/ directory at your TYPO3 installation and check the contents of each discussed file. Some files may be missing if the extension does not use them. There is only one file which is mandatory for any TYPO3 extension, ext_emconf.php. We will start examining files starting from this one. Common Files All files from this group have predefined names, and TYPO3 expects to find certain information in them. Hacking these files to serve another purpose or to have a different format usually results in incompatibility with other extensions or TYPO3 itself. While it may work in one installation, it may fail in others. So, avoid doing anything non-standard with these files. ext_emconf.php This is the only required file for any TYPO3 extension. And this is the only file that should be modified with great care. If it is corrupt, TYPO3 will not load any extension. This file contains information on the TYPO3 Extension Manager. This information tells the Extension Manager what the extension does, provides, requires, and conflicts with. It also contains a checksum for each file in the extension. This checksum is updated automatically when the extension is sent to TER (TYPO3 Extension Repository). The server administrator can easily check if anyone has hijacked the extension files by looking into the extension details in the Extension Manager. The modified files are shown in red. Here is a tip. If you (as an extension developer) send your own extension directly to the customer (bypassing TER upload), or plan to use it on your own server, always update the ext_emconf.php file using the Backup/Delete function of the Extension Manager. This will ensure that TYPO3 shows up-to-date data in the Extension Manager. Here is an example of a ext_emconf.php file from the smoothuploader extension: <?php ############################################################# # Extension Manager/Repository config file for ext: ↵ # "smoothuploader" # Auto generated 29-02-2008 12:36 # Manual updates: # Only the data in the array - anything else is removed by ↵ # next write. # "version" and "dependencies" must not be touched! ############################################################# $EM_CONF[$_EXTKEY] = array( 'title' => 'SmoothGallery Uploader', 'description' => 'Uploads images to SmoothGallery', 'category' => 'plugin', 'author' => 'Dmitry Dulepov [Netcreators]', 'author_email' => 'dmitry@typo3.org', 'shy' => '', 'dependencies' => 'rgsmoothgallery', 'conflicts' => '', 'priority' => '', 'module' => '', 'state' => 'beta', 'internal' => '', 'uploadfolder' => 0, 'createDirs' => '', 'modify_tables' => 'tx_rgsmoothgallery_image', 'clearCacheOnLoad' => 0, 'lockType' => '', 'author_company' => 'Netcreators BV', 'version' => '0.3.0', 'constraints' => array( 'depends' => array( 'rgsmoothgallery' => '1.1.1-', ), 'conflicts' => array( ), 'suggests' => array( ), ), '_md5_values_when_last_written' => 'a:12:{s:9:...;}', 'suggests' => array( ), ); ?> The variable _md5_values_when_last_written is shortened in the listing above.

Autoproxy with classic Spring By using the class ProxyFactoryBean, AOP can be used in a classic way. But writing separately for each bean on which we want to apply an advisor is not a pleasant thing to see, especially if they are many. So let's consider it as a practicable way only if the beans to be configured in that modality are few. On the other hand, if the beans to which we have to apply AOP are many, in order to avoid finding ourselves with very long configuration files, we adopt another tactic: We use the auto proxy creator's system, which allows us to automatically create proxies for the beans and prevent using ProxyFactoryBean. There are two classes made available by Spring to allow the auto proxy creator: BeanNameAutoProxyCreator and DefaultAdvisorAutoProxyCreator. BeanNameAutoProxyCreator BeanNameAutoProxyCreator just has a list of beans names to which proxy can be created automatically. The way in which the autoproxy is created is really simple. It implements the BeanPostProcessor interface, which in its implementation replaces the bean (target) with a proxy. Example: This is the interface describing an animal. package org.springaop.chapter.three.autoproxy.domain;public interface Animal { public Integer getNumberPaws(); public Boolean hasTail(); public boolean hasFur(); public Boolean hasHotBlood(); } The (interface) Bird extends Animal. package org.springaop.chapter.three.autoproxy.domain;public interface Bird extends Animal{ public Boolean hasBeak(); public Boolean hasFeathers(); } The class that implements the Animal interface to describe Cat: package org.springaop.chapter.three.autoproxy.domain;public class Cat implements Animal{ public boolean hasFur() { return true; } public Integer getNumberPaws() { return 4; } public Boolean hasTail() { return true; } public Boolean hasHotBlood() { return true; } public void setSpecies(String species) { this.species = species; } public String getSpecies() { return species; } public String getColour() { return colour; } public void setColour(String colour) { this.colour = colour; } private String species, colour;} The class that implements Animal and Bird to describe a Seabird: package org.springaop.chapter.three.autoproxy.domain;public class Seabird implements Animal,Bird{ public Integer getNumberPaws() { return 2; } public Boolean hasTail() { return false; } public Boolean hasBeak() { return true; } public Boolean hasFeathers() { return true; } public boolean hasFur() { return false; } public Boolean hasHotBlood() { return false; } public String getName() { return name; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; } private String name;} AnimalAdvice containing just the log with the target class, the invoked method, and the result. package org.springaop.chapter.three.autoproxy;import org.aopalliance.intercept.MethodInterceptor;import org.aopalliance.intercept.MethodInvocation;public class AnimalAdvice implements MethodInterceptor { public Object invoke(MethodInvocation invocation) throws Throwable { Logger log = Logger.getLogger(Constants.LOG_NAME); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.append("Target Class:").append(invocation.getThis()).append("n").append(invocation.getMethod()).append("n"); Object retVal = invocation.proceed(); sb.append(" return value:").append(retVal).append("n"); log.info(sb.toString()); return retVal; }} The configuration file applicationContext.xml: <beans xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd"> <bean id="tiger" class="org.springaop.chapter.three.autoproxy.domain.Cat"> <property name="species" value="tiger"/> <property name="colour" value="tear stripes"/></bean> <bean id="albatross" class="org.springaop.chapter.three.autoproxy.domain.Seabird"> <property name="name" value="albatross"/></bean> <!-- Pointcut --> <bean id="methodNamePointcut" class="org.springframework.aop.support.NameMatchMethodPointcut"> <property name="mappedNames"> <list> <value>has*</value> <value>get*</value> </list> </property> </bean> <!-- Advices --> <bean id="animalAdvice" class="org.springaop.chapter.three.autoproxy.AnimalAdvice"/> <!-- Advisor --> <bean id="animalAdvisor" class="org.springframework.aop.support.DefaultPointcutAdvisor"> <property name="pointcut" ref="methodNamePointcut"/> <property name="advice" ref="animalAdvice"/> </bean> <bean id="autoProxyCreator" class="org.springframework.aop.framework.autoproxy.BeanNameAutoProxyCreator"> <property name="proxyTargetClass" value="true"/> <property name="beanNames"> <list> <value>tiger</value> <value>albatross</value> </list> </property> <property name="interceptorNames"> <list> <value>animalAdvisor</value> </list> </property> </bean> </beans> Application context contains two beans, tiger and albatross. The methodNamePointcut acts on the methods starting with has and get. The animalAdvice (around advice) contains the logics to be executed, the animal advisor that links the animalAdvice to the methodNamePointcut, and the autoProxyCreator, where we declare just the beans' names and the list of interceptors' names. package org.springaop.chapter.three.autoproxy;public class AutoProxyTest { public static void main(String[] args) { String[] paths = { "org/springaop/chapter/three/autoautoproxy/applicationContext.xml" }; ApplicationContext ctx = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(paths); Cat tiger = (Cat)ctx.getBean("tiger"); tiger.hasHotBlood(); Bird albatross = (Bird)ctx.getBean("albatross"); albatros.hasBeak(); }} The test class invokes two methods on the beans tiger and albatross. Output:

An important aspect of socializing in our application is letting users to maintain their friend lists and browse through the bookmarks of their friends. So, in this section we will build a data model to maintain user relationships, and then program two views to enable users to manage their friends and browse their friends' bookmarks. Creating the friendship data model Let's start with the data model for the friends feature. When a user adds another user as a friend, we need to maintain both users in one object. Therefore, the Friendship data model will consist of two references to the User objects involved in the friendship. Create this model by opening the bookmarks/models.py file and inserting the following code in it: class Friendship(models.Model): from_friend = models.ForeignKey( User, related_name='friend_set' ) to_friend = models.ForeignKey( User, related_name='to_friend_set' ) def __unicode__(self): return u'%s, %s' % ( self.from_friend.username, self.to_friend.username ) class Meta: unique_together = (('to_friend', 'from_friend'), ) The Friendship data model starts with defining two fields that are User objects: from_friend and to_friend. from_friend is the user who added to_friend as a friend. As you can see, we passed a keyword argument called related_name to both the fields. The reason for this is that both fields are foreign keys that refer back to the User data model. This will cause Django to try to create two attributes called friendship_set in each User object, which would result in a name conflict. To avoid this problem, we provide a specific name for each attribute. Consequently, each User object will contain two new attributes: user.friend_set, which contains the friends of this user and user.to_friend_set, which contains the users who added this user as a friend. Throughout this article, we will only use the friend_set attribute, but the other one is there in case you need it . Next, we defined a __unicode__ method in our data model. This method is useful for debugging. Finally, we defined a class called Meta. This class may be used to specify various options related to the data model. Some of the commonly used options are: db_table: This is the name of the table to use for the model. This is useful when the table name generated by Django is a reserved keyword in SQL, or when you want to avoid conflicts if a table with the same name already exists in the database. ordering: This is a list of field names. It declares how objects are ordered when retrieving a list of objects. A column name may be preceded by a minus sign to change the sorting order from ascending to descending. permissions: This lets you declare custom permissions for the data model in addition to add, change, and delete permissions. Permissions should be a list of two-tuples, where each two-tuple should consist of a permission codename and a human-readable name for that permission. For example, you can define a new permission for listing friend bookmarks by using the following Meta class: class Meta: permissions = ( ('can_list_friend_bookmarks', 'Can list friend bookmarks'), ) unique_together: A list of field names that must be unique together. We used the unique_together option here to ensure that a Friendship object is added only once for a particular relationship. There cannot be two Friendship objects with equal to_friend and from_friend fields. This is equivalent to the following SQL declaration: UNIQUE ("from_friend", "to_friend") If you check the SQL generated by Django for this model, you will find something similar to this in the code. After entering the data model code into the bookmarks/models.py file, run the following command to create its corresponding table in the database: $ python manage.py syncdb Now let's experiment with the new model and see how to store and retrieve relations of friendship. Run the interactive console using the following command: $ python manage.py shell Next, retrieve some User objects and build relationships between them (but make sure that you have at least three users in the database): >>> from bookmarks.models import *>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User>>> user1 = User.objects.get(id=1)>>> user2 = User.objects.get(id=2)>>> user3 = User.objects.get(id=3)>>> friendship1 = Friendship(from_friend=user1, to_friend=user2)>>> friendship1.save()>>> friendship2 = Friendship(from_friend=user1, to_friend=user3)>>> friendship2.save() Now, user2 and user3 are both friends of user1. To retrieve the list of Friendship objects associated with user1, use: >>> user1.friend_set.all()[<Friendship: user1, user2>, <Friendship: user1, user3>] (The actual usernames in output were replaced with user1, user2, and user3 for clarity.) As you may have already noticed, the attribute is named friend_set because we called it so using the related_name option when we created the Friendship model. Next, let's see one way to retrieve the User objects of user1's friends: >>> [friendship.to_friend for friendship in user1.friend_set.all()][<User: user2>, <User: user3>] The last line of code uses a Python feature called "list" comprehension to build the list of User objects. This feature allows us to build a list by iterating through another list. Here, we built the User list by iterating over a list of Friendship objects. If this syntax looks unfamiliar, please refer to the List Comprehension section in the Python tutorial. Notice that user1 has user2 as a friend, but the opposite is not true. >>> user2.friend_set.all() [] In other words, the Friendship model works only in one direction. To add user1 as a friend of user2, we need to construct another Friendship object. >>> friendship3 = Friendship(from_friend=user2, to_friend=user1)>>> friendship3.save()>>> user2.friend_set.all() [<Friendship: user2, user1>] By reversing the arguments passed to the Friendship constructor, we built a relationship in the other way. Now user1 is a friend of user2 and vice-versa. Experiment more with the model to make sure that you understand how it works. Once you feel comfortable with it, move to the next section, where we will write views to utilize the data model. Things will only get more exciting from now on!

What are we going to do and why? Before we get started, let's have a closer look at what we will be doing, and why. Our users can interact with the web site, and they can have their own blog. Apart from this, there are very few provisions for the users to tell everyone else about themselves, and expand their profiles with something more personal. With a site like ours, it would be useful to know more about our users including: Their pet dinosaur's name Breed of dinosaur Their pet dinosaur's birthday The dinosaur's hobbies and so on Their web address (if they have one) Location / City / Area More information about the user themselves This can be added to user profiles using the Profile module, which is a core module within Drupal, and simply needs to be enabled and configured. Many web sites allow users to upload an image to be associated with their accounts, which could be either a small photo of themselves, or a small image known as an avatar. Drupal allows this, but it has some drawbacks which can be fixed using Gravatar. Gravatar is a social avatar service, whereby users set up their avatars, and other web sites automatically pick up their avatars by sending a request to the Gravatar service with the users' emails. This is convenient for our users, as it saves them having to upload their avatars to our site, and reduces the amount of data stored on our site as well as the data being sent and received from our site. This module needs to be downloaded, installed and configured for our users to make use of its features. With the upload module enabled, users can upload their own avatars directly to the site, if they choose to do so. This is because not all users would be members of Gravatar, nor would they all wish to sign up to a third-party service. With the rise in the number of web sites and social networks that users of the Internet are members of, having to log in to different web sites on a daily basis can put off users if they have to sign up to another web site. OpenID helps prevent this as users need to remember only one username and password. It works by allowing users to login by providing a web address, instead of their usernames and passwords. This web site is their identity with an OpenID provider (maybe it is their own web site or another social network—MySpace and other social networking web sites are OpenID providers). When they log in with these identities, they will be taken to these web sites to log in before being returned to our site. If they have already logged in into their OpenIDs, they will return to the web site as new users. More information on OpenID is available from http://openid.net/. This is a core module which just needs to be enabled. There are two important points to be noted about OpenID. Firstly, it is decentralized, which means log in details are not tied to a specific provider, and secondly, it is offered as an alternative log in method—users without an OpenID (or those who don't know they have an OpenID!) can still log in or sign up as normal. Users have their own blogs which they can use, but they are not personalized blogs. By installing the blog theme module, we can allow our users to select different themes for use in their blogs. This way, visitors to one particular user's blog (for example 'Bob') will see the theme that Bob chose. Once users get to know each other more, they become more interested in each other's posts and topics, and may wish to look up a specific user's posts and contributions. The Tracker module allows users to track one another's contributions to the site. This is a core module, which just needs to be enabled and set up. Now that we have a better idea of what we are going to do, let's get started! Install the modules To make things easier for us, let's install and enable all the relevant modules first. This saves us having to do this again and again at a later stage. The modules which we require are: Profile (a core module) Tracker (a core module) OpenID (a core module) Gravatars (http://drupal.org/project/gravatar) Blog Theme (http://drupal.org/project/blogtheme) We need to download the relevant modules (ensuring we download ones which are compatible with Drupal 6.x), and extract the ZIP files into the /sites/all/modules folder. As we have not downloaded and installed any new modules on our Drupal installation yet, we will need to create the folder modules within the /sites/all/ directory. The reason there are sites/all and a sites/default directories is because Drupal can support multiple web sites running off one installation, and this defines which modules are available to which of the installations. Core modules are located elsewhere, which is why we don't have a modules folder already in this location containing the core modules. Now all the modules just have to be enabled via the Site Building | Modules section of the Administration area. Users, roles, and permissions Let's have a more detailed look at users, roles, and permissions and also how they work. These are all areas of the administration area, within the User management section. The other options within this section (Access rules, Gravatar, Profiles and User settings) will be looked at later in this article. Users When a visitor signs up for our site, a user account is created for him/her. From the Users area, we can view a list of existing users, create new ones and edit them. Within the context of editing a user, not only can we edit their details, such as their usernames or passwords, but we can also suspend their user accounts or delete their user accounts permanently from our social network. We want our site to become popular, which means that we want to have lots of users. When