How-To Tutorials - CMS and E-Commerce

  (For more resources on BackTrack, see here.) Man-in-the-Middle attack MITM attacks are probably one of most potent attacks on a WLAN system. There are different configurations that can be used to conduct the attack. We will use the most common one—the attacker is connected to the Internet using a wired LAN and is creating a fake access point on his client card. This access point broadcasts an SSID similar to a local hotspot in the vicinity. A user may accidently get connected to this fake access point and may continue to believe that he is connected to the legitimate access point. The attacker can now transparently forward all the user's traffic over the Internet using the bridge he has created between the wired and wireless interfaces. In the following lab exercise, we will simulate this attack. Time for action – Man-in-the-Middle attack Follow these instructions to get started: To create the Man-in-the-Middle attack setup, we will first c create a soft access point called mitm on the hacker laptop using airbase-ng. We run the command airbase-ng --essid mitm –c 11 mon0: It is important to note that airbase-ng when run, creates an interface at0 (tap interface). Think of this as the wired-side interface of our software-based access point mitm. Let us now create a bridge on the hacker laptop, consisting of the wired (eth0) and wireless interface (at0). The succession of commands used for this are—brctl addbr mitm-bridge, brctl addif mitm-bridge eth0, brctl addif mitmbridge at0, ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 up, ifconfig at0 0.0.0.0 up: We can assign an IP address to this bridge and check the connectivity with the gateway. Please note that we could do the same using DHCP as well. We can assign an IP address to the bridge interface with the command—ifconfig mitm-bridge 192.168.0.199 up. We can then try pinging the gateway 192.168.0.1 to ensure we are connected to the rest of the network: Let us now turn on IP Forwarding in the kernel so that routing and packet forwarding can happen correctly using echo > 1 /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward: Now let us connect a wireless client to our access point mitm. It would automatically get an IP address over DHCP (server running on the wired-side gateway). The client machine in this case receives the IP address 192.168.0.197. We can ping the wired side gateway 192.168.0.1 to verify connectivity: We see that the host responds to the ping requests as seen: We can also verify that the client is connected by looking at the airbase-ng terminal on the hacker machine: It is interesting to note here that because all the traffic is being relayed from the wireless interface to the wired-side, we have full control over the traffic. We can verify this by starting Wireshark and start sniffing on the at0 interface: (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) Let us now ping the gateway 192.168.0.1 from the client machine. We can now see the packets in Wireshark (apply a display filter for ICMP), even though the packets are not destined for us. This is the power of Man-in-the-Middle attacks! (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it.) What just happened? We have successfully created the setup for a wireless Man-In-The-Middle attack. We did this by creating a fake access point and bridging it with our Ethernet interface. This ensured that any wireless client connecting to the fake access point would "perceive" that it is connected to the Internet via the wired LAN. Have a go hero – Man-in-the-Middle over pure wireless In the previous exercise, we bridged the wireless interface with a wired one. As we noted earlier, this is one of the possible connection architectures for an MITM. There are other combinations possible as well. An interesting one would be to have two wireless interfaces, one creates the fake access point and the other interface is connected to the authorized access point. Both these interfaces are bridged. So, when a wireless client connects to our fake access point, it gets connected to the authorized access point through the attacker machine. Please note that this configuration would require the use of two wireless cards on the attacker laptop. Check if you can conduct this attack using the in-built card on your laptop along with the external one. This should be a good challenge!

CMS Made Simple Development Cookbook Over 70 simple but incredibly effective recipes for extending CMS Made Simple with detailed explanations – useful for beginners and experts alike! These recipes have been specially selected to demonstrate capabilities. While they may be useful as provided, they are designed to show the range of what can be done with tags, and to provide examples of useful operations such as setting Smarty variables, interfacing with the database, interacting with modules, and consuming data from remote web services. You are encouraged to use these recipes as starting points for your own projects. Introduction One of the most popular uses of CMS Made Simple involves an administrator who creates a basic site structure and template, and one or more editors who maintain page content without having to worry about the site layout. In this configuration, you can think of the CMS essentially as a big template engine with some utilities to add content. Each page of the site comprises a page template with areas that get populated with various kinds of content. These areas are either tags or variables, where the distinction is that a tag involves the execution of code, while a variable is a simple substitution of values. The CMS comes with a large assortment of built-in tags, including the fundamental "content" tag and a variety of useful supporting tags for building navigation, links, including images, and so forth. Because CMS Made Simple can be seen as being built around tags, it is not surprising that there are facilities for creating your own tags. You can create tags directly through the Admin panel—these are called User-Defined Tags or UDTs. If you want even more extensive capabilities in your tag, you can have those capabilities by creating a file that follows a few basic conventions. The template engine used by CMS Made Simple comes from the Smarty project. Pages are Smarty templates, and the built-in CMS tag types are all Smarty tags. Behind the scenes, both UDTs and file-based tags also become Smarty tags. For additional information on Smarty, the documentation provided by the Smarty project is invaluable. You can read more at http://www.smarty.net/docsv2/en/ Displaying the User's IP address from a User-Defined Tag This recipe demonstrates creating a very simple User-Defined Tag, and using it to display information, that it gets from PHP globally-defined variables. Getting ready For this recipe, you will need to have CMS Made Simple installed and working. You will need login access to the site's Administration area as a member of the "admin" group, or as a member of a group with permissions to "Modify User-Defined Tags" and "Manage All Content". How to do it... Log in to your CMS Administration area. Using the top menu, go to "Extensions" and click on "User Defined Tags". Click on the "Add User Defined Tag" button. In the "Name" field type "user_ip". In the "Code" text area, type the following code: echo 'Welcome user from '.$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'].' -- enjoy your visit!'; Click on the "Submit" button. Using the top menu, go to "Content" and click on "Pages". Click on the "Add New Content" button. In the "Title" and "Menu Text" fields, type "Tag Test". In the "Content" text area, type the following code: {user_ip} Click on the "Submit" button. View your site from the user side. Click on the new "Tag Test" page. How it works... User-Defined Tags work by linking a piece of PHP code to a tag which is recognized by Smarty. When Smarty parses a template and encounters that tag, it executes the code in question, and substitutes the tag markup with any output from that PHP code. When we create a UDT in the CMS Made Simple admin area, the name we enter into the text field becomes the tag which Smarty will look for, and the code we enter into the text area is the PHP associated with the tag. This recipe is an example of outputting text directly from a User-Defined Tag. It works by echoing a string, that then replaces the {user_ip} tag in the content. This substitution of the tag can take place either in a page template or in the page content, which might seem a little confusing since it's stated earlier that Smarty processes tags that it finds in templates. The confusion, though, is mostly due to terminology; CMS Made Simple processes both layout templates and page content through Smarty, so while it is being processed, page content serves as a template from Smarty's perspective. The User-Defined Tag we create accesses one of the PHP "superglobals"—the $_SERVER variable . This variable contains information about the HTTP request and some environmental information about the PHP server. In this case, we're getting the user's IP address information to display. Using the CmsObject and the current content object in a User-Defined Tag This recipe shows you how to access the Page Content object via the CmsObject in a User-Defined Tag. The primary technique that it demonstrates—getting a reference to the CmsObject and using the CmsObject to get a reference to other important CMS runtime objects—is one that you will use to solve many different kinds of problems. In this recipe, we use the CmsObject to get a reference to the Page Content object. Once we have a reference to this object, we can call upon its methods to report all kinds of interesting information about the current page content. Getting ready For this recipe, you will need login access to your site's Administration area with permission to "Modify User-Defined Tags" and "Manage All Content". How to do it... Log in to your CMS Administration area. Using the top menu, go to "Extensions" and click on "User Defined Tags". Click on the "Add User Defined Tag" icon. In the "Name" field, type "content_description". In the "Code" field, type the following code: $gCms = cmsms(); $contentops = $gCms->GetContentOperations(); $content_obj = $contentops->getContentObject(); echo 'Current content object is "'.$content_obj->Name().'"<br />'; echo 'which was created on '.$content_obj->GetCreationDate().'<br />'; echo 'its alias is "'.$content_obj->Alias().'"<br />'; echo 'and its URL is "'.$content_obj->GetURL().'"<br />'; Click on the "Submit" button. Using the top menu, select "Content" and click on "Pages". Click on the "Add New Content" button. Enter "New Content Page" into the "Title" and "Menu Text" fields. In the "Content" field, enter: {content_description} Click on the "Submit" button. View your site from the user side. Click on the new "Content Page" page. How it works... CMS Made Simple uses an internal object called "CmsObject" to keep track of a great deal of what it needs to serve content. This information includes the site hierarchy, the installed and active modules, references to the database, and more. The CmsObject is available to Modules, Tags, and User-Defined Tags via the cmsms() function. In this recipe, we want to display information from the current Content object. However, this object is not directly accessible. To get access to this object, we need to make a static call to the ContentOperations object, but this object is also not directly accessible from our code. To get access to these objects, we need to get references to them. We start by gaining access to the CmsObject by calling the global cmsms() function. From our reference to the CmsObject, we request a reference to the ContentOperations object, that we then use to request a reference to the current content object. Once we have the current content object, we can call assorted methods on it to retrieve information about the current content. In this recipe, we get the content's name, when it was last modified, its alias, and its URL. Since this recipe is an example, we don't format these various pieces of information or use a template, but simply echo them. In a production UDT or one in which there's any complexity to what is being displayed, it would be more advisable to use the values to populate Smarty variables for later display, or use a template for formatting them. There's more... There are a number of interesting objects, that CmsObject manages. References can be requested to: BookmarkOperations— used in the Admin area ContentOperations—which has methods to handle Content and content metadata Db— which wraps the ADODB database API GlobalContentOperations— which has methods to handle Global Content Blocks GroupOperations— which has methods to handle Admin Groups HierarchyManager— which has methods for handling site content hierarchies ModuleOperations— which has methods for managing Modules Smarty— which wraps the Smarty template engine StylesheetOperations—which has methods for handling TemplateOperations— which has methods for handling Smarty templates UserOperations— which has methods for handling Admin Users UserTagOperations— which has methods for handling User-Defined Tags Getting attributes using page_attr If you're looking to display information about the current content object, CMS Made Simple has a custom Smarty tag that provides some attributes: {page_attr}. You can use this tag to display page attribute information—simply by specifying a key to the information you're requesting. For example, to get the page's "image" attribute, you could use the tag {page_attr key="image"}. Other keys that are supported include: target image thumbnail extra1 extra2 extra3 searchable pagedata disable_wysiwyg content_en As you can see, this is not as rich a collection of information as you can get from the content object directly using your own UDT. Old code and the use of globals If you look at old modules or User-Defined Tags that have been posted in the CMS Made Simple forum, you may see the following code: global $gCms; instead of the $gCms = cmsms() used here. For a long time, the use of the global declaration was the preferred way to access the CmsObject. This approach is now deprecated for a number of reasons, most important of which is a security issue and also including portability of code between CMS Made Simple 1.x and the upcoming 2.x versions. While use of the global declaration to access the CmsObject will likely still work, it is strongly discouraged.  