we get lots of users, it will become more difficult to navigate through their list, and this is when searching, sorting, and filtering them come in handy—which is what we are going to look at now. For each user, the user list displays: The username The status of the user account (active or blocked) Roles associated with the account Length of time the user has been a member for The time passed since the user was last active on our site A link to edit the user Viewing / searching / sorting / filtering Clicking the username will take us to their user profile. We can sort the list of users by clicking the heading in any of the columns to sort the list by that column. One particular use of doing this is that we can see all blocked users, ????so we can quickly reactivate an account should we need to, or see who the newest members are. We can also filter the accounts displayed using the Show only users where panel. This allows us to filter the list based on whether the account is active or not, or against specific roles assigned to users. Creating a user At the top of the users page, we have the Add user link. This takes us to the new user page, where we are required to fill out the Username, E-mail address, Password, and Confirm Password again for the user. We can also opt to notify the users of their new accounts, which will send them an email informing them that they have a new account with the Dino Space social network. Editing To edit an account, we just need to click the edit link which corresponds to the account, which takes us to the edit page. We can edit the user's Username, E-mail address, Password, account Status and settings pertaining to modules, which give users additional settings too. Careful!If you edit these settings, the users may not be able to log in to their accounts. If you change a user's Username without his/her request, you should let him/her know through email. Suspending / blocking a user Within the edit page, we have an option entitled Status, which can be set to either Blocked or Active. This would allow us to block a user from accessing our site, for instance if they had been posting inappropriate material repeatedly, even after being contacted and asked to stop. Why block? Why not just delete?If we were to just delete a user who was posting inappropriate material, or doing something we didn't want, then he/she could just sign up again. Blocking the user prevents him/her from signing up with the same email address and username. Of course, he/she could sign up again with a different email address and a different username. But this helps us to keep things under control. Deleting a user At the bottom of the edit user screen, there are two buttons: Save and Delete. The Save button will confirm and save any changes made to the user's account, and the delete button will permanently remove the user from our social network. When to delete a userA user may request to be removed from the web site, in which case, we can use this feature. Roles Users are grouped into roles, which in turn have permissions assigned to them. By default, there are two roles within Drupal. These two roles are: anonymous users authenticated users These roles can be edited, but they can neither be renamed nor deleted. This is why the Operations column in the table below is locked. The anonymous user role is the role for any user who is not logged-in, and so the permissions associated with it are those which a guest user has. Whereas the role of an authenticated user suits all those users who are logged-in. Additional roles which are added can apply to any number of users. At this stage, we must select which users have which roles assigned to them. Users can change their roles and get more active within the network with features such as Organic Groups, but it is out of the scope of this article. Editing the permissions of a role allows us to select which permissions are granted to users who have that role assigned to their account. New roles are simply created by entering the name of a new role into the text box and then clicking the Add role button and selecting the permissions to be granted to those users. Permissions The Permissions section provides us with a grid view for roles and the permissions assigned to them. All the permissions which can be granted are listed down theside (for example, create blog entries) and the roles along the top. The use of this view, if we were to install a new module with new permissions related to it, is that we could easily update all of our roles to have the desired permissions directly from the grid view. The Save permissions link at the bottom of the page saves the changes made.

These options can be helpful for distance education, providing new ways of communicating and interacting with our students (and between them) when we are not all in the same physical space. Because Moodle does not provide effective synchronous communication tools (the chat activity could overload the server), the aforementioned tools are presented as extensions that can support our courses, giving them a new level of interaction. In distance courses with considerable duration, such communication can be a motivation and a way of providing support to students when we are online at the same time. Communicating in real-time using text, audio, and video Google Chat is a service from Google that allows text, audio, and video chat amongst Google Mail users meaning, we'll need a Google account. The audio conversation is usually called Voice over IP (VoIP), but as bandwidth allowances increase, the use of video is becoming common. With this tool we can: Meet with colleagues or students, individually or in groups Participate in a distant event (for example, attend a conference) Conduct interviews Teach how to play an instrument (by using the webcam) Teach gestural language (by using the webcam) I find it really useful to use VoIP in distance courses, not only to give feedback to students and get to know them better, but also to create opportunities for students to interact with each other during group tasks outside of these tutor-students meeting times. A good time to use this application is in Module 10 – What's good music—a theme that fits well with an online debate about how to define quality criteria for music. Students will be required to work in groups and debate on what they think is good music and how it can be assessed. This discussion will be facilitated by using this tool. Chat and group chat The chat option is available in Google Mail, on the sidebar on the left. For a start, we can configure some settings, especially privacy settings, by going to Options | Chat settings…: In the section Auto-add suggested contacts, we should select the option Only allow people that I've explicitly approved to chat with me and see when I'm online option, as shown in the screenshot below: We can also disable chat history if we don't want to keep a record of our chat. There is another option during a chat to go "off record", meaning that if the chat history is on, this portion of the conversation (that takes place whilst this option is selected) will not be archived. We are now ready to start a chat. We can search for contacts in the same Google Mail Chat sidebar, using the search form that is available (Search, add or invite) and double-click on the name of the contact that is displayed, or in the Chat link of the pop-up window that is displayed: Because the chat is synchronous, it's obvious that the (two or more) people chatting must be online. We can check if a person is online or not by looking at the small icon next to the people we've located, or in our chat list. If they have a grey, round icon on the left of their name, they are offline (or invisible and don't want to be bothered). If the color is green (available), yellow (idle), or red (busy) it's possible to chat to them. In the pop-up, we can also add the person to the chat list below the search form. After starting the chat, a window similar to the one shown below opens in the lower-right corner of the Google Mail account, and we can start talking: When we are chatting with someone, we can click on the Video & More | Group Chat option to invite one or more friends to join the conversation: A new window will appear, in which we can chat with the participants. Note that if we click on the arrow in the blue bar at the top of our chat window, the window will pop-up from its position in the Google Mail window and we can access it as an independent window. If we paste a URL from a YouTube video into the chat window, a preview of the video will be integrated directly into our conversation, as shown in the screenshot below: Transferring files The easiest way to send files to participants for reading, or supporting discussion or commenting upon is either by using Google Mail, or by uploading them to Moodle or Google Docs and sharing these with the chat participants. This can be useful in many online discussions. Voice and video chat Chat, as we saw, is available by default in Google Mail, on the leftmost sidebar. To add audio and voice capabilities to this chat, we have to install a plug-in that is available at http://mail.google.com/videochat, for Windows and Mac users (again, sorry to Linux users). After installing this plug-in, we can start an audio or video conversation (only one-to-one). If our contacts have a camera or microphone, we can click on the Video & more option again, and the following two options will be available: In the case of voice chat, a call will be started, and we will also keep the text chat functionality: In the case of video chat, the same applies. In the upper area, a video of the person that we are chatting with will be displayed, and in the lower corner, if we have a webcam, our video will be displayed: Image source: Scmoewes (2005). Jimi. Retrieved March 30, 2009,from http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmoewes/30989105/ For distance courses or even in e-learning, Google chat is an option. But if we need more complex functionality, including audio conferencing and desktop sharing, there are other tools that are available. We will now look at one in particular, called Dimdim.