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Overview about portals Well, to understand more about what portals are, let me throw some familiar words at you. Have you used, heard, or seen iGoogle, the Yahoo! home page, or MSN? If the answer is yes, then you have been using portals already. All these websites have two things in common. A common dashboard Information from various sources shown on a single page, giving a uniform experience For example, on iGoogle, you can have a gadget showing the weather in Chicago, another gadget to play your favorite game of Sudoku, and a third one to read news from around the globe, everything on the same page without you knowing that all of these are served from different websites! That is what a portal is all about. So, a portal (or web portal) can be thought of as a website that shows, presents, displays, or brings together information or data from various sources and gives the user a uniform browsing experience. The small chunks of information that form the web page are given different names such as gadgets or widgets, portlets or dashlets. Introduction to Liferay Now that you have some basic idea about what portals are, let us revisit the initial statement I made about Liferay. Liferay is an open source portal solution. If you want to create a portal, you can use Liferay to do this. It is written in Java. It is an open source solution, which means the source code is freely available to everyone and people can modify and distribute it. With Liferay you can create basic intranet sites with minimal tweaking. You can also go for a full-fledged enterprise banking portal website with programming, and heavy customizations and integrations. Besides the powerful portal capabilities, Liferay also provides the following: Awesome enterprise and web content management capabilities Robust document management which supports protocols such as CMIS and WebDAV Good social collaboration features Liferay is backed up by a solid and active community, whose members are ever eager to help. Sounds good? So what are we waiting for? Let's take a look at Liferay and its features. Installation and setup In four easy steps, you can install Liferay and run it on your system. Step 1 – Prerequisites Before we go and start our Liferay download, we need to check if we have the requirements for the installation. They are as follows: Memory: 2 GB (minimum), 4 GB (recommended). Disk space: Around 5 GB of free space should be more than enough for the exercises mentioned in the book. The exercises performed in this book are done on Windows XP. So you can use the same or any subsequent versions of Windows OS. Although Liferay can be run on Mac OSX and Linux, it is beyond the scope of this book how to set up Liferay on them. The MySQL database should be installed. As with the OS, Liferay can be run on most of the major databases out there in the market. Liferay is shipped with the Hypersonic database by default for demo purpose, which should not be used for a production environment. Unzip tools such as gzip or 7-Zip. Step 2 – Downloading Liferay You can download the latest stable version of Liferay from https://www.liferay.com/downloads/liferay-portal/available-releases. Liferay comes in the following two versions: Enterprise Edition: This version is not free and you would have to purchase it. This version has undergone rigorous testing cycles to make sure that all the features are bug free, providing the necessary support and patches. Community Edition: This is a free downloadable version that has all the features but no enterprise support provided. Liferay is supported by a lot of open source application servers and the folks at Liferay have made it easy for end users by packaging everything as a bundle. What this means is that if you are asked to have Liferay installed in a JBoss application server, you can just go to the URL previously mentioned and select the Liferay-JBoss bundle to download, which gives you the JBoss Application server installed with Liferay. We will download the Community Edition of the Liferay-Tomcat bundle, which has Liferay preinstalled in the Tomcat server. The stable version at the time of writing this book was Liferay 6.1 GA2. As shown in the following screenshot, just click on Download after making sure that you have selected Liferay bundled with Tomcat and save the ZIP file at an appropriate location: Step 3 – Starting the server After you have downloaded the bundle, extract it to the location of your choice on your machine. You can see a folder named liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2. The latter part of the name can change based on the version that you download. Let us take a moment to have a look at the folder structure as shown in the following screenshot: The liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2 folder is what we will refer to as LIFERAY_HOME. This folder contains the server, which in our case is tomcat-7.0.27. Let's refer to this folder as SERVER_HOME. Liferay is created using Java, so to run Liferay we need Java Runtime Environment (JRE). The Liferay bundle is shipped with a JRE by default (as you can see inside our SERVER_HOME). So if you are running a Windows OS, you can directly start and run Liferay. If you are using any other OS, you need to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable. Navigate to SERVER_HOME/webapps. This is where all the web applications are deployed. Delete everything in this folder except marketplace-portlet and ROOT. Now go to SERVER/bin and double-click on startup.bat, since we are using Windows OS. This will bring up a console showing the server startup. Wait till you see the Server Startup message in the console, after which you can access Liferay from the browser. Step 4 – Doing necessary first-time configurations Once the server is up, open your favorite browser and type in http://localhost:8080. You will be shown a screen that performs basic configurations, such as changing the database and name of your portal, deciding what should be the admin name and e-mail address, or changing the default locale. This is a new feature introduced in Liferay 6.1 to ease the first-time setup, which on previous versions had to be done using the property file. Go change the name of the portal, administrator username, and e-mail address. Keep the locale as it is. As I stated earlier, Liferay is shipped with a default Hypersonic database which is normally used for demo purposes. You can change it to MySQL if you want, by selecting the database type from the drop-down list presented, and typing in the necessary JDBC details. I have created a database in MySQL by the name Portal Starter; hence my JDBC URL would contain that. You can create a blank database in MySQL and accordingly change the JDBC URL. Once you are done making your changes, click on the Finish Configuration button as shown in the following screenshot: This will open up a screen, which will show the path where this configuration is saved. What Liferay does behind the scenes is creates a property file named portal-setup-wizard.properties and put all the configurations in that. This, as I said earlier, was created manually in the previous versions of Liferay. Clicking on the Go to my portal button on this screen will take the user to the Terms of Use page. Agree to the terms and proceed further. A screen will be shown to change the password for your admin user that you earlier specified in the Basic Configuration screen. After you change the password, you will be presented with a screen to select a password reminder question. Select a question or create your own question from the drop-down list, set the password reminder, and move on. And that's it!! Finally, you can see the home page of Liferay. That's it and you are done setting up your very first Liferay instance. Summary So, we just gained a quick understanding about portals and Liferay and its installation and setup that teaches you how to set up Liferay on your local machine. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Vaadin Portlets in Liferay User Interface Development [Article] Setting up and Configuring a Liferay Portal [Article] User Interface in Production [Article]

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Upgrading Oracle GoldenGate binaries In this recipe you will learn how to upgrade GoldenGate binaries. You will also learn about GoldenGate patches and how to apply them. Getting ready For this recipe, we will upgrade the GoldenGate binaries from version 11.2.1.0.1 to 11.2.1.0.3 on the source system, that is prim1-ol6-112 in our case. Both of these binaries are available from the Oracle Edelivery website under the part number V32400-01 and V34339-01 respectively. 11.2.1.0.1 binaries are installed under /u01/app/ggate/112101. How to do it... The steps to upgrade the Oracle GoldenGate binaries are: Make a new directory for 11.2.1.0.3 binaries: mkdir /u01/app/ggate/112103 Copy the binaries ZIP file to the server in the new directory. Unzip the binaries file: [ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112103]$ cd /u01/app/ggate/112103 [ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112103]$ unzip V34339-01.zip Archive: V34339-01.zip inflating: fbo_ggs_Linux_x64_ora11g_64bit.tar inflating: Oracle_GoldenGate_11.2.1.0.3_README.doc inflating: Oracle GoldenGate_11.2.1.0.3_README.txt inflating: OGG_WinUnix_Rel_Notes_11.2.1.0.3.pdf Install the new binaries in /u01/app/ggate/112103: [ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112103]$ tar -pxvf fbo_ggs_Linux_x64_ora11g_64bit.tar Stop the processes in the existing installation: [ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112103]$ cd /u01/app/ggate/112101 [ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112101]$ ./ggsci Oracle GoldenGate Command Interpreter for Oracle Version 11.2.1.0.1 OGGCORE_11.2.1.0.1_PLATFORMS_120423.0230_FBO Linux, x64, 64bit (optimized), Oracle 11g on Apr 23 2012 08:32:14 Copyright (C) 1995, 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 1> stop * Sending STOP request to EXTRACT EGGTEST1 ... Request processed. Sending STOP request to EXTRACT PGGTEST1 ... Request processed. Stop the manager process: GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 2> STOP MGRManager process is required by other GGS processes.Are you sure you want to stop it (y/n)? ySending STOP request to MANAGER ...Request processed.Manager stopped. Copy the subdirectories to the new binaries: [ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112101]$ cp -R dirprm /u01/app/ggate/112103/[ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112101]$ cp -R dirrpt /u01/app/ggate/112103/[ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112101]$ cp -R dirchk /u01/app/ggate/112103/[ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112101]$ cp -R BR /u01/app/ggate/112103/[ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112101]$ cp -R dirpcs /u01/app/ggate/112103/ [ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112101]$ cp -R dirdef /u01/app/ggate/112103/[ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112101]$ cp -R dirout /u01/app/ggate/112103/[ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112101]$ cp -R dirdat /u01/app/ggate/112103/[ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112101]$ cp -R dirtmp /u01/app/ggate/112103/ Modify any parameter files under dirprm if you have hardcoded old binaries path in them. Edit the ggate user profile and update the value of the GoldenGate binaries home: vi .profile export GG_HOME=/u01/app/ggate/112103 Start the manager process from the new binaries: [ggate@prim1-ol6-112 ~]$ cd /u01/app/ggate/112103/ [ggate@prim1-ol6-112 112103]$ ./ggsci Oracle GoldenGate Command Interpreter for Oracle Version 11.2.1.0.3 14400833 OGGCORE_11.2.1.0.3_PLATFORMS_120823.1258_FBO Linux, x64, 64bit (optimized), Oracle 11g on Aug 23 2012 20:20:21 Copyright (C) 1995, 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 1> START MGR Manager started. Start the processes: GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 18> START EXTRACT * Sending START request to MANAGER ... EXTRACT EGGTEST1 starting Sending START request to MANAGER ... EXTRACT PGGTEST1 starting How it works... The method to upgrade the GoldenGate binaries is quite straightforward. As seen in the preceding section, you need to download and install the binaries on the server in a new directory. After this, you would stop the all GoldenGate processes that are running from the existing binaries. Then you would copy all the important GoldenGate directories with parameter files, trail files, report files, checkpoint files, and recovery files to the new binaries. If your trail files are kept on a separate filesystem which is linked to the dirdat directory using a softlink, then you would just need to create a new softlink under the new GoldenGate binaries home. Once all the files are copied, you would need to modify the parameter files if you have the path of the existing binaries hardcoded in them. The same would also need to be done in the OS profile of the ggate user. After this, you just start the manager process and rest of the processes from the new home. GoldenGate patches are all delivered as full binaries sets. This makes the procedure to patch the binaries exactly the same as performing major release upgrades. Table structure changes in GoldenGate environments with similar table definitions Almost all of the applications systems in IT undergo some change over a period of time. This change might include a fix of an identified bug, an enhancement or some configuration change required due to change in any other part of the system. The data that you would replicate using GoldenGate will most likely be part of some application schema. These schemas, just like the application software, sometimes require some changes which are driven by the application vendor. If you are replicating DDL along with DML in your environment then these schema changes will most likely be replicated by GoldenGate itself. However, if you are only replicating only DML and there are any DDL changes in the schema particularly around the tables that you are replicating, then these will affect the replication and might even break it. In this recipe, you will learn how to update the GoldenGate configuration to accommodate the schema changes that are done to the source system. This recipe assumes that the definitions of the tables that are replicated are similar in both the source and target databases. Getting ready For this recipe we are making the following assumptions: GoldenGate is set up to replicate only DML changes between the source and target environments. The application will be stopped for making schema changes in the source environment. The table structures in the source and target database are similar. The replication is configured for all objects owned by a SCOTT user using a SCOTT.