Getting started We are going to look at a few different modules, some of which we will use. These need to be installed first, so let's do that now to save us time. The modules We need to download the following modules: Addresses module (http://drupal.org/project/addresses) enable the Addresses, Addresses - Phone/Fax and Addresses - Users components. Simplenews module (http://drupal.org/project/simplenews) And extract them to our sites/all/modules folder, and enable them via the administration interface. A look back We have already looked at one very important aspect to communicate with our users—user e-mail settings. Within the User settings page (Administer | User management | User settings), we have a group of settings under the heading User e-mail settings. These are various email templates that are sent to our users upon certain events, such as registration, account activation, password reset, account being blocked or account being deleted. The content of these emails can be very important depending on the nature of the web site. In our Dino Space site, we may use a very informal, welcoming and fun tone for our automated emails. But for a business-oriented social network, we would want to use a much more formal tone. Modules Don't forget, many modules also have their own email templates for sending emails to users, all of which can normally be changed easily from their respective sections in the administration area. Communicating on an individual basis As we have installed the contact form module on our site, we can also communicate with our users on an individual basis using the contact forms on their profiles. This is handy for those times when we do need to contact an individual user, maybe because of complaints against them by other members of the community, or perhaps to invite them to become a moderator or contributor to the site. Alternatively, we can contact the user directly via their email addresses listed in their accounts, as this is viewable from the administration area. Inactive users We may wish to contact users who have not been active on the site for a long time, to remind them that the site is still there, and that they would be welcome to become active in the community once again. Drupal records the time a user was last active, which allows us to easily sort the list of users by their activity. A module (Inactive user) is available for Drupal 5, which is intended to contact inactive users automatically, but (at the time of writing this) one is not available for Drupal 6. You may wish to keep watch on the modules list on the Drupal.org web site to see if anything comes up in future http://drupal.org/project/inactive_user Communicating with individuals publicly Don't forget, we also have access to all of the communication methods available for our users to communicate with one another, such as replying to posts, commenting on content, or posting on their profiles. So if we need to contact a user, and we can contact them publicly, we can use these features. Mailing lists Drupal has a number of modules available for sending emails to our users. Many of them are still currently under heavy development, or had their development stopped after the release of a previous version of Drupal. One of these modules is Simplenews, which is a native Drupal system for managing newsletters. One limitation of the Simplenews module, and most of the modules available, is that it can't send to all our users; it requires users to subscribe to the mailing list. We can manage the Simplenews module via Administer | Newsletter. The features available to us are quite comprehensive. Let's have a look at how the module works: Newsletters are created and managed from here Users subscribe to various Newsletters Users can be imported into Newsletters to become a subscriber A message is sent to a newsletter (this is referred to as an issue) by creating Newsletters content Issues which have been sent are saved within the module Issues which have not yet been sent are saved within the module as drafts By default, we have a newsletter, which is generic to our site based on our site name. From here we can also create new Newsletters should we wish so. The Subscriptions tab allows us to see and manage the subscriptions to our various newsletters, the Sent issues tab lists issues sent out to the newsletter lists, and the Drafts tab lists issues which are still being written. From within the Settings tab, we can set how new issues for newsletters are created, as well as the email address shown as the sender of issues. Don't forget to set the permissions; you want your users to be able to subscribe to newsletters. Users can subscribe to newsletters from within their account, or we can enable blocks for the relevant newsletters we have on our site. To send an "issue" to our newsletter list, we need to create the issue as a new content element via Create content | Newsletter issue. We enter the subject of our email as the Title, select the newsletter to send the message to from the Newsletter drop-down list, and the message is entered into the Bodybox. Beneath these options, we have some newsletter specific-options within the Newsletter sending options box. These options allow us to set the priority of the email message (this is often ignored by email clients), if we wish to request a receipt to see if a user has read the message (this is also often ignored by email clients) and finally, we can select a sending method. There are three sending methods, which are: Don't send now—this won't send the message, and will save it as a draft. Send one test newsletter to the test address—this will send the email message to the test email addresses, which we can set in the administration area. This allows us to review the newsletter, as if we were a subscriber, make any final alterations and then send it to our list. Send newsletter—this sends the email to our newsletter list. How to send an email to all our users? We can use the module to send an email to all of our users, by taking advantage of the subscriber import feature. Within Administer | Content management | Newsletters | Subscriptions, we have the ability to Import subscriptions, as shown in the following screenshot: Importing subscribers consists of entering the E-mail addresses (separated by a comma) and selecting the newsletter which we wish the user to subscribe to. To get all of our current members to subscribe to the mailing list, we could export all of our users' email addresses directly from the Drupal database, using a tool such as phpMyAdmin. If we use the tool correctly, we can even get the data in a comma-separated list ready to be pasted into the form.