* clause. The GoldenGate Admin user has been granted SELECT ANY TABLE in the source database and INSERT ANY TABLE, DELETE ANY TABLE, UPDATE ANY TABLE, SELECT ANY TABLE in the target database. The schema changes performed in this recipe are as follows: Add a new column called DOB (DATE) to the EMP table. Modify the DNAME column in the DEPT table to VARCHAR(20). Add a new table called ITEMS to the SCOTT schema: ITEMS ITEMNO NUMBER(5) PRIMARY KEY NAME VARCHAR(20) Add a new table called SALES to the SCOTT schema: SALES INVOICENO NUMBER(9) PRIMARY KEY ITEMNO NUMBER(5) FOREIGN KEY ITEMS(ITEMNO) EMPNO NUMBER(4) FOREIGN KEY EMP(EMPNO) Load the values for the DOB column in the EMP table. Load a few records in the ITEMS table. How to do it… Here are the steps that you can follow to implement the preceding schema changes in the source environment: Ensure that the application accessing the source database is stopped. There should not be any process modifying the data in the database. Once you have stopped the application, wait for 2 to 3 minutes so that all pending redo is processed by the GoldenGate extract. Check the latest timestamp read by the Extract and Datapump processes and ensure it is the current timestamp: GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 9> INFO EXTRACT EGGTEST1 GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 10> INFO EXTRACT * EXTRACT EGGTEST1 Last Started 2013-03-25 22:24 Status RUNNING Checkpoint Lag 00:00:00 (updated 00:00:07 ago) Log Read Checkpoint Oracle Redo Logs 2013-03-25 22:35:06 Seqno 350, RBA 11778560 SCN 0.11806849 (11806849) EXTRACT PGGTEST1 Last Started 2013-03-25 22:24 Status RUNNING Checkpoint Lag 00:00:00 (updated 00:00:04 ago) Log Read Checkpoint File /u01/app/ggate/dirdat/st000010 2013-03-25 22:35:05.000000 RBA 7631 Stop the Extract and Datapump processes in the source environment: GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 1> STOP EXTRACT * Sending STOP request to EXTRACT EGGTEST1 ... Request processed. Sending STOP request to EXTRACT PGGTEST1 ... Request processed. Check the status of the Replicat process in the target environment and ensure that it has processed the timestamp noted in step 3: GGSCI (stdby1-ol6-112.localdomain) 54> INFO REPLICAT * REPLICAT RGGTEST1 Last Started 2013-03-25 22:25 Status RUNNING Checkpoint Lag 00:00:00 (updated 00:00:04 ago) Log Read Checkpoint File ./dirdat/rt000061 2013-03-25 22:37:04.950188 RBA 10039 Stop the Replicat process in the target environment: GGSCI (stdby1-ol6-112.localdomain) 48> STOP REPLICAT * Sending STOP request to REPLICAT RGGTEST1 ... Request processed. Apply the schema changes to the source database: SQL> ALTER TABLE SCOTT.EMP ADD DOB DATE; Table altered. SQL> ALTER TABLE SCOTT.DEPT MODIFY DNAME VARCHAR(20); Table altered. SQL> CREATE TABLE SCOTT.ITEMS ( ITEMNO NUMBER(5) PRIMARY KEY, NAME VARCHAR(20)); Table created. SQL> CREATE TABLE SCOTT.SALES ( INVOICENO NUMBER(9) PRIMARY KEY, ITEMNO NUMBER(5) REFERENCES SCOTT.ITEMS(ITEMNO), EMPNO NUMBER(4) REFERENCES SCOTT.EMP(EMPNO)); Table created. SQL> UPDATE SCOTT.EMP SET DOB=TO_DATE('01-01-1980','DD-MM-YYYY'); 14 rows updated. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (1,'IRON'); 1 row created. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (2,'COPPER'); 1 row created. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (3,'GOLD'); 1 row created. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (4,'SILVER'); 1 row created. SQL> COMMIT; Commit complete. Apply the schema changes to the target database: SQL> ALTER TABLE SCOTT.EMP ADD DOB DATE; Table altered. SQL> ALTER TABLE SCOTT.DEPT MODIFY DNAME VARCHAR(20); Table altered. SQL> CREATE TABLE SCOTT.ITEMS ( ITEMNO NUMBER(5) PRIMARY KEY, NAME VARCHAR(20)); Table created. SQL> CREATE TABLE SCOTT.SALES ( INVOICENO NUMBER(9) PRIMARY KEY, ITEMNO NUMBER(5) REFERENCES SCOTT.ITEMS(ITEMNO), EMPNO NUMBER(4) REFERENCES SCOTT.EMP(EMPNO)); Table created. SQL> UPDATE SCOTT.EMP SET DOB=TO_DATE('01-01-1980','DD-MM-YYYY'); 14 rows updated. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (1,'IRON'); 1 row created. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (2,'COPPER'); 1 row created. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (3,'GOLD'); 1 row created. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (4,'SILVER'); 1 row created. SQL> COMMIT; Commit complete. Add supplemental logging for the newly added tables: GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 4> DBLOGIN USERID GGATE_ADMIN@ DBORATEST Password: Successfully logged into database. GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 5> ADD TRANDATA SCOTT.ITEMS Logging of supplemental redo data enabled for table SCOTT.ITEMS. GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 6> ADD TRANDATA SCOTT.SALES Logging of supplemental redo data enabled for table SCOTT.SALES. Alter the Extract and Datapump processes to skip the changes generated by the Application Schema Patch: GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 7> ALTER EXTRACT EGGTEST1 BEGIN NOW EXTRACT altered. GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 8> ALTER EXTRACT PGGTEST1 BEGIN NOW EXTRACT altered. Start the Extract and Datapump in the source environment: GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 9> START EXTRACT * Sending START request to MANAGER ... EXTRACT EGGTEST1 starting Sending START request to MANAGER ... EXTRACT PGGTEST1 starting Start the Replicat process in the target environment: GGSCI (stdby1-ol6-112.localdomain) 56> START REPLICAT RGGTEST1 Sending START request to MANAGER ... REPLICAT RGGTEST1 starting How it works... The preceding steps cover a high level procedure that you can follow to modify the structure of the replicated tables in your GoldenGate configuration. Before you start to alter any processes or parameter file, you need to ensure that the applications are stopped and no user sessions in the database are modifying the data in the tables that you are replicating. Once the application is stopped, we check that all the redo data has been processed by GoldenGate processes and then stop. At this point we run the scripts that need to be run to make DDL changes to the database. This step needs to be run on both the source and target database as we will not be replicating these changes using GoldenGate. Once this is done, we alter the GoldenGate processes to start from the current time and start them. There's more... Some of the assumptions made in the earlier procedure might not hold true for all environments. Let's see what needs to be done in such cases where the environment does not satisfy these conditions: Specific tables defined in GoldenGate parameter files Unlike the earlier example, where the tables are defined in the parameter files using a schema qualifier for example SCOTT.*, if you have individual tables defined in the GoldenGateparameterfiles, you would need to modify the GoldenGate parameter files to add these newly created tables to include them in replication. Individual table permissions granted to the GoldenGate Admin user If you have granted table-specific permissions to the GoldenGate Admin user in the source and target environments, you would need to grant them on the newly added tables to allow the GoldenGate user to read their data in the source environment and also to apply the changes to these tables in the target environment. Supplemental logging for modified tables without any keys If you are adding or deleting any columns from the tables in the source database which do not have any primary/unique keys, you would then need to drop the existing supplemental log group and read them. This is because when there are no primary/unique keys in a table, GoldenGate adds all columns to the supplemental log group. This supplemental log group will have to be modified when the structure of the underlying table is modified. Supplemental log groups with all columns for modified tables In some cases, you would need to enable supplemental logging on all columns of the source tables that you are replicating. This is mostly applicable for consolidation replication topologies where all changes are captured and converted into INSERTs in the target environment, which usually is a Data warehouse. In such cases, you need to drop and read the supplemental logging on the tables in which you are adding or removing any columns. Table structure changes in GoldenGate environments with different table definitions In this recipe you will learn how to perform table structure changes in a replication environment where the table structures in the source and target environments are not similar. Getting ready For this recipe we are making the following assumptions: GoldenGate is set up to replicate only DML changes between the source and target environments. The application will be stopped for making schema changes in the source environment. The table structures in the source and target databases are not similar. The GoldenGate Admin user has been granted SELECT ANY TABLE in the source database and INSERT ANY TABLE, DELETE ANY TABLE, UPDATE ANY TABLE, SELECT ANY TABLE in the target database. The definition file was generated for the source schema and is configured in the replicat parameter file. The schema changes performed in this recipe are as follows: Add a new column called DOB (DATE) to the EMP table. Modify the DNAME column in the DEPT table to VARCHAR(20). Add a new table called ITEMS to the SCOTT schema: ITEMS ITEMNO NUMBER(5) PRIMARY KEY NAME VARCHAR(20) Add a new table called SALES to the SCOTT schema: SALES INVOICENO NUMBER(9) PRIMARY KEY ITEMNO NUMBER(5) FOREIGN KEY ITEMS(ITEMNO) EMPNO NUMBER(4) FOREIGN KEY EMP(EMPNO) Load the values for the DOB column in the EMP table. Load a few records in the ITEMS table. How to do it... Here are the steps that you can follow to implement the previous schema changes in the source environment: Ensure that the application accessing the source database is stopped. There should not be any process modifying the data in the database. Once you have stopped the application, wait for 2 to 3 minutes so that all pending redo is processed by the GoldenGate extract. Check the latest timestamp read by the Extract and Datapump process, and ensure it is the current timestamp: GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 9> INFO EXTRACT EGGTEST1 GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 10> INFO EXTRACT * EXTRACT EGGTEST1 Last Started 2013-03-28 10:12 Status RUNNING Checkpoint Lag 00:00:00 (updated 00:00:07 ago) Log Read Checkpoint Oracle Redo Logs 2013-03-28 10:16:06 Seqno 352, RBA 12574320 SCN 0.11973456 (11973456) EXTRACT PGGTEST1 Last Started 2013-03-28 10:12 Status RUNNING Checkpoint Lag 00:00:00 (updated 00:00:04 ago) Log Read Checkpoint File /u01/app/ggate/dirdat/st000010 2013-03-28 10:15:43.000000 RBA 8450 Stop the Extract and Datapump processes in the source environment: GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 1> STOP EXTRACT * Sending STOP request to EXTRACT EGGTEST1 ... Request processed. Sending STOP request to EXTRACT PGGTEST1 ... Request processed. Check the status of the Replicat process in the target environment and ensure that it has processed the timestamp noted in step 3: GGSCI (stdby1-ol6-112.localdomain) 54> INFO REPLICAT * REPLICAT RGGTEST1 Last Started 2013-03-28 10:15 Status RUNNING Checkpoint Lag 00:00:00 (updated 00:00:04 ago) Log Read Checkpoint File ./dirdat/rt000062 2013-03-28 10:15:04.950188 RBA 10039 Stop the Replicat process in the target environment: GGSCI (stdby1-ol6-112.localdomain) 48> STOP REPLICAT * Sending STOP request to REPLICAT RGGTEST1 ... Request processed. Apply the schema changes to the source database: SQL> ALTER TABLE SCOTT.EMP ADD DOB DATE; Table altered. SQL> ALTER TABLE SCOTT.DEPT MODIFY DNAME VARCHAR(20); Table altered. SQL> CREATE TABLE SCOTT.ITEMS ( ITEMNO NUMBER(5) PRIMARY KEY, NAME VARCHAR(20)); Table created. SQL> CREATE TABLE SCOTT.SALES ( INVOICENO NUMBER(9) PRIMARY KEY, ITEMNO NUMBER(5) REFERENCES SCOTT.ITEMS(ITEMNO), EMPNO NUMBER(4) REFERENCES SCOTT.EMP(EMPNO)); Table created. SQL> UPDATE SCOTT.EMP SET DOB=TO_DATE('01-01-1980','DD-MM-YYYY'); 14 rows updated. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (1,'IRON'); 1 row created. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (2,'COPPER'); 1 row created. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (3,'GOLD'); 1 row created. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (4,'SILVER'); 1 row created. SQL> COMMIT; Commit complete. Apply the schema changes to the target database: SQL> ALTER TABLE SCOTT.EMP ADD DOB DATE; Table altered. SQL> ALTER TABLE SCOTT.DEPT MODIFY DNAME VARCHAR(20); Table altered. SQL> CREATE TABLE SCOTT.ITEMS ( ITEMNO NUMBER(5) PRIMARY KEY, NAME VARCHAR(20)); Table created. SQL> CREATE TABLE SCOTT.SALES ( INVOICENO NUMBER(9) PRIMARY KEY, ITEMNO NUMBER(5) REFERENCES SCOTT.ITEMS(ITEMNO), EMPNO NUMBER(4) REFERENCES SCOTT.EMP(EMPNO)); Table created. SQL> UPDATE SCOTT.EMP SET DOB=TO_DATE('01-01-1980','DD-MM-YYYY'); 14 rows updated. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (1,'IRON'); 1 row created. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (2,'COPPER'); 1 row created. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (3,'GOLD'); 1 row created. SQL> INSERT INTO SCOTT.ITEMS VALUES (4,'SILVER'); 1 row created. SQL> COMMIT; Commit complete. Add supplemental logging for the newly added tables: GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 4> DBLOGIN USERID GGATE_ADMIN@DBORATEST Password: Successfully logged into database. GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 5> ADD TRANDATA SCOTT.ITEMS Logging of supplemental redo data enabled for table SCOTT.ITEMS. GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 6> ADD TRANDATA SCOTT.SALES Logging of supplemental redo data enabled for table SCOTT.SALES. Update the parameter file for generating definitions as follows: vi $GG_HOME/dirprm/defs.prm DEFSFILE ./dirdef/defs.def USERID ggate_admin@dboratest, PASSWORD XXXX TABLE SCOTT.EMP; TABLE SCOTT.DEPT; TABLE SCOTT.BONUS; TABLE SCOTT.DUMMY; TABLE SCOTT.SALGRADE; TABLE SCOTT.ITEMS; TABLE SCOTT.SALES; Generate the definitions in the source environment: ./defgen paramfile ./dirprm/defs.prm Push the definitions file to the target server using scp: scp ./dirdef/defs.def stdby1-ol6-112:/u01/app/ggate/dirdef/ Edit the Extract and Datapump process parameter to include the newly created tables if you have specified individual table names in them. Alter the Extract and Datapump processes to skip the changes generated by the Application Schema Patch: GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 7> ALTER EXTRACT EGGTEST1 BEGIN NOW EXTRACT altered. GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 8> ALTER EXTRACT PGGTEST1 BEGIN NOW EXTRACT altered. Start the Extract and Datapump in the source environment: GGSCI (prim1-ol6-112.localdomain) 9> START EXTRACT * Sending START request to MANAGER ... EXTRACT EGGTEST1 starting Sending START request to MANAGER ... EXTRACT PGGTEST1 starting Edit the Replicat process parameter file to include the tables: ./ggsci EDIT PARAMS RGGTEST1 REPLICAT RGGTEST1 USERID GGATE_ADMIN@TGORTEST, PASSWORD GGATE_ADMIN DISCARDFILE /u01/app/ggate/dirrpt/RGGTEST1.dsc,append,MEGABYTES 500 SOURCEDEFS ./dirdef/defs.def MAP SCOTT.BONUS, TARGET SCOTT.BONUS; MAP SCOTT.SALGRADE, TARGET SCOTT.SALGRADE; MAP SCOTT.DEPT, TARGET SCOTT.DEPT; MAP SCOTT.DUMMY, TARGET SCOTT.DUMMY; MAP SCOTT.EMP, TARGET SCOTT.EMP; MAP SCOTT.EMP,TARGET SCOTT.EMP_DIFFCOL_ORDER; MAP SCOTT.EMP, TARGET SCOTT.EMP_EXTRACOL, COLMAP(USEDEFAULTS, LAST_UPDATE_TIME = @DATENOW ()); MAP SCOTT.SALES, TARGET SCOTT.SALES; MAP SCOTT.ITEMS, TARGET SCOTT.ITEMS; Start the Replicat process in the target environment: GGSCI (stdby1-ol6-112.localdomain) 56> START REPLICAT RGGTEST1 Sending START request to MANAGER ... REPLICAT RGGTEST1 starting How it works... You can follow the previously mentioned procedure to apply any DDL changes to the tables in the source database. This procedure is valid for environments where existing table structures between the source and the target databases are not similar. The key things to note in this method are: The changes should only be made when all the changes extracted by GoldenGate are applied to the target database, and the replication processes are stopped. Once the DDL changes have been performed in the source database, the definitions file needs to be regenerated. The changes that you are making to the table structures needs to be performed on both sides. There's more… Some of the assumptions made in the earlier procedure might not hold true for all environments. Let's see what needs to be done in cases where the environment does not satisfy these conditions: Individual table permissions granted to the GoldenGate Admin user If you have granted table-specific permissions to the GoldenGate Admin user in the source and target environments, you would need to grant them on the newly added tables to allow the GoldenGate user to read their data in the source environment and also to apply the changes to these tables in the target environment. Supplemental logging for modified tables without any keys If you are adding or deleting any columns from the tables in the source database which do not have any primary/unique keys, you would then need to drop the existing supplemental log group and read them. This is because when there are no primary/unique keys in a table, GoldenGate adds all columns to the supplemental log group. This supplemental log group will need to be modified when the structure of the underlying table is modified. Supplemental log groups with all columns for modified tables In some cases, you would need to enable supplemental logging on all columns of the source tables that you are replicating. This is mostly applicable for consolidation replication topologies where all changes are captured and converted into INSERTs in the target environment, which usually is a Data warehouse. In such cases, you need to drop and read the supplemental logging on the tables in which you are adding or removing any columns.