If you’re searching for details of a particular term in Google, you’re most probably going to see a link for relevant articles from wikipedia.org in the top 10 result list. Wikipedia, is the largest encyclopedia on the Internet, and contains huge collections of articles in many languages. The most significant feature of this encyclopedia is that it is a Wiki, so anybody can contribute to the knowledge base. A Wiki, (a new concept of web2.0), is a collection of web pages whose content can be created and changed by the visitor of the page with simplified mark-up language. Wikis are usually used as knowledge management systems on the web. Brief Introduction to Wikipedia Wikipedia has defined itself as : … a free, multilingual, open content encyclopedia project operated by the United States-based non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia is built upon an open source wiki package called MediaWiki. MediaWiki uses PHP as a server side scripting language and MySql as the database. Wikipedia uses MediaWiki’s wikitext format for editing the text, so the user (without any necessary  knowledge of HTML and CSS) can edit them easily. The Wikitext language (also called Wiki Markup) is a markup language which gives instruction on how outputted text will be displayed. It provides a simplified approach to writing pages in a wiki website. Different types of wiki software employ different styles of Wikitext language. For example, the Wikitext markup language has ways to hyperlink pages within the website but a number of different syntaxes are available for creating such links. Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001 as a means of collecting and summarizing human knowledge in every major language. As of April 2008, Wikipedia had over 10 million articles in 253 languages. With so many articles, it is the largest encyclopedia ever assembled. Wikipedia articles are written collaboratively by volunteers, and any visitor can modify the content of article. Any modification must be accepted by the editors of Wikipedia otherwise the article will be reverted to the previous content. Along with popularity, Wikipedia is also criticized for systematic bias and inconsistency since the modifications must be cleared by the editors. Critics also argue that it’s open nature and the lack of proper sources for many articles makes it unreliable. Searching in Wikipedia To search for a particular article in Wikipedia, you can use the search box in the home page of wikipedia.org.Wikipedia classifies its articles in different sub-domains according to language; “en.wikipedia.org” contains articles in English language whereas “es.wikipedia.org” contains Spanish articles. Whenever you select “english” language in the dropdown box, the related articles will be searched over “en.wikipedia.org” and so on for the another language. You can also search the articles of Wikipedia from a remote server. For this, you have to send the language and search parameters to http://www.wikipedia.org/search-redirect.php via the GET method Creating a Wiki Seek Widget Up till now, we’ve looked at the background concept of Wikipedia. Now, let’s start building the widget. This widget contains a form with three components. A textbox where the visitors enters the search keyword, a dropdown list which contains the language of the article and finally a submit button to search the articles of Wikipedia. By the time we’re done, you should have a widget that looks like this: Concept for creating form Before looking at the JavaScript code, first let’s understand the architecture of the form with the parameters to be sent for searching Wikipedia. The request should be sent to http://www.wikipedia.org/search-redirect.php via the GET method. <form action="http://www.wikipedia.org/search-redirect.php" ></form> If you don’t specify the method attribute in the form, the form uses GET, which is the default method. After creating the form element, we need to add the textbox inside the above form with the name search because we’ve to send the search keyword in the name of search parameter. <input type="text" name="search" size="20" /> After adding the textbox for the search keyword, we need to add the dropdown list which contains the language of the article to search. The name of this dropdown-list should be language as we’ve to send the language code to the above URL in the language parameter. These language codes are two or three letter codes specified by ISO. ISO has assigned three letter language codes for most of the popular languages of the world. And, there are a few languages that are represented by two letter ISO codes. For example, eng and en are the three and two letter language code for English. Some of the article languages of Wikipedia don’t have ISO codes, and you have to find the value of the language parameter from Wikipedia. For example, articles in the Alemannisch language is als. Here is the HTML code for constructing a dropdown list in major languages : <select name="language"><option value="de" >Deutsch</option><option value="en" selected="selected">English</option><option value="es" >Español</option><option value="eo" >Esperanto</option><option value="fr" >Français</option><option value="it" >Italiano</option><option value="hu" >Magyar</option><option value="nl" >Nederlands</option></select> As you can see in the above dropdown list, English is the default language selected. Now, we just need to add a submit button in the above form to complete the form for searching the article in wikipedia. <input type="submit" name="go" value="Search" title="Search in wikipedia" /> Put all the HTML code together to create the form. JavaScript Code As we’ve already got the background concept of the HTML form, we just have to use the document.write() to output the HTML to the web browser. Here is the JavaScript code to create the Wiki Seek Widget : document.write('<div>');document.write('<form action="http://www.wikipedia.org/search-redirect.php" >');document.write('<input type="text" name="search" size="20" />');document.write('&nbsp;<select name="language">');document.write('<option value="de" >Deutsch</option>');document.write('<option value="en" selected="selected">English</option>');document.write('<option value="es" >Español</option>');document.write('<option value="eo" >Esperanto</option>');document.write('<option value="fr" >Français</option>');document.write('<option value="it" >Italiano</option>');document.write('<option value="hu" >Magyar</option>');document.write('<option value="nl" >Nederlands</option>');document.write('</select>');document.write('&nbsp;<input type="submit" name="go" value="Search" title="Search in wikipedia" />');document.write('</form>');document.write('</div>'); In the above code, I’ve used division (div) as the container for the HTML form. I’ve also saved the above code in a wiki_seek.js file. The above JavaScript code displays a non-stylish widget. To make a stylish widget, you can use style property in the input elements of the form. Using Wiki Seek widget To use this wiki seek widget we’ve to follow these steps: First of all, we need to upload the above wiki_seek.js to a web server so that it can be used by the client websites. Let’s suppose that is uploaded and placed in the URL : http://www.widget-server.com/wiki_seek.js Now, we can widget in any web pages by placing the following JavaScript Code in the website. <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"src="http://www.widget-server.com/wiki_seek.js"></script> The Wiki Seek widget is displayed in any part of web page, where you place the above code.

Activating the administration interface The administration interface comes as a Django application. To activate it, we will follow a simple procedure that is similar to enabling the user authentication system. The administration application is located in the django.contrib.admin package. So the first step is adding the path of this package to the INSTALLED_APPS variable. Open the settings.py file, locate INSTALLED_APPS, and edit it as follows: INSTALLED_APPS = ( 'django.contrib.auth', 'django.contrib.admin', 'django.contrib.contenttypes', 'django.contrib.sessions', 'django.contrib.sites', 'django.contrib.comments', 'django_bookmarks.bookmarks',) Next, run the following command to create the necessary tables for the administration application: $ python manage.py syncdb Now we need to make the administration interface accessible from within our site by adding URL entries for it. The admin application defines many views (as we will see later), so manually adding a separate entry for each view can become a tedious task. Therefore, the admin interface provides a shortcut for this. There is a single object that encapsulates all the admin views. To use it, open the urls.py file and edit it as follows: from django.contrib import adminadmin.autodiscover()urlpatterns = ('', [...] # Admin interface (r'^admin/(.*)', admin.site.root),) Here, we are importing the admin module, calling a method in it, and mapping all the URLs under the path ^admin/ to a view called admin.site.root. This will make the views of the administration interface accessible from within our project. One last thing remains before we see the administration page in action. We need to tell Django what models can be managed in the administration interface. This is done by creating a new file called the admin.py file in the bookmarks directory. Create the bookmarks/admin.py file and add the following code to it: from django.contrib import adminfrom bookmarks.models import *class LinkAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin): passadmin.site.register(Link, LinkAdmin) We created a class derived from the admin.ModelAdmin class and mapped it to the Link model using the admin.site.register method. This effectively tells Django to enable the Link model in the administration interface. The keyword pass means that the class is empty. Later, we will use this class to customize the administration page; so it won't remain empty. Do the same to the Bookmark, Tag, and SharedBookmark models and add it to the bookmarks/admin.py file. Now, create an empty admin class for each of them and register it. The User model is provided by Django and, therefore, we don't have control over it. But fortunately, it already has an Admin class so it's available in the administration interface by default. Next, launch the development server and direct your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/. You will be greeted by a login page. The superuser account after writing the database model is the account that you have to use in order to log in: Next, you will see a list of the models that are available to the administration interface. As discussed earlier, only models that have admin classes in the bookmarks/admin.py file will appear on this page. If you click on a model name, you will get a list of the objects that are stored in the database under this model. You can use this page to view or edit a particular object, or to add a new one. The following figure shows the listing page for the Link model: The edit form is generated according to the fields that exist in the model. The Link form, for example, contains a single text field called Url. You can use this form to view and change the URL of a Link object. In addition, the form performs proper validation of fields before saving the object. So if you try to save a Link object with an invalid URL, you will receive an error message asking you to correct the field. The following figure shows a validation error when trying to save an invalid link: Fields are mapped to form widgets according to their type. For example, date fields are edited using a calendar widget, whereas foreign key fields are edited using a list widget, and so on. The following figure shows a calendar widget from the user edit page. Django uses it for date and time fields. As you may have noticed, the administration interface represents models by using the string returned by the __unicode__ method. It was indeed a good idea to replace the generic strings returned by the default __unicode__ method with more helpful ones. This greatly helps when working with the administration page, as well as with debugging. Experiment with the administration pages. Try to create, edit, and delete objects. Notice how changes made in the administration interface are immediately reflected on the live site. Also, the administration interface keeps a track of the actions that you make and lets you review the history of changes for each object. This section has covered most of what you need to know in order to use the administration interface provided by Django. This feature is actually one of the main advantages of using Django. You get a fully featured administration interface from writing only a few lines of code! Next, we will see how to tweak and customize the administration pages. As a bonus, we will learn more about the permissions system offered by Django.