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) This all starts by visiting https://appdev.microsoft.com/StorePortals, which will get you to the store dashboard that you use to submit and manage your applications. If you already have an account you'll just log in here and proceed. If not, we'll take a look at ways of getting it set up. There are a couple of ways to get a store account, which you will need before you can submit any game or application to the store. There are also two different types of accounts: Individual accounts Company accounts In most cases you will only need the first option. It's cheaper and easier to get, and you won't require the enterprise features provided by the company account for a game. For this reason we'll focus on the individual account. To register you'll need a credit card for verification, even if you gain a free account another way. Just follow the registration instructions, pay the fee, and complete verification, after which you'll be ready to go. Free accounts Students and developers with MSDN subscriptions can access registration codes that waive the fee for a minimum of one year. If you meet either of these requirements you can gain a code using the respective methods, and use that code during the registration process to set the fee to zero. Students can access their free accounts using the DreamSpark service that Microsoft runs. To access this you need to create an account on www.dreamspark.com and create an account. From there follow the steps to verify your student status and visit https://www.dreamspark.com/Student/Windows-Store-Access.aspx to get your registration code. If you have access to an MSDN subscription you can use this to gain a store account for free. Just log in to your account and in your account benefits overview you should be able to generate your registration code. Submitting your game So your game is polished and ready to go. What do you need to do to get it in the store? First log in to the dashboard and select Submit an App from the menu on the left. Here you can see the steps required to submit the app. This may look like a lot to do, but don't worry. Most of these are very simple to resolve and can be done before you even start working on the game. The first step is to choose a name for your game, and this can be done whenever you want. By reserving a name and creating the application entry you have a year to submit your application, giving you plenty of time to complete it. This is why it's a good idea to jump in and register your application once you have a name for it. If you change your mind later and want a different name you can always change it. The next step is to choose how and where you will sell your game. The other thing you need to choose here are the markets you want to sell your game in. This can be an area you need to be careful of, because the markets you choose here define the localization or content you need to watch for in your game. Certain markets are restrictive and including content that isn't appropriate for a market you say you want to sell in can cause you to fail the certification process. Once that is done you need to choose when you want to release your game—you can choose to release as soon as certification finishes or on a specific date, and then you choose the app category, which in this case will be Games. Don't forget to specify the genre of your game as the sub-category so players can find it. The final option on the Selling Details page which applies to us is the Hardware requirements section. Here we define the DirectX feature-level required for the game, and the minimum RAM required to run it. This is important because the store can help ensure that players don't try to play your game on systems that cannot run it. The next section allows you to define the in-app offers that will be made available to players. The Age rating and rating certificates section allows you to define the minimum age required to play the game, as well as submit official ratings certificates from ratings boards so that they may be displayed in the store to meet legal requirements. The latter part is optional in some cases, and may affect where you can submit your game depending on local laws. Aside from official ratings, all applications and games submitted to the store require a voluntary rating, chosen from one of the following age options: 3+ 7+ 12+ 16+ 18+ While all content is checked, the 7+ and 3+ ratings both have extra checks because of the extra requirements for those age ranges. The 3+ rating is especially restrictive as apps submitted with that age limit may not contain features that could connect to online services, collect personal information, or use the webcam or microphone. To play it safe it's recommended the 12+ rating is chosen, and if you're still uncertain, higher is safer. GDF Certificates The other entry required here if you have official ratings certificates is a GDF file. This is a Game Definition File, which defines the different ratings in a single location and provides the necessary information to display the rating and inform any parental settings. To do this you need to use the GDFMAKER.exe utility that ships with the Windows 8 SDK, and generate a GDF file which you can submit to the store. Alongside that you need to create a DLL containing that file (as a resource) without any entry point to include in the application package. For full details on how to create the GDF as well as the DLL, view the following MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465153.aspx The final section before you need to submit your compiled application package is the cryptography declaration. For most games you should be able to declare that you aren't using any cryptography within the game and quickly move through this step. If you are using cryptography, including encrypting game saves or data files, you will need to declare that here and follow the instructions to either complete the step or provide an Export Control Classification Number (ECCN). Now you need to upload the compiled app package before you can continue, so we'll take a look at what it takes to do that before you continue. App packages To submit your game to the store, you need to package it up in a format that makes it easy to upload, and easy for the store to distribute. This is done by compiling the application as an .appx file. But before that happens we need to ensure we have defined all of the required metadata, and fulfill the certification requirements, otherwise we'll be uploading a package only to fail soon after. Part of this is done through the application manifest editor, which is accessible in Visual Studio by double-clicking on the Package.appxmanifest file in solution explorer. This editor is where you specify the name that will be seen in the start menu, as well as the icons used by the application. To pass certification all icons have to be provided at 100 percent DPI, which is referred to as Scale 100 in the editor. Icon/Image Base resolution Required Standard 150 x 150 px Yes Wide 310 x 150 px If Wide Tile Enabled Small 30 x 30 px Yes Store 50 x 50 px Yes Badge 24 x 24 px If Toasts Enabled Splash 620 x 300 px Yes If you wish to provide a higher quality images for people running on high DPI setups, you can do so with a simple filename change. If you add scale-XXX to your filename, just before the extension, and replace XXX with one of the following values, Windows will automatically make use of it at the appropriate DPI. scale-100 scale-140 scale-180 In the following image you can see the options available for editing the visual assets in the application. These all apply to the start menu and application start-up experience, including the splash screen and toast notifications. Toast Notifications in Windows 8 are pop-up notifications that slide in from the edge of the screen and show the users some information for a short period of time. They can click on the toast to open the application if they want. Alongside Live Tiles, Toast Notifications allow you to give the user information when the application is not running (although they work when the application is running). The previous table shows the different images you required for a Windows 8 application, and if they are mandatory or just required in certain situations. Note that this does not include the imagery required for the store, which includes some screenshots of the application and optional promotional art in case you want your application to be featured. You must replace all of the required icons with your own. Automated checks during certification will detect the use of the default "box" icon shown in the previous screenshot and automatically fail the submission. Capabilities Once you have the visual aspects in place, you need to declare the capabilities that the application will receive. Your game may not need any, however you should still only specify what you need to run, as some of these capabilities come with extra implications and non-obvious requirements. Adding a privacy policy One of those requirements is the privacy policy. Even if you are creating a game, there may be situations where you are collecting private information, which requires you to have a privacy policy. The biggest issue here is connecting to the internet. If your game marks any of the Internet capabilities in the manifest, you automatically trigger a check for a privacy policy as private information—in this case an IP address—is being shared. To avoid failing certification for this, you need to put together a privacy policy if you collect privacy information, or use any of the capabilities that would indicate you collect information. These include the Internet capabilities as well as location, webcam, and microphone capabilities. This privacy policy just needs to describe what you will do with the information, and directly mention your game and publisher name. Once you have the policy written, it needs to be posted in two locations. The first is a publicly accessible website, which you will provide a link to when filling out the description after uploading your game. The second is within the game itself. It is recommended you place this policy in the Windows 8 provided settings menu, which you can build using XAML or your own code. If you're going with a completely native Windows 8 application you may want to display the policy in your own way and link to it from options within your game. Declarations Once you've indicated the capabilities you want, you need to declare any operating system integration you've done. For most games you won't use this, however if you're taking advantage of Windows 8 features such as share targets (the destination for data shared using the Share Charm), or you have a Game Definition File, you will need to declare it here and provide the required information for the operating system. In the case of the GDF, you need to provide the file so that the parental controls system can make use of the ratings to appropriately control access. Certification kit The next step is to make sure you aren't going to fail the automated tests during certification. Microsoft provides the same automated tests used when you submit your app in the Windows Application Certification Kit (WACK). WACK is installed by default with Visual Studio 2012 or higher version. There are two ways to run the test: after you build your application package, or by running the kit directly against an installed app. We'll look at the latter first, as you might want to run the test on your deployed test game well before you build anything for the store. This is also the only way to run the WACK on a WinRT device, if you want to cover all bases. If you haven't already deployed or tested your app, deploy it using the Build menu in Visual Studio and then search for the Windows App Cert Kit using the start menu (just start typing). When you run this you will be given an option to choose which type of application you want to validate. In this case we want to select the Windows Store App option, which will then give you access to the list of apps installed on your machine. From there it's just a matter of selecting the app you want and starting the test. At this point you will want to leave your machine alone until the automated tests are complete. Any interference could lead to an incorrect failure of the certification tests. The results will indicate ways you can fix any issues; however, you should be fine for most of the tests. The biggest issues will arise from third party libraries that haven't been developed or ported to Windows 8. In this case the only option is to fix them yourself (if they're open source) or find an alternative. Once you have the test passing, or you feel confident that it won't be an issue, you need to create app packages that are compatible with the store. At this point your game will be associated with the submission you have created in the Windows Store dashboard so that it is prepared for upload. Creating your app packages To do this, right click on your game project in Visual Studio and click on Create App Packages inside the Store menu. Once you do that, you'll be asked if you want to create a package for the store. The difference between the two options comes down to how the package is signed. If you choose No here, you can create a package with your test certificate, which can be distributed for testing. These packages must be manually installed and cannot be submitted to the store. You can, however, use this type of package on other machines to install your game for testers to try out. Choosing No will give you a folder with a .ps1 file (Powershell), which you can run to execute the install script. Choosing Yes at this option will take you to a login screen where you can enter your Windows Store developer account details. Once you've logged in you will be presented with a list of applications that you have registered with the store. If you haven't yet reserved the name of your application, you can click on the Reserve Name link, which will take you directly to the appropriate page in the store dashboard. Otherwise select the name of the game you're trying to build and click on Next. The next screen will allow you to specify which architectures to build for, and the version number of the built package. As this is a C++ game, we need to provide separate packages for the ARM, x86, and x64 builds, depending on what you want to support. Simply providing an x86 and ARM build will cover the entire market; 64 bit can be nice to have if you need a lot of memory, but ultimately it is optional, and some users may not even be able to run x64 code. When you're ready click on Create and Visual Studio will proceed to build your game and compile the requested packages, placing them in the directory specified. If you've built for the store, you will need the .appxupload files from this directory when you proceed to upload your game. Once the build has completed you will be asked if you want to launch the Windows Application Certification Kit. As mentioned previously this will test your game for certification failures, and if you're submitting to the store it's strongly recommended you run this. Doing so at this screen will automatically deploy the built package and run the test, so ensure you have a little bit of time to let it run. Uploading and submitting Now that you have a built app package you can return to the store dashboard to submit your game. Just edit the submission you made previously and enter the Packages section, which will take you to the page where you can upload the appxupload file. Once you have successfully uploaded your game you will gain access to the next section, the Description. This is where you define the details that will be displayed in the store. This is also where your marketing skills come into play as you prepare the content that will hopefully get players to buy your game. You start with the description of your game, and any big feature bullet points you want to emphasize. This is the best place to mention any reviews or praise, as well as give a quick description