Toast for Sale! To demonstrate the power of ExpressionEngine, we are going to use a fictitious business as an example throughout this article. Our website is in the business of selling toast (heated bread with melted butter) online. With this example, we will be able to explore many of the nuances of building a complete website with ExpressionEngine. Though unlikely that we would really want to sell toast over the internet, the concepts of our example should be transferable to any website. In this article, we want to introduce the world to our business, so we are going to create a 'News from the President' webpage. This will allow the President of our company to communicate to customers and investors the latest goings-on in his business. Inside the Control Panel When you first log into the control panel, there are lots of options. Let us take a quick tour of the control panel. First, we will need to log into ExpressionEngine. If you are using XAMPP to follow along with this article, go to http://localhost/admin.php or http://localhost/system/index.php to log in. It is assumed that you are using XAMPP with http://localhost/ addresses. If you are following along on an actual website, substitute http://localhost/ for your website domain (for example, http://www.example.com/). It is required to move the login page to the root of our website to mask the location of our system directory The first page we see is the CP Home. We can return to this page anytime by selecting CP Home from the menu at the top-right of the screen, above the main menu. In the left column, we have EllisLab News Feed. Below, we have Most Recent Weblog Entries as well as any Recent Comments or trackbacks visitors may have left. In our case, our site is brand new, so there will be no recent comments or trackbacks, and only 1 recent weblog entry (Getting Started with ExpressionEngine). Clicking on the link will take you directly to that entry. On the right, there is a Bulletin Board (a way for you to pass messages to other members of your control panel), the Site Statistics and a Notepad (we can write anything here, and it will be available every time we log-in). Across the top is the main menu bar, and at the top-right are links to your website (My Site), this page (CP Home), the ExpressionEngine user-guide (User Guide), and to log-out (Log-out). The Publish and Edit links in the main menu bar are where you can create new entries and edit existing entries. The Templates link is where we can create new templates and edit existing templates. We will spend most of our time in these sections. The Communicate tab is where we can manage bulk-emails to our website members. At this time we do not have any members to email (other than ourselves), but as our site grows larger, this feature can be a useful communication/marketing tool. Be careful to avoid sending unsolicited bulk emails (or spam) using this feature. In many countries, there are laws governing what can or cannot be done. In the United States, commercial emails must meet very specific guidelines set by the Federal Trade Commission (http://www.ftc.gov/spam/). The Modules tab is where we can manage all the modules that come with ExpressionEngine, as well as optional third-party modules that we may wish to install. We can download additional modules from http://expressionengine.com/downloads/addons/category/modules/. The My Account tab is where we can edit our login preferences, including our username and password. We can also edit the look and feel of the control panel home page from this screen, as well as send private messages to other members. Much of this page is irrelevant when we are the only member of the site (as we are right now). The Admin tab is where most of the configuration of ExpressionEngine takes place, and we will spend a lot of time here. By default, most of the ExpressionEngine settings are already properly set, but feel free to browse and explore all the options that are available. Full documentation on each of the options is available at http://expressionengine.com/docs/cp/admin/index.html. This concludes our brief tour of ExpressionEngine. Now we are going to delve into one of the most important parts of the control panel—templates. Templates and URLs The basic concept in ExpressionEngine is that of a template. Go to any ExpressionEngine-powered website and you will undoubtedly be looking at a template. Templates are what the outside world sees. At its most basic, a template in ExpressionEngine is a HTML (or CSS or JavaScript) file. If we wanted to, we could use a template exactly like a HTML file, without any problems. We could create an entire website without ever using any other part of ExpressionEngine. However, we can take templates a lot further than that. By using ExpressionEngine tags inside our templates, we can take advantage of all the features of ExpressionEngine and combine it with all the flexibility that HTML and CSS offers in terms of layout and design. We are not limited to pre-defined 'cookie-cutter' templates that have been carefully adapted to work with ExpressionEngine. This is why ExpressionEngine is very popular with website designers. On the flip side, this is also why there is such a learning curve with ExpressionEngine. There is no point-and-click interface to change the look and feel of your website; you have to have some experience with HTML to get the most out of it. Let us take a closer look at templates and how they relate to URLs: If you are not already logged in, log into ExpressionEngine at either http://localhost/admin.php or http://www.example.com/admin.php. Click on the Templates button on the top of the screen. Templates are stored in groups. There is no 'right' way to group templates—some sites have all their templates in a single group and other sites have lots of template groups. We are going to create a new template group for each section of our website. ExpressionEngine does come pre-installed with two template groups: the site template group and the search template group. As a new user, it is best not to delete these template groups in case you want to refer to them later. In the next screen we can give our template group a name; let us use toast. There is an option to Duplicate an Existing Template Group which copies all the templates from one template group into our new template group. This can be useful if we are creating one template group that will work very similarly to the one that we already created, but as this is our first template group, we are going to start from scratch. Checking the box Make the index template in this group your site's home page? means that visitors will see the toast website in place of the ExpressionEngine example site. If you are using the XAMPP test server, go ahead and check this box. Hit Submit to create the template group. We will be returned to the Template Management screen. A message will appear saying Template Group Created, and the new template will appear in the box of groups on the left-hand side. Left-click on the New Template group in the Choose Group box on the left-hand side. Each template group comes with an initial template, called index. Remembering that a template is like an HTML file, a template group is like a directory on our server. The index template is the equivalent of the index.html file—when a visitor visits our template group, the index template is displayed first. For that reason, the index template cannot be renamed or deleted. Let us edit the index template to see what it does. Click on the word index. A template is essentially just text (although it usually contains HTML, CSS, or ExpressionEngine code). When we first create a template, there is no text, and therefore all we see is an empty white box. Let us write something in the box to demonstrate how templates are seen by visitors. Type in a sentence and click Update and Finished. Just like HTML files and directories, templates and template groups relate directly to the URL that visitors see. In the URL http://www.example.com/index.php/toast/index, the index.php is what distinguishes this as an ExpressionEngine page. Then comes the template group name, in our case called toast. Finally, we have the template name, in this case index. Go to the previous URL (with or without the index.php as appropriate, for example, http://www.example.com/toast/index or http://localhost/toast/index) and the template we just edited should appear. Now try typing the template group without specifying which template to load. The index template is always returned. What happens if we do not specify the template group, and just go to our base domain (http://localhost/ or http://www.example.com/)? In this case, the toast template of the default template group is returned. The default template group is indicated on the templates screen with an * before the template group name and underneath the list of template groups.