that will help the players decide if they want to try your game. You can have a number of app features listed; however, like any "back of the box" bullet points, keep them short and exciting. Along with the description, the store requires at least one screenshot to display to the potential player. These screenshots need to be of the entire screen, and that means they need to be at least 1366x768, which is the minimum resolution of Windows 8. These are also one of the best ways to promote your game, so ensure you take some great screenshots that show off the fun and appeal of your game. There are a few ways to take a screenshot of your game. If you're testing in the simulator you can use the screenshot icon on the right toolbar of the simulator to take the screenshot. If not, you can use Windows Key + Prt Scr SysRq to take a screenshot of your entire screen, and then use that (or edit it if you have multiple monitors). Screenshots taken with either of these tools can be found in the Screenshots folder within your Pictures library. There are two other small pieces of information that are required during this stage: Copyright Info and Support contact info. For the support info, an e-mail address will usually suffice. At this point you can also include your website and, if applicable to your game, a link to the privacy policy included in your game. Note that if you require a privacy policy, it must be included in two places: your game, and the privacy policy field on this form. The last items you may want to add here are promotional images. These images are intended for use in store promotions and allow Microsoft to easily feature your game with larger promotional imagery in prominent locations within the store. If you are serious about maximizing the reach of your game, you will want to include these images. If you don't, the number of places your game can be featured will be reduced. At a minimum the 414x180 px image should be included if you want some form of promotion. Now you're almost done! The next section allows you to leave notes for the testing team. This is where you would leave test account details for any features in your game that require an account so that they can test those features. This is also the location to leave any notes about testing in case there are situations where you can point out any features that might not be obvious. In certain situations you may have an exemption from Microsoft for a certification requirement; this would be where you include that exemption. When every step has been completed and you have tick marks in all of the stages, the Submit for Certification button will unlock, allowing you to complete your submission and send it off for certification. At this stage a number of automated tests will run before human testers will try your game on a variety of devices to ensure it fits the requirements for the store. If all goes well, you will receive an email notifying you of your successful certification and, depending on if you set the release date as ASAP, you will find your game in the store a few hours later (it may take a few hours to appear in the store once you receive an email informing you that your game or app is in the store). Certification tips Your first stop should be the certification requirements page, which lists all of the current requirements your game will be tested for: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh694083.aspx. There are some requirements that you should take note of, and in this section we'll take a look at ways to help ensure you pass those requirements. Privacy The first of course is the privacy policy. As mentioned before, if your game collects any sort of personal information, you will need that policy in two places: In full text within the game Accessible through an Internet link The default app template generated by Visual Studio automatically enables the Internet capability, and by simply having that enabled you require a privacy policy. If you aren't connecting to the Internet at all in your game, you should always ensure that none of the Internet options are enabled before you package your game. If you share any personal information, then you need to provide players with a method of opting in to the sharing. This could be done by gating the functionality behind a login screen. Note that this functionality can be locked away, and the requirement doesn't demand that you find a way to remain fully functional even if the user opts out. Features One requirement is that your game support both touch input and keyboard/mouse input. You can easily support this by using an input system like the one described in this article; however, by supporting touch input you get mouse input for free and technically fulfill this requirement. It's all about how much effort you want to put into the experience your player will have, and that's why including gamepad input is recommended as some players may want to use a connected Xbox 360 gamepad for their input device in games. Legacy APIs Although your game might run while using legacy APIs, it won't pass certification. This is checked through an automated test that also occurs during the WACK testing process, so you can easily check if you have used any illegal APIs. This often arises in third party libraries which make use of parts of the standard IO library such as the console, or the insecure versions of functions such as strcpy or fopen. Some of these APIs don't exist in WinRT for good reason; the console, for example, just doesn't exist, so calling APIs that work directly with the console makes no sense, and isn't allowed. Debug Another issue that may arise through the use of third-party libraries is that some of them may be compiled in debug mode. This could present issues at runtime for your app, and the packaging system will happily include these when compiling your game, unless it has to compile them itself. This is detected by the WACK and can be resolved by finding a release mode version, or recompiling the library. WACK The final tip is: run WACK. This kit quickly and easily finds most of the issues you may encounter during certification, and you see the issues immediately rather than waiting for it to fail during the certification process. Your final step before submitting to the store should be to run WACK, and even while developing it's a good idea to compile in release mode and run the tests to just make sure nothing is broken. Summary By now you should know how to submit your game to the store, and get through certification with little to no issues. We've looked at what you require for the store including imagery and metadata, as well as how to make use of the Windows Application Certification Kit to find problems early on and fix them up without waiting hours or days for certification to fail your game. One area unique to games that we have covered in this article is game ratings. If you're developing your game for certain markets where ratings are required, or if you are developing children's games, you may need to get a rating certificate, and hopefully you have an idea of where to look to do this. Resources for Article: Further resources on this subject: Introduction to Game Development Using Unity 3D [Article] HTML5 Games Development: Using Local Storage to Store Game Data [Article] Unity Game Development: Interactions (Part 1) [Article]

(For more resources on Plone here.) We will first inspect a few structural changes and install them, and then finally examine the various components and skin layer items that have been changed, one at a time. Where restarting Zope or rerunning your buildout would be required, this will be noted. About the theme This theme and its design are available for personal and professional use to anyone, and can be freely modified. You can (and should) download the files from https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/plonetheme.guria/trunk using the following command: svn co https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/plonetheme.guria/trunk plonetheme.guria Note the space between the words trunk and plonetheme.guria. This theme is intended for installation on Plone 3 web sites. The finished theme should look like the following, but we have work to do to make this happen: This theme was created by me, for use by a charity group in India, called Guria (http://www.guriaindia.org), dedicated to ending human trafficking and prostitution. The finished site is currently in development, and is generously hosted free of charge by the talented folks at Six Feet Up (sixfeetup.com). Additionally, most of the code and lessons learned come courtesy of similar themes created by the staff at ONE/Northwest in Seattle, Washington. The design for this theme was created with the assumption that most of the tasks would need to be present in this theme. In fact, the only task not covered here is the creation of a new viewlet manager. Creation of viewlet managers is discussed at http://plone.org/documentation/how-to/adding-portlet-managers and http://plone.org/documentation/manual/theme-reference/elements/viewletmanager/override. Creating a theme product I created a theme product named plonetheme.guria, using the command line syntax paster create –t plone3_theme, while we were located in the src/ directory of our buildout, as seen next: [bash: /opt/mybuildout/src] paster create -t plone3_theme plonetheme.guriaSelected and implied templates: ZopeSkel#basic_namespace A project with a namespace package ZopeSkel#plone A Plone project ZopeSkel#plone3_theme A Theme for Plone 3.0Variables: egg: plonetheme.guria package: plonethemeguria project: plonetheme.guriaEnter namespace_package (Namespace package (like plonetheme)) ['plonetheme']:Enter package (The package contained namespace package (like example)) ['example']: guriaEnter skinname (The skin selection to be added to 'portal_skins' (like 'My Theme')) ['']: Guria Theme for the Plone Theming BookEnter skinbase (Name of the skin selection from which the new one will be copied) ['Plone Default']:Enter empty_styles (Override default public stylesheets with empty ones?) [True]: FalseEnter include_doc (Include in-line documentation in generated code?) [False]:Enter zope2product (Are you creating a Zope 2 Product?) [True]:Enter version (Version) ['0.1']:Enter description (One-line description of the package) ['An installable theme for Plone 3.0']:Enter long_description (Multi-line description (in reST)) ['']:Enter author (Author name) ['Plone Collective']: Veda WilliamsEnter author_email (Author email) ['product-developers@lists. plone.org']: email@email.comEnter keywords (Space-separated keywords/tags) ['web zope plone theme']:Enter url (URL of homepage) ['http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/']:Enter license_name (License name) ['GPL']:Enter zip_safe (True/False: if the package can be distributed as a .zip file) [False]:Creating template basic_namespaceCreating directory ./plonetheme.guria[snip] You may wish to generate a new Plone theme product yourself, so that you can compare and contrast the differences between the Guria theme and a vanilla Plone theme. Notice that the full name of the theme is plonetheme.guria, and where an item shows as blank, it defaults to the example value in that step. In other words, the namespace package defaults to plonetheme, because there was no reason to change it. The skinname is set to a single lowercase word out of stylistic preference. It's important to also note that you should not use hyphens or spaces in your theme names, as they will not be recognized by your buildout. We've chosen not to override Plone's default stylesheets, and instead, we want to build on top of Plone's default (and excellent!) stylesheets. I prefer this method mostly because the layout needed for Plone's Contents view and other complex structural pieces are already taken care of by Plone's base stylesheets. It's easier than trying to rebuild those from scratch every time, but this is merely a personal preference. Following the creation of the theme, we register the theme product in our buildout.cfg, using the following syntax [buildout] ...develop = src/plonetheme.guria...[instance]eggs = plonetheme.guria...zcml = plonetheme.guria... If we were using the eggtractor egg, there would be no need to add these lines of code to our buildout.cfg; all we would need to do is rebuild our buildout and it would automatically recognize the new egg. eggtractor can be found at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/buildout.eggtractor, and is documented thoroughly. Assuming we are not using eggtractor, we must rebuild our buildout, as we have altered ZCML code and added a new egg: [bash: /opt/mybuildout/src/] ./bin/buildout This would be a good time to check your vanilla theme product into Subversion, so that you can track back to the original version, if needed. However, since this is an existing theme, there is no need to do so. For the purposes of following along, it might be best if you do not yet install the theme. We want to make some changes first. However, we will point out some caveats along the way, in case you installed the theme prematurely. Altering the theme product's structure Several modifications have been made to the theme product's structure to shorten folder names and change the default behavior. Again, this is mostly a personal preference. Let's take a look at these changes and how they were achieved. Renaming the theme In our theme product, you will see a file named profiles.zcml, located at mybuildout/src/plonetheme.guria/plonetheme/guria/profiles.zcml. The code looks like this: <configure i18n_domain="plonetheme.guria"> <genericsetup:registerProfile name="default" title="Guria Theme for the Plone Theming Book" directory="profiles/default" description='Extension profile for the "Guria Theme for the Plone Theming Book" Plone theme.' provides="Products.GenericSetup.interfaces.EXTENSION" /></configure> If you named your theme in a way that was less descriptive, you could alter the title. Naming your theme product properly is important, because you may have different types of products used for a given web site—for example, a policy product for content that might be used in tandem with your theme product. This text is what you see in the portal_quickinstaller at http://localhost:8080/mysite/portal_quickinstaller/manage_installProductsForm, where mysite is the name of your Plone site. You can also see this name if you install your theme product via Site Setup Add-on Products|, found at http://localhost:8080/mysite/prefs_install_products_form. If you change your XML here, and your theme product is already installed, you'll need to start (or restart) your Zope instance, using: [bash: /opt/mybuildout] ./bin/instance fg Shortening folder names Next, we look at the folder structure of our theme product. The standard Plone 3 theme produces folders with names like plonetheme_guria_custom_images, plonetheme_guria_custom_templates, and plonetheme_guria_styles. While there is nothing wrong with keeping this structure, it can be cumbersome to type or tab through (especially when checking items into Subversion). However, you might want to keep the existing folder names to help you distinguish which items of base Plone you modified. This can make migrations easier. If you choose this route, you probably want to create additional folders for non-base-Plone items. I personally prefer the shorter folder names and don't worry too much about the migration issues. In the case of this theme product, I opted to make the folder names shorter. First, I altered the names of the folders in the skins/ folder to guria_images, guria_styles, and guria_templates. Then, in the theme, go to mybuildout/plonetheme.guria/plonetheme/guria/skins.zcml. The code in this file is altered to appear as follows: <configure i18n_domain="plonetheme.guria"> <!-- File System Directory Views registration --> <cmf:registerDirectory name="guria_images"/> <cmf:registerDirectory name="guria_templates"/> <cmf:registerDirectory name="guria_styles"/></configure> One more step is required here. In plonetheme.guria/plonetheme/guria/profiles/default/skins.xml, the code is changed to read as follows: <?xml version="1.0"?