Programming the Manage panel The Manage Posts screen can be changed to show extra columns, or remove unwanted columns in the listing. Let's say that we want to show the post type—Normal, Photo, or Link. Remember the custom field post-type that we added to our posts? We can use it now to differentiate post types. Time for action – Add post type column in the Manage panel We want to add a new column to the Manage panel, and we will call it Type. The value of the column will represent the post type—Normal, Photo, or Link. Expand the admin_menu() function to load the function to handle Manage Page hooks: add_submenu_page('post-new.php', __('Add URL',$this->plugin_domain) , __('URL', $this->plugin_domain) , 1 ,'add-url', array(&$this, 'display_form') );// handle Manage page hooksadd_action('load-edit.php', array(&$this, 'handle_load_edit') );} Add the hooks to the columns on the Manage screen: // Manage page hooksfunction handle_load_edit(){ // handle Manage screen functions add_filter('manage_posts_columns', array(&$this, 'handle_posts_columns')); add_action('manage_posts_custom_column', array(&$this, 'handle_posts_custom_column'), 10, 2);} Then implement the function to add a new Column, remove the author and replace the date with our date format: // Handle Column headerfunction handle_posts_columns($columns){ // add 'type' column $columns['type'] = __('Type',$this->plugin_domain); return $columns;} For date key replacement, we need an extra function:     function array_change_key_name( $orig, $new, &$array ){ foreach ( $array as $k => $v ) $return[ ( $k === $orig ) ? $new : $k ] = $v; return ( array ) $return;} And finally, insert a function to handle the display of information in that column: // Handle Type column displayfunction handle_posts_custom_column($column_name, $id){ // 'type' column handling based on post type if( $column_name == 'type' ) { $type=get_post_meta($id, 'post-type', true); echo $type ? $type : __('Normal',$this->plugin_domain); }} Don't forget to add the Manage page to the list of localized pages: // pages where our plugin needs translation$local_pages=array('plugins.php', 'post-new.php', 'edit.php');if (in_array($pagenow, $local_pages)) As a result, we now have a new column that displays the post type using information from a post custom field. What just happened? We have used the load-edit.php action to specify that we want our hooks to be assigned only on the Manage Posts page (edit.php). This is similar to the optimization we did when we loaded the localization files. The handle_posts_columns is a filter that accepts the columns as a parameter and allows you to insert a new column: function handle_posts_columns($columns){ $columns['type'] = __('Type',$this->plugin_domain); return $columns;} You are also able to remove a column. This example would remove the Author column: unset($columns['author']); To handle information display in that column, we use the handle_posts_custom_column action. The action is called for each entry (post), whenever an unknown column is encountered. WordPress passes the name of the column and current post ID as parameters. That allows us to extract the post type from a custom field: function handle_posts_custom_column($column_name, $id){ if( $column_name == 'type' ) { $type=get_post_meta($id, 'post-type', true); It also allows us to print it out: echo $type ? $type : __('Normal',$this->plugin_domain); }} Modifying an existing column We can also modify an existing column. Let's say we want to change the way Date is displayed. Here are the changes we would make to the code: // Handle Column headerfunction handle_posts_columns($columns){ // add 'type' column $columns['type'] = __('Type',$this->plugin_domain); // remove 'author' column //unset($columns['author']); // change 'date' column $columns = $this->array_change_key_name( 'date', 'date_new', $columns ); return $columns;}// Handle Type column displayfunction handle_posts_custom_column($column_name, $id){ // 'type' column handling based on post type if( $column_name == 'type' ) { $type=get_post_meta($id, 'post-type', true); echo $type ? $type : __('Normal',$this->plugin_domain); } // new date column handling if( $column_name == 'date_new' ) { the_time('Y-m-d <br > g:i:s a'); } }function array_change_key_name( $orig, $new, &$array ){ foreach ( $array as $k => $v ) $return[ ( $k === $orig ) ? $new : $k ] = $v; return ( array ) $return;} The example replaces the date column with our own date_new column and uses it to display the date with our preferred formatting. Manage screen search filter WordPress allows us to show all the posts by date and category, but what if we want to show all the posts depending on post type? No problem! We can add a new filter select box straight to the Manage panel. Time for action – Add a search filter box Let's start by adding two more hooks to the handle_load_edit() function. The restrict_manage_posts function draws the search box and the posts_where alters the database query to select only the posts of the type we want to show. // Manage page hooksfunction handle_load_edit(){ // handle Manage screen functions add_filter('manage_posts_columns', array(&$this, 'handle_posts_columns')); add_action('manage_posts_custom_column', array(&$this, 'handle_posts_custom_column'), 10, 2); // handle search box filter add_filter('posts_where', array(&$this, 'handle_posts_where')); add_action('restrict_manage_posts', array(&$this, 'handle_restrict_manage_posts'));} Let's write the corresponding function to draw the select box: // Handle select box for Manage pagefunction handle_restrict_manage_posts(){ ?> <select name="post_type" id="post_type" class="postform"> <option value="0">View all types</option> <option value="normal" <?php if( $_GET['post_type']=='normal') echo 'selected="selected"' ?>><?php _e ('Normal',$this->plugin_domain); ?></option> <option value="photo" <?php if( $_GET['post_type']=='photo') echo 'selected="selected"' ?>><?php _e ('Photo',$this->plugin_domain); ?></option> <option value="link" <?php if( $_GET['post_type']=='link') echo 'selected="selected"' ?>><?php _e ('Link',$this->plugin_domain); ?></option> </select> <?php} And finally, we need a function that will change the query to retrieve only the posts of the selected type: // Handle query for Manage pagefunction handle_posts_where($where){ global $wpdb; if( $_GET['post_type'] == 'photo' ) { $where .= " AND ID IN (SELECT post_id FROM {$wpdb->postmeta} WHERE meta_key='post-type' AND metavalue='".__ ('Photo',$this->plugin_domain)."' )"; } else if( $_GET['post_type'] == 'link' ) { $where .= " AND ID IN (SELECT post_id FROM {$wpdb->postmeta} WHERE meta_key='post-type' AND metavalue='".__ ('Link',$this->plugin_domain)."' )"; } else if( $_GET['post_type'] == 'normal' ) { $where .= " AND ID NOT IN (SELECT post_id FROM {$wpdb->postmeta} WHERE meta_key='post-type' )"; } return $where;} What just happened? We have added a new select box to the header of the Manage panel. It allows us to filter the post types we want to show. We added the box using the restrict_manage_posts action that is triggered at the end of the Manage panel header and allows us to insert HTML code, which we used to draw a select box. To actually perform the filtering, we use the posts_where filter, which is run when a query is made to fetch the posts from the database. if( $_GET['post_type'] == 'photo' ){ $where .= " AND ID IN (SELECT post_id FROM {$wpdb->postmeta} WHERE meta_key='post-type' AND metavalue='".__ ('Photo',$this->plugin_domain)."' )"; If a photo is selected, we inspect the WordPress database postmeta table and select posts that have the post-type key with the value, Photo. At this point, we have a functional plugin. What we can do further to improve it is to add user permissions checks, so that only those users allowed to write posts and upload files are allowed to use it. Quick referencemanage_posts_columns($columns): This acts as a filter for adding/removing columns in the Manage Posts panel. Similarly, we use the function, manage_pages_columns for the Manage Pages panel.manage_posts_custom_column($column, $post_id): This acts as an action to display information for the given column and post. Alternatively, manage_pages_custom_column for Manage Pages panel.posts_where($where): This acts as a filter for the where clause in the query that gets the posts.restrict_manage_posts: This acts as an action that runs at the end of the Manage panel header and allows you to insert HTML.