><object name="portal_skins" allow_any="False" cookie_persistence="False" default_skin=" Guria Theme for the Plone Theming Book "> <object name="guria_images" meta_type="Filesystem Directory View" directory="plonetheme.guria:skins/guria_images"/> <object name="guria_templates" meta_type="Filesystem Directory View" directory="plonetheme.guria:skins/guria_templates"/> <object name="guria_styles" meta_type="Filesystem Directory View" directory="plonetheme.guria:skins/guria_styles"/> <skin-path name=" Guria Theme for the Plone Theming Book " based- on="Plone Default"> <layer name="guria_images" insert-after="custom"/> <layer name="guria_templates" insert-after="guria_images"/> <layer name="guria_styles" insert-after="guria_templates"/> </skin-path></object> Basically, the steps are the following:   Rename the folders on the filesystem. Modify the skins.zcml file to change the name of the filesystem directory view (what you see in the portal_skins/properties area of the ZMI). Modify the skins.xml file in the profiles/default folder to match. This alters the basic profile of your theme product. If you wanted to add additional folders and filesystem directory views here (a scripts/ folder, for example), you'd just add code by following the conventions given to you in these files and then create additional folders. Making changes to the ZCML file means that you would need to do a restart of your Zope instance. If you installed your theme product before making the changes to the skin layer names, you might want to inspect the skin layers at http://localhost:8080/mysite/ portal_skins/manage_propertiesForm, to make sure that the correct skin layers are listed. You might even need to reimport the "skins tool" step via portal_setup at http://localhost:8080/mysite/portal_setup/manage_importSteps. Make sure you choose the correct profile first by choosing your theme product's name from the drop-down list at the top of the import page. The theme product's name is the same name as you find in your profiles.zcml file. Adjusting how stylesheets and images are used Next, we remove some of the default behavior given to us by the plone3_theme recipe. In a vanilla theme product, folders named images/ and stylesheets/ are inserted into the plonetheme.guria/plonetheme/guria/browser/ directory. Additionally, a file named main.css is included in the stylesheets/ directory. I chose not to place the theme's images or stylesheets in the browser/ directory, as this is generally unnecessary for most themes. Advanced programmers may wish to expose these items to the browser layer, but this is generally a personal choice and carries with it additional consequences. I deleted the folders mentioned above, as well as the i file. Then, I opened the file named configure.zcml, located at plonetheme.guria/plonetheme/guria/browser/, and removed all of the following boilerplate text: <!-- Viewlets registration --> <!-- Zope 3 browser resources --> <!-- Resource directory for images --> <browser:resourceDirectory name="plonetheme.guria.images" directory="images" layer=".interfaces.IThemeSpecific" /> <!-- Resource directory for stylesheets --> <browser:resourceDirectory name="plonetheme.guria.stylesheets" directory="stylesheets" layer=".interfaces.IThemeSpecific" /> I then removed the highlighted code below fromI then removed the highlighted code below from plonetheme.guria/plonetheme/guria/profiles/default/cssregistry.xml:: <stylesheet title="" id="++resource++plonetheme.guria.stylesheets/main.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet" rendering="import" cacheable="True" compression="safe" cookable="True" enabled="1" expression=""/> And replaced it with the following: <stylesheet title="" id="guria.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet" rendering="import" cacheable="True" compression="safe" cookable="True" enabled="1" expression=""/> This, in effect, tells our theme product that we will be using a stylesheet named guria.css (or more correctly, guria.css.dtml, as we'll see in a moment). This stylesheet does not yet exist, so we have to create it. I wanted the option of making use of the DTML behavior provided by Plone, so that I could use certain base properties provided to us via the base_properties.props file (also located in our skins/guria_styles/ folder). DTML essentially allows us to use property-sheet variables and apply changes on a more global scale. The easiest way to create this new stylesheet is to go to your mybuildout/buildout-cache/eggs/Plone[some version number]/Products/CMFPlone/skins/plone_styles/ploneCustom.css and copy the contents of that file into a new stylesheet (named guria.css.dtml) in your theme's guria_styles/ folder (located in the skins/ directory at mybuildout/plonetheme.guria/plonetheme/guria/skins/guria_styles). The important bits of code you want are as follows: /* <dtml-with base_properties> (do not remove this :) *//* <dtml-call "REQUEST.set('portal_url', portal_url())"> (not this either :) *//* DELETE THIS LINE AND PUT YOUR CUSTOM STUFF HERE */ /* </dtml-with> */ Again, we would need to restart our Zope at this point, as we have modified our ZCML. If we had already installed our theme product, we'd also have to import our cssregistry.xml file via portal_setup in the ZMI, to capture the new GenericSetup profile settings. However, we have not yet installed the product, so we do not need to worry about this.

(For more resources on Plone, see here.) Introduction One of the major changes from Plone 2.5 to Plone 3.0 was the complete refactoring of its portlets engine. In Plone 2.5, left and right side portlets were managed from Zope Management Interface (ZMI) by setting two special properties: left_slots and right_slots. This was not so hard but was cumbersome. Any TALES path expression—ZPT macros typically—could be manually inserted in the above two properties and would be displayed as a bit of HTML to the final user. The major drawback for site managers with the old-style approach was not just the uncomfortable way of setting which portlets to display, but the lack of any configuration options for them. For example, if we wanted to present the latest published news items, we wouldn't have any means of telling how many of them to show, unless the portlet itself were intelligent enough to get that value from some other contextual property. But again, we were still stuck in the ZMI. Fortunately, this has changed enormously in Plone 3.x: Portlets can now be configured and their settings are mantained in ZODB. Portlets are now managed via a user-friendly, Plone-like interface. Just click on the Manage portlets link below each of the portlets columns (see the following screenshot). In the above screen, if we click on the News portlet link, we are presented with a special configuration form to choose the Number of items to display and the Workflow state(s) we want to consider when showing news items. If you have read previous chapters, you might be correctly guessing that Zope 3 components (zope.formlib mainly) are behind the portlets configuration forms. In the next sections, we'll look again at the customer's requirements: Advertisement banners will be located in several areas of every page Advertisement banners may vary according to the section of the website Creating a portlet package Once again, paster comes to the rescue. As in Creating a product package structure and Creating an Archetypes product with paster, we will use the paster command here to create all the necessary boilerplate (and even more) to get a fully working portlet. Getting ready As we are still at the development stage, we should run the following commands in our buildout's src folder: cd ./src How to do it... Run the paster command: We are going to create a new egg called pox.portlet.banner. The pox prefix is from PloneOpenX (the website we are working on) and it will be the namespace of our product. Portlets eggs usually have a nested portlet namespace as in plone.portlet.collection or plone.portlet.static. We have chosen the pox main namespace as in the previous eggs we have created, and the banner suffix corresponds to the portlet name. For more information about eggs and packages names read http://www.martinaspeli.net/articles/the-naming-ofthings-package-names-and-namespaces.If you want to add portlets to an existing package instead of creating a new one, the steps covered in this chapter should tell you all you need to know (the use of paster addcontent portlet local command will be of great help). In your src folder, run the following command: paster create -t plone3_portlet This paster command creates a product using the plone3_portlet template. When run, it will output some informative text, and then a short wizard will be started to select options for the package: Option Value Enter project name pox.portlet.banner Expert Mode? easy Version 1.0 Description Portlet to show banners Portlet Name Banner portlet Portlet Type BannerPortlet After selecting the last option, you'll get an output like this (a little longer actually): Creating directory ./pox.portlet.banner ... Recursing into +namespace_package+ Recursing into +namespace_package2+ Recursing into +package+ Recursing into profiles Creating ./pox.portlet.banner/pox/portlet/banner/profiles/ Recursing into default Creating ./pox.portlet.banner/pox/portlet/banner/profiles/default/ Copying metadata.xml_tmpl to ./pox.portlet.banner/pox/portlet/banner/profiles/default/metadata.xml Copying portlets.xml_tmpl to ./pox.portlet.banner/pox/portlet/banner/profiles/default/portlets.xml This tells us that even the GenericSetup extension profile has also been created by paster. This means that we can install the new Banner portlet product (as entered in the portlet_name option above). Install the product: To tell our Zope instance about the new product, we must update the buildout.cfg file as follows: [buildout]...eggs =... pox.portlet.banner...develop = src/pox.portlet.banner We can automatically install the product during buildout. Add a pox.portlet.banner line inside the products parameter of the [plonesite] part: [plonesite]recipe = collective.recipe.plonesite...products =... pox.portlet.banner Build your instance and, if you want to, launch it to see the new empty Banner portlet: ./bin/buildout./bin/instance fg Check the new portlet: After implementing the changes above, if you click on the Manage portlets link in the site's home page (or anywhere in the Plone site), you will see a new Banner portlet option in the drop-down menu. A new box in the portlet column will then be shown. The Header/Body text/Footer box shown above matches the template definition in the bannerportlet.pt file the way paster created it.

What is an audio-visual production? The term audio-visual production basically covers anything in the known universe that combines varying components of movement, sound, and light. Movies are nothing more than big expensive (really expensive) audio-visual shows. Television programs; the fireworks, performed music, and laser lights of a major rock concert; a business presentation; Uncle Spud showing slides of his vacation in Idaho—all are audio-visual productions. A complex audio-visual production, such as the big rock concert, combines many types of contents and is called a multimedia show, which combine sounds and music, projections of video and photos (often several at once), lights, spoken words, text on screens, and more. Audio visual shows, those of an educational nature as well as for entertainment value, might be produced with equipment such as the following: Dioramas Magic lanterns Planetarium Film projectors Slide projectors Opaque projectors Overhead projectors Tape recorders Television Video Camcorders Video projectors Interactive whiteboards Digital video clips Also productions such as TV commercials, instructional videos, those moving displays you see in airports, even the new digital billboards along our highways—all are audio-visual productions (even the ones without sound). My favorite type of production, documentaries (I've done literally hundreds of them), are audio-visual shows. A documentary is a nonfiction movie and includes newsreels, travel, politics, docudramas, nature films and animal films, music videos, and much more. In short, as we can see from the preceding discussion, you can throw just about everything into a production including your kitchen sink. Turn the faucet on and off while blasting inspiring music and hitting it with colored spotlights, and plumbers will flock to buy tickets to the show! Now, while just about every conceivable project falls into the audio-visual category, Celtx (as shown in the next screenshot) offers us specific categories that narrow the field down a little. The following screenshot from Celtx's splash page shows those categories. Film handles movies and television shows, Theatre (love that Canadian spelling, eh?) is for stage plays, Audio Play is designed for radio programs and podcasts, Storyboard is for visual planning, and Comic Book is for writing anything from comic strips to epic graphic novels. Text (not shown in the following screenshot) is the other project type that comes with Celtx and is great for doing loglines, synopses, treatments, outlines, and anything else calling for a text editor rather than a script formatter. Just about everything else can be written in an Audio-Visual project container! Let's think about that for a moment. This means that Audio-Visual is by far and away the most powerful project provided by Celtx. In the script element drop-down box, there are only five script elements—Scene Heading, Shot, Character, Dialog, and Parenthetical—whereas Film has eight! Yet, thanks to Celtx magic, these five elements, as I will show you in this article, are a lot more flexible than in Film and the other projects. It's pretty amazing. So, time to start an audio-visual project of our own. Starting an AV project in Celtx What better example to use than a short documentary on... wait for it... Celtx. This film I actually plan on producing and using to both promote Celtx (which certainly deserves letting people know about it) and also showing that this article is great for learning all this marvelous power of Celtx. The title: "Celtx Loves Indies." Indies is slang for independent producers. An independent producer is a company or quite often an individual who makes films outside Hollywood or Bollywood or any other studio system. Big studios have scores or even hundreds of people to do all those tasks needed in producing a film. Indies often have very few people, sometimes just one or two doing all the crewing and production work. Low budget (not spending too much money on making films) is our watchword. Celtx is perfect for indies—it is, as I point out in the documentary—like having a studio in a box! So, my example project for this chapter is how I set up "Celtx Loves Indies" in Celtx. Time for action — beginning our new AV project We start our project, as we did our spec script in the last chapter, by making a directory on our computer. Having a separate directory for our projects makes it a lot easier to organize and to find stuff when we need it. Therefore, I first create the new empty directory on my hard drive named Celtx Loves Indies, as shown in the following screenshot: Now, fire up Celtx. In a moment, we'll left click on Audio-Visual to open a project container that has an Audio-Visual script in it. However, first, since I have not mentioned it to date, look at the items outside the Project Templates and Recent Project boxes in the lower part of the splash page, as shown in the following screenshot: As Celtx is connected to the Internet, we get some information each time Celtx starts up from the servers at: . This information from online includes links to news, help features, ads for Celtx add-ons, and announcements. The big news here is that Celtx has added an app (application) to synchronize projects with iPhones and iPadsHowever, check these messages out each time you open Celtx. Next, we open an Audio-Visual project in Celtx. This gives us a chance to check out those five script elements we met earlier by left clicking on the downward arrow next to Scene Heading. In the next section, we'll examine each and use them. Time for action – setting up the container Continuing with our initial setup of the container for this project, rename the A/V Script in the Project Library. I renamed mine, naturally, Celtx Loves Indies. Also, remember we can have hundreds of files, directories, subdirectories, and so on in the Project Library—our research and more. This is why a Celtx project is really a container. Just right click on A/V Script, choose Rename... and type in the new title, as shown in the following screenshot: Left click on File at the top left of the Celtx screen, then on Save Project As... (or use the Ctrl+Shift+S key shortcut) to save the project into your new directory, all properly titled and ready for action, as shown in the following screenshot:

  CMS Design Using PHP and jQuery Build and improve your in-house PHP CMS by enhancing it with jQuery Create a completely functional and a professional looking CMS Add a modular architecture to your CMS and create template-driven web designs Use jQuery plugins to enhance the "feel" of your CMS A step-by-step explanatory tutorial to get your hands dirty in building your own CMS         Read more about this book       (For more resources on this subject, see here.) Dates Dates are annoying. The scheme I prefer is to enter dates the same way MySQL accepts them—yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss. From left to right, each subsequent element is smaller than the previous. It's logical, and can be sorted sensibly using a simple numeric sorter. Unfortunately, most people don't read or write dates in that format. They'd prefer something like 08/07/06. Dates in that format do not make sense. Is it the 8th day of the 7th month of 2006, or the 7th day of the 8th month of 2006, or even the 6th day of the 7th month of 2008? Date formats are different all around the world. Therefore, you cannot trust human administrators to enter the dates manually. A very quick solution is to use the jQuery UI's datepicker plugin. Temporarily (we'll remove it in a minute) add the highlighted lines to /ww.admin/pages/pages.js: other_GET_params:currentpageid }); $('.date-human').datepicker({ 'dateFormat':'yy-mm-dd' });}); When the date field is clicked, this appears: It's a great calendar, but there's still a flaw: Before you click on the date field, and even after you select the date, the field is still in yyyy-mm-dd format. While MySQL will thank you for entering the date in a sane format, you will have people asking you why the date is not shown in a humanly readable way. We can't simply change the date format to accept something more reasonable such as "May 23rd, 2010", because we would then need to ensure that we can understand this on the server-side, which might take more work than we really want to do. So we need to do something else. The datepicker plugin has an option which lets you update two fields at the same time. This is the solution—we will display a dummy field which is humanly readable, and when that's clicked, the calendar will appear and you will be able to choose a date, which will then be set in the human-readable field and in the real form field. Don't forget to remove that temporary code from /ww.admin/pages/pages.js. Because this is a very useful feature, which we will use throughout the admin area whenever a date is needed, we will add a global JavaScript file which will run on all pages. Edit /ww.admin/header.php and add the following highlighted line: <script src="/j/jquery.remoteselectoptions /jquery.remoteselectoptions.js"></script><script src="/ww.admin/j/admin.js"></script><link rel="stylesheet" href="http://ajax.googleapis.com /ajax/libs/jqueryui/1.8.0/themes/south-street /jquery-ui.css" type="text/css" /> And then we'll create the /ww.admin/j/ directory and a file named /ww.admin/j/admin.js: function convert_date_to_human_readable(){ var $this=$(this); var id='date-input-'+Math.random().toString() .replace(/\./,''); var dparts=$this.val().split(/-/); $this .datepicker({ dateFormat:'yy-mm-dd', modal:true, altField:'#'+id, altFormat:'DD, d MM, yy', onSelect:function(dateText,inst){ this.value=dateText; } }); var $wrapper=$this.wrap( '<div style="position:relative" />'); var $input=$('<input id="'+id+'" class="date-human-readable" value="'+date_m2h($this.val())+'" />'); $input.insertAfter($this); $this.css({ 'position':'absolute', 'opacity':0 }); $this .datepicker( 'setDate', new Date(dparts[0],dparts[1]-1,dparts[2]) );}$(function(){ $('input.date-human').each(convert_date_to_human_readable);}); This takes the computer-readable date input and creates a copy of it, but in a human-readable format. The original date input box is then made invisible and laid across the new one. When it is clicked, the date is updated on both of them, but only the human-readable one is shown. Much better. Easy for a human to read, and also usable by the server. Saving the page We created the form, and except for making the body textarea more user-friendly, it's just about finished. Let's do that now. When you click on the Insert Page Details button (or Update Page Details, if an ID was provided), the form data is posted to the server. We need to perform these actions before the page menu is displayed, so it is up-to-date. Edit /ww.admin/pages.php, and add the following highlighted lines before the load menu section: echo '<h1>Pages</h1>';// { perform any actionsif(isset($_REQUEST['action'])){ if($_REQUEST['action']=='Update Page Details' || $_REQUEST['action']=='Insert Page Details'){ require 'pages/action.edit.php'; } else if($_REQUEST['action']=='delete'){ 'pages/action.delete.php'; }}// }// { load menu If an action parameter is sent to the server, then the server will use this block to decide whether you want to edit or delete the page. We'll handle deletes later in the article. Notice that we are handling inserts and updates with the same file, action.edit.php—in the database, there is almost no difference between the two when using MySQL. So, let's create that file now. We'll do it a bit at a time, like how we did the form, as it's a bit long. Create /ww.admin/pages/action.edit.php with this code: <?phpfunction pages_setup_name($id,$pid){ $name=trim($_REQUEST['name']); if(dbOne('select id from pages where name="'.addslashes($name).'" and parent='.$pid.' and id!='.$id,'id')){ $i=2; while(dbOne('select id from pages where name="'.addslashes($name.$i).'" and parent='.$pid.' and id!='.$id,'id'))$i++; echo '<em>A page named "'.htmlspecialchars($name).'" already exists. Page name amended to "' .htmlspecialchars($name.$i).'".</em>'; $name=$name.$i; } return $name;} The first piece is a function which tests the submitted page name. If that name is the same as another page which has the same parent, then a number is added to the end and a message is shown explaining this. Here's an example, creating a page named "Home" in the top level (we already have a page named "Home"): Next we'll create a function for testing the inputted special variable. Add this to the same file: function pages_setup_specials($id=0){ $special=0; $specials=isset($_REQUEST['special']) ?$_REQUEST['special']:array(); foreach($specials as $a=>$b) $special+=pow(2,$a); $homes=dbOne("SELECT COUNT(id) AS ids FROM pages WHERE (special&1) AND id!=$id",'ids'); if($special&1){ // there can be only one homepage if($homes!=0){ dbQuery("UPDATE pages SET special=special-1 WHERE special&1"); } } else{ if($homes==0){ $special+=1; echo '<em>This page has been marked as the site\'s Home Page, because there must always be one.</em>'; } } return $special;} In this function, we build up the special variable, which is a bit field. A bit field is a number which uses binary math to combine a few "yes/no" answers into one single value. It's good for saving space and fields in the database.Each value has a value assigned to it which is a power of two. The interesting thing to note about powers of two is that in binary, they're always represented as a 1 with some 0s after it. For example, 1 is represented as 00000001, 2 is 00000010, 4 is 00000100, and so on.When you have a bit field such as 00000011 (each number here is a bit), it's easy to see that this is composed of the values 1 and 2 combined, which are 20 and 21 respectively.The & operator lets us check quickly if a certain bit is turned on (is 1) or not. For example, 00010011 & 16 is true, and 00010011 & 32 is false, because the 16 bit is on and the 32 bit is off. In the database, we set a bit for the homepage, which we say has a value of 1. In the previous function, we need to make sure that after inserting or updating a page, there is always exactly one homepage. The only other one we've set so far is "does not appear in navigation menu", which we've given the value 2. If we added a third bit flag ("is a 404 handler", for example), it would have the value 4, then 8, and so on. Okay—now we will set up our variables. Add this to the same file: // { set up common variables$id =(int)$_REQUEST['id'];$pid =(int)$_REQUEST['parent'];$keywords =$_REQUEST['keywords'];$description =$_REQUEST['description'];$associated_date =$_REQUEST['associated_date'];$title =$_REQUEST['title'];$name =pages_setup_name($id,$pid);$body =$_REQUEST['body'];$special =pages_setup_specials($id);if(isset($_REQUEST['page_vars'])) $vars =json_encode($_REQUEST['page_vars']);else $vars='[]';// } Then we will add the main body of the page update SQL to the same file: // { create SQL$q='edate=now(),type="'.addslashes($_REQUEST['type']).'", associated_date="'.addslashes($associated_date).'", keywords="'.addslashes($keywords).'", description="'.addslashes($description).'", name="'.addslashes($name).'", title="'.addslashes($title).'", body="'.addslashes($body).'",parent='.$pid.', special='.$special.',vars="'.addslashes($vars).'"';// } This is SQL which is common to both creating and updating a page. Finally we run the actual query and perform the action. Add this to the same file: // { run the queryif($_REQUEST['action']=='Update Page Details'){ $q="update pages set $q where id=$id"; dbQuery($q);}else{ $q="insert into pages set cdate=now(),$q"; dbQuery($q); $_REQUEST['id']=dbLastInsertId();}// }echo '<em>Page Saved</em>'; In the first case, we simply run an update. In the second, we run an insert, adding the creation date to the query, and then setting $_REQUEST['id'] to the ID of the entry that we just created. Creating new top-level pages If you've been trying all this, you'll have noticed that you can create a top-level page simply by clicking on the admin area's Pages link in the top menu, and then you're shown an empty Insert Page Details form. If you've been trying all this, you'll have noticed that you can create a top-level page simply by clicking on the admin area's Pages link in the top menu, and then you're shown an empty Insert Page Details form. It makes sense, though, to also have it available from the pagelist on the left-hand side. So, let's make that add main page button useful. If you remember, we created a pages_add_main_page function in the menu.js file, just as a placeholder until we got everything else done. Open up that file now, /ww.admin/pages/menu.js, and replace that function with the following two new functions: function pages_add_main_page(){ pages_new(0);}function pages_new(p){ $('<form id="newpage_dialog" action="/ww.admin/pages.php" method="post"> <input type="hidden" name="action" value="Insert Page Details" /> <input type="hidden" name="special[1]" value="1" /> <input type="hidden" name="parent" value="'+p+'" /> <table> <tr><th>Name</th><td><input name="name" /></td></tr> <tr><th>Page Type</th><td><select name="type"> <option value="0">normal</option> </select></td></tr> <tr><th>Associated Date</th><td> <input name="associated_date" class="date-human" id="newpage_date" /></td></tr> </table> </form>') .dialog({ modal:true, buttons:{ 'Create Page': function() { $('#newpage_dialog').submit(); }, 'Cancel': function() { $(this).dialog('destroy'); $(this).remove(); } } }); $('#newpage_date').each(convert_date_to_human_readable); return false;} When the add main page button is clicked, a dialog box is created asking some basic information about the page to create: We include a few hidden inputs. action: To tell the server this is an Insert Page Details action. special: When Create Page is clicked, the page will be saved in the database, but we should hide it initially so that front-end readers don't see a half-finished page. So, the special[1] flag is set (21 == 2, which is the value for hiding a page). parent: Note that this is a variable. We can use the same dialog to create sub-pages. When the dialog has been created, the date input box is converted to human-readable. Creating new sub-pages We will add sub-pages by using context menus on the page list. Note that we have a message saying right-click for options under the list. First, add this function to the /ww.admin/pages/menu.js file: function pages_add_subpage(node,tree){ var p=node[0].id.replace(/.*_/,''); pages_new(p);} We will now need to activate the context menu. This is done by adding a contextmenu plugin to the jstree plugin . Luckily, it comes with the download, so you've already installed it. Add it to the page by editing /ww.admin/pages/menu.php and add this highlighted line: <script src="/j/jquery.jstree/jquery.tree.js"></script><script src= "/j/jquery.jstree/plugins/jquery.tree.contextmenu.js"></script><script src="/ww.admin/pages/menu.js"></script> And now, we edit the .tree() call in /ww.admin/menu.js to tell it what to do: $('#pages-wrapper').tree({ callback:{// SKIPPED FOR BREVITY - DO NOT DELETE THESE LINES }, plugins:{ 'contextmenu':{ 'items':{ 'create' : { 'label' : "Create Page", 'icon' : "create", 'visible' : function (NODE, TREE_OBJ) { if(NODE.length != 1) return 0; return TREE_OBJ.check("creatable", NODE); }, 'action':pages_add_subpage, 'separator_after' : true }, 'rename':false, 'remove':false } } }}); By default, the contextmenu has three links: create, rename, and remove. You need to turn off any you're not currently using by setting them to false. Now if you right-click on any page name in the pagelist, you will have a choice to create a sub-page under it. Deleting pages We will add deletions in the same way, using the context menu. Edit the same file, and this time in the contextmenu code, replace the remove: false line with these: 'remove' : { 'label' : "Delete Page", 'icon' : "remove", 'visible' : function (NODE, TREE_OBJ) { if(NODE.length != 1) return 0; return TREE_OBJ.check("deletable", NODE); }, 'action':pages_delete, 'separator_after' : true} And add the pages_delete function to the same file: function pages_delete(node,tree){ if(!confirm( "Are you sure you want to delete this page?"))return; $.getJSON('/ww.admin/pages/delete.php?id=' +node[0].id.replace(/.*_/,''),function(){ document.location=document.location.toString(); }); } One thing to always keep in mind is whenever creating any code that deletes something in your CMS, you must ask the administrator if he/she is sure, just to make sure it wasn't an accidental click. If the administrator confirms that the click was intentional, then it's not your fault if something important was deleted. So, the pages_delete function first checks for this, and then calls the server to remove the file. The page is then refreshed because this may significantly change the page list tree, as we'll see now. Create the /ww.admin/pages/delete.php file: <?phprequire '../admin_libs.php';$id=(int)$_REQUEST['id'];if(!$id)exit;$r=dbRow("SELECT COUNT(id) AS pagecount FROM pages");if($r['pagecount']<2){ die('cannot delete - there must always be one page');}else{ $pid=dbOne("select parent from pages where id=$id",'parent'); dbQuery("delete from pages where id=$id"); dbQuery("update pages set parent=$pid where parent=$id");}echo 1; First, we ensure that there is always at least one page in the database. If deleting this page would empty the table, then we refuse to do it. There is no need to add an alert explaining this, as it should be clear to anyone that deleting the last remaining page in a website leaves the website with no content at all. Simply refusing the deletion should be enough. Next, we delete the page. Finally, any pages which were contained within that page (pages which had this one as their parent), are moved up in the tree so they are contained in the deleted page's old parent. For example, if you had a page, page1>page2>page3 (where > indicates the hierarchy), and you removed page2, then page3 would then be in the position page1>page3. This can cause a large difference in the treestructure if there were quite a few pages contained under the deleted one, so the page needs to be refreshed.