Welcome to the exciting world of Essbase Analytics known as the Aggregate Storage Option (ASO). Well, now you're ready to take everything one step further. You see, the BSO architecture used by Essbase is the original database architecture as the behind the scenes method of data storage in an Essbase database. The ASO method is entirely different. What is ASO ASO is Essbase's alternative to the sometimes cumbersome BSO method of storing data in an Essbase database. In fact, it is BSO that is exactly what makes Essbase a superior OLAP analytical tool but it is also the BSO that can occasionally be a detriment to the level of system performance demanded in today's business world. In a BSO database, all data is stored, except for dynamically calculated members. All data consolidations and parent-child relationships in the database outline are stored as well. While the block storage method is quite efficient from a data to size ratio perspective, a BSO database can require large amounts of overhead to deliver the retrieval performance demanded by the business customer. The ASO database efficiently stores not only zero level data, but can also store aggregated hierarchical data with the understandings that stored hierarchies can only have the no-consolidation (~) or the addition (+) operator assigned to them and the no-consolidation (~) operator can only be used underneath Label Only members. Outline member consolidations are performed on the fly using dynamic calculations and only at the time of the request for data. This is the main reason why ASO is a valuable option worth consideration when building an Essbase system for your customer. Because of the simplified levels of data stored in the ASO database, a more simplified method of storing the physical data on the disk can also be used. It is this simplified storage method which can help result in higher performance for the customer. Your choice of one database type over the other will always depend on balancing the customer's needs with the server's physical capabilities, along with the volume of data. These factors must be given equal consideration. Creating an aggregate storage Application|Database Believe it or not, creating an ASO Essbase application and database is as easy as creating a BSO application and database. All you need to do is follow these simple steps: Right-click on the server name in your EAS console for the server on which you want to create your ASO application. Select Create application | Using aggregate storage as shown in the following screenshot: Click on Using aggregate storage and that's it. The rest of the steps are easy to follow and basically the same as for a BSO application. To create an ASO application and database, you follow virtually the same steps as you do to create a BSO application and database. However, there are some important differences, and here we list a few: A BSO database outline can be converted into an Aggregate Storage database outline, but an Aggregate Storage database outline cannot be converted into a Block Storage database outline.Steps to convert a BSO application into an ASO application: Open the BSO outline that you wish to convert, select the Essbase database and click on the File | Wizards | Aggregate Storage Outline Conversion option. You will see the first screen Select Source Outline. The source of the outline can be in a file system or on the Essbase Server. In this case, we have selected the OTL from the Essbase Server and then click Next as shown in the following screenshot: In the Next screen, the conversion wizard will verify the conversion and display a message that the conversion has completed successfully. Click Next. Here, Essbase prompts you to select the destination of the ASO outline. If you have not yet created an ASO application, you can click on the Create Aggregate Storage Application on the bottom-right corner of the screen as shown in the next screenshot: Enter the Application and the Database name and click on OK. Your new ASO application is created, now click on Finish. Your BSO application is now converted into an ASO application. You may still need to tweak the ASO application settings and outline members to be the best fit for your needs. In an ASO database, all dimensions are Sparse so there is no need to try to determine the best Dense/Sparse settings as you would do with a BSO database. Although Essbase recommends that you only have one Essbase database in an Essbase application, you can create more than one database per application when you are using the BSO. When you create an ASO application, Essbase will only allow one database per application. There is quite a bit to know about ASO but have no fear, with all that you know about Essbase and how to design and build an Essbase system, it will seem easy for you. Keep reading for more valuable information on the ASO for things like, when it is a good time to use ASO, or how do you query ASO databases effectively, or even what are the differences between ASO and BSO. If you understand the differences, you can then understand the benefits.

FileField remixed If you haven't examined FileField, you'll have to do so by downloading the FileField module from http://drupal.org/project/filefield and enable it on the Modules administration page (by browsing to Administer | Site building | Modules, at /admin/build/modules). Now create a new content type named Album by going to Administer | Content management | Content types | Add content type (at /admin/content/types/add). We'll next add a FileField to this by editing the new Album type and selecting the Add field tab (at /admin/content/types/album/add_field). Call it Song, select the File for the Field type, press Continue, and press Continue again (leaving the Widget type as File Upload). In the Permitted upload file extensions, enter mp3 for now. If you wish, you may enter a new File path as well such as audio. Uploaded files would then be saved to that path. Note that you have access to the Token module's features here. So, for instance you may enter something like audio/[user-raw], which will replace [user-raw] with the username of the node's creator: Finally, select Unlimited for the Number of values, since we'll allow a single album to contain many songs. We'll also check the Required checkbox so that each album will hold at least one song. Finally, we will ensure that the Default listed value is Listed, and that we select the Enforce Default radio button for How should the list value be handled? This will force a node to always list files when displayed. We need to list our files, although we plan ultimately to control display of an album's songs in the player: Now we can add an album node with a few songs by going to Create content | Album (at /node/add/album). Uploading is simple. At this point, we only have a link displayed for our files. Our next task is to create an inline player for the audio. One possibility would be to override the theme function. However, we have other tools available that will make our job easier and even ensure cross-browser compatibility, better accessibility, and valid HTML: jQuery Media to the rescue The jQuery Media plug-in, written by Mike Alsup at http://www.malsup.com/jquery/media/, is a perfect solution. It will convert any link to media into the browser-specific code required for displaying the media. The jQuery Media module is a configurable wrapper for this plug-in. We'll also need a media player. For this exercise, we'll again use the JW FLV Media Player developed by Jeroen Wijering. This excellent player is free for non-commercial use, and has a very inexpensive licensing fee for other uses. First, download that player from http://jeroenwijering.com/ and install the player.swf file somewhere in your site's directory tree. If you install it in the site's www root folder, the module will work with little extra configuration. But you can install it in the files directory, your theme folder, or another convenient place if you need it for your environment. Just remember where you put it for future reference. Next, download and enable the jQuery Media module from http://drupal.org/project/jquery_media. You may wish to also install the jQ module from http://drupal.org/project/jq, which consolidates jQuery plug-ins installed on your site. The configuration is simple. You'll just need to enter the filepath of your media player, which can be different than the Flash Video player entered earlier, if desired. Go to the jQuery Media Administration page by browsing to Administer | Site configuration | jQuery Media Administration (at /admin/settings/jquery_media). Open the Default players (within Extra settings) and enter the filepath of your media player in the MP3 Player (mp3Player) text field: Now just check the Album box in Node types, and set the width and height within Default settings. In most cases, you would be done and the audio would be displayed automatically with no further configuration. However, we're assuming you plan to use this module in conjunction with videos, which may have already set a width and height. That means we'll need to do some more customization. Note: You do not need to do any of this, unless you have video and audio files on the site both using jQuery Media. We need to change the class of our field and add a new invocation script. However, we don't want to affect the class of our existing video files. So add the following somewhere in the phptemplate_preprocess_filefield_file function, creating that function if necessary. (If you haven't already done that, then create function phptemplate_preprocess_filefield_file(&$variables) in template.php. $node = node_load($file['nid']); if ($node->type == 'album') { $variables['classes'] = 'filefield-file-song'; if (module_exists('jquery_media')) { jquery_media_add(array('media class' => '.filefield-file-song a', 'media height' => 20, 'media width' => 200)); } } else { $variables['classes'] = 'filefield-file'; } Then you'll need to change a line in filefield_file.tpl.php. (If you haven't already created that file, create it in your theme directory, and copy the code from the theme_filefield_file function that is found in /sites/all/modules/filefield/filefield_formater.inc.) The original line in question reads as follows: return '<div class="filefield-file clear-block">'. $icon . l($file['filename'], $url) .'</div>'; However, we can rewrite that line to read: <div id="filefield-file-file-<?php print $id; ?>" class="filefield-file clear-block" <?php print $style; ?> > In either case, simply replace class="filefield-file clear-block" with class=" clear-block".