  Locations and tax setup There's no doubt that tax law is complicated, but it's a necessity. It's far beyond the scope to discuss tax law in all countries, so be sure to do your own research regarding taxes for your own state, country, and region. For businesses located in the USA, here are a couple of links to get you started: Amazon Sales Tax Info – http://bit.ly/amazon-sales-tax State Tax Info – http://www.business.gov/finance/taxes/state.html Within the USA, most businesses charge state sales tax based on the shipping information that the customer provides. While nine times out of ten a customer's billing and shipping information are the same, the times when the billing and shipping information differ can lead to some interesting scenarios. For example, if your store is based in Kansas, a customer in Kansas who buys a product and ships it to Texas would not have to pay tax on that order at least not to the state of Kansas. On the other hand, a customer in Georgia who buys your product and ships it to Kansas would have to pay tax on the order. Again, tax law is undoubtedly complicated, so be sure to look up any laws specific to your own state. On to business—the first thing to do is to verify that your Base Country/Region is correct. You can find this under the General tab of the WP e-Commerce Plugin Settings, as seen in the following screenshot: Next, verify that the tax percentages are correct for your state or region. This is just underneath the settings for Base Country/Region. Finally, switch to the Checkout tab at the top to consider one more setting. Just, under Checkout Options there is an option to Lock Tax to Billing Country. This is shown in the following screenshot: What this option does, once selected, is lock the billing country to the shipping country. For stores in the USA, it also has the effect of locking the billing state to the shipping state. This certainly simplifies matters, but it doesn't quite solve the tax scenarios outlined earlier in this section. Shipping Options and Calculators Configuring a store's shipping options is potentially one of the most complicated tasks that new store owners face, but it doesn't have to be. Much of it depends on the type of products that you are planning to sell. The absolute simplest scenario involves selling digital downloads only, in which case you don't need to worry about shipping at all. When dealing with tangible goods, one's shipping needs grow increasingly complicated depending on the diversity of the products involved and anticipated location of the customers. For instance, selling books as well as clothing will create different shipping needs than selling only books or clothing. Also, planning to sell to customers worldwide will necessitate more complicated shipping needs than limiting one's customer base to only one or two countries. Unlike creating and modifying a product catalog, configuring shipping settings is a task that only needs to be done once. General Shipping Settings To view and modify your shipping settings, switch to the Shipping tab at the top of the Settings page, as seen in the following screenshot: Under the General Settings, you have the option to globally enable or disable shipping. If your shop is comprised of digital downloads only, then you can safely switch the Use Shipping option to No and rejoice! You no longer have to worry about any shipping confi guration. The following screenshot shows the relevant panel: Those, who do sell tangible items should leave it set to Yes, as shown above. If your store is located in the USA, add the Zipcode for the area from where you will be shipping items. This is really only necessary if you plan to use one of the external shipping calculators (UPS or USPS), but it doesn't hurt to add it anyway. If you subscribe to the third-party Shipwire order fulfillment service (www.shipwire.com), set the Shipwire option to Yes and enter your relevant login information. Shipwire is a service that collects and stores your products for you, shipping them to customers when necessary. While convenient, Shipwire comes with a cost, currently starting at $30 per month. One neat aspect of the e-Commerce plugin is that you can opt to allow for free shipping, provided that the order price is above a certain threshold. At the bottom of the general shipping options is a toggle to Enable Free Shipping Discount, as seen in the following screenshot: Enter a threshold amount of your choice, such as $50, like seen above. Any orders that customers place with a value equal to or higher than that price will automatically qualify for free shipping.

Building on the example site It's time to make room for growth. Your client has a big pile of information on ugly art that they want to present to the public. You are asked to design a site framework that makes it easy to add more content, while at the same time keeps it easy for visitors to quickly find their way through the site. Can you do that? You most certainly can! Joomla! allows you to build sites of all sorts and sizes, whether they consist of just a few pages or thousands of them. If you plan ahead and start with a sound basic structure, you'll be rewarded with a site that's easy to maintain and extend. In this article, we'll review the site you've just built and look at the different ways the content can be structured—and rearranged, if need be. Grouping content: A crash course in site organization To lay the groundwork for your site, you won't use Joomla!. The back of a napkin will do fine. Draw up a site map to lay out the primary content chunks and their relationships. View your site from a user's perspective. What do you think your visitors will primarily look for, and how can you help them find things fast and easily? Designing a site map To create a site map, first collect all information you plan on having on your website and organize it into a simple and logical format. As site maps come, this is a very basic one. For the most part, it's just one level deep. Introducing Ugly Paintings and Mission are basic web pages (articles). Activities is a section that allows the visitor to browse two other categories. Contact Us is a contact form page. This structure was good enough for a basic website, but it won't do if SRUP wants to expand their site. Time for action – create a future proof site map Let's make some room for growth. Imagine your client's planning to add an indefinite amount of new content, so there's a need for additional content containers. They have come up with the following list of subjects they want to add to their site: News items A few pages to introduce the founding members of SRUP Reviews on ugly art Facts on ugly paintings (history, little known facts, and so on) What's the best way to organize things? Let's figure out which content fits which type of container. Step 1: You'll probably want to create a separate News section. News should be a top level item, a part of the site's main menu.     Step 2: The information on the SRUP founders fits in a new section 'About SRUP'.   Step 3: Both Reviews and Facts can be categories in a new general section on 'Ugly Paintings'. The existing article 'Introducing Ugly Paintings' could be moved here (or dropped).     What just happened? You've laid a solid foundation for your site—on paper. Before you actually start using Joomla! to create sections and categories, create a structure for the content that you have in mind. Basically, no matter how big or small your website is, you'll organize it just like the example you've just seen. You'll work from top to bottom, from the primary level to the lower levels, defining content groups and their relations. Bear in mind, though, that there will certainly be more than one way to organize your information. Choose an organization that makes sense to you and your visitors, and try to keep things lean and clean. A complex structure will make it harder to maintain the content, and eventually—when building menus—it will make it harder to design clear and simple navigation paths for your visitors. Tips on choosing sections It can be useful to choose sections based on the main intentions people have when they come to the site. What are they here for? Is it to Browse Products or to Join a Workshop? Common choices for sections are: Products, Catalog, Company, Portfolio, About Us, Jobs, News, and Downloads. Try not to have more than five to seven sections. Once you have more than that, readers won't be able to hold them all in their heads at once when they have to choose which one to browse. Transferring your site map to Joomla! Let's have a closer look at our new site map and identify the Joomla! elements. This—and any—Joomla! site is likely to consist of five types of content. The following are the content types in our SRUP site map:   Obviously, the top level item will be the home page. The main content groups we can identify as sections and categories. This small site has four sections, three of which contain two categories. Each of the categories hold actual content: this is what will end up in Joomla! as articles. In this site map, there is one article that doesn't really belong in any category: the Mission Statement page. Every site will have one or two of those independent articles. In Joomla!, you can add these as uncategorized articles. Finally, there's one item that represents a very different type of content. In the site map above, a grey background indicates an item containing special functionality. In this case this is a contact form. Other examples are guest books, order forms, photo galleries. Basically, that's all there is to a Joomla! site. When you've got your site outlined like this, you won't meet any surprises while building it. You can transform any amount of content and functionality into a website, step by step.   How do you turn a site map into a website? If you've got your site blueprint laid out, you probably want to start building! Now, what should be the first step? What's the best, and fastest, way to get from that site map on the back of your napkin to a real-life Joomla! site? In this book, we'll work in this order: Organize: Create content containers.You've seen that much of the site map we just created consists of content containers: sections and categories. In this article, we'll focus on these containers. We'll create all necessary containers for our example site. Add content: Fill the containers with articles.Next, we'll add articles to the sections and categories. Articles are the "classic content" that most web pages are made of. We should also check for articles that do not belong in any category. Instead of assigning them to a section and a category, we'll add them as Uncategorized content.. Put your contents on display: Create the home page and content overview pages.Next, you'll want to guide and invite visitors. You can achieve this using two special types of pages in the site map, the home page and Joomla!'s section/category overview pages ("secondary home pages"). Make everything findable: Create menus.The top level items in your site map will probably end up as menu items on the site. To open up your site to the world you'll create and customize menus helping visitors to easily navigate your content. And what about the special content stuff? You'll notice that in the above list we've summed up all sorts of "classic content", such as articles, home pages, overview pages, and menus linking it all. We haven't yet mentioned one essential part of the site map, the special goodies. On a dynamic website you can have more than just plain old articles. You can add picture galleries, forms, product catalogues, site maps, and much, much more. It's important to identify those special pages from the beginning, but you'll add them later using Joomla!'s components and extensions. That's why we'll first concentrate on building a rock-solid foundation; later we'll add all of the desired extras. Let's start with step one now, and get our site organized! Creating content containers: Sections and categories To create a section, navigate to Content | Section Manager | New. To make a new category, you'll use the Category Manager instead. Just add a title for your new section or category and click on Save. You've created a perfectly workable section or category with the default settings (or parameters as Joomla! likes to call them). Time for action – create a new section and a category Your client was happy with the initial site structure you designed, but now their website is evolving, there's a need for more content containers. Let's add a news section first: Navigate to Content | Section Manager and click on New. In the Section: [New] screen, fill out the Title field. In this example, type News: Leave the other values unchanged; click on Save. You're taken to the Section Manager. The News section is now shown in the section list. Now, add a category to the new section. We'll call this category General News: Navigate to Content | Category Manager and click on New. In the Title field, type General News. In the Section field, select News. Click on Save. You're done!

(For more resources on Drupal, see here.) Setting up the e-commerce system Ubercart has existed since Drupal 6 so those users who have used Ubercart with Drupal 6 will have some experience setting up and configuring this module for Drupal 7. In this section we'll install and set up the basic Ubercart configuration. Goal Set up the system that will allow visitors to purchase take-out from the website. Additional modules needed Ubercart, Token, Views, CTools, Entity, Token, Rules (http://drupal.org/project/ubercart). Configuring Ubercart In order to utilize an e-commerce solution within a website, you must either build a solution from scratch or use a ready-made solution. Because building a professional e-commerce solution from scratch would take an entire book and weeks or months to build, we are fortunate to have Ubercart, which is a professional quality e-commerce solution tailor-made for Drupal. To begin using Ubercart: Download and install the module from its project page. The current stable release for Drupal 7 is 7.x-3.0-rc3. To use Ubercart, you will also need to install some dependency modules in order to get the best functionality and performance from Ubercart. These dependencies are listed on the Ubercart Website: Token, Views, Rules, CTools, Entity API, Entity Token and Token. Go ahead and install and enable the dependency modules and Ubercart. Once installed, we will begin by enabling the following Ubercart modules: All of the modules in the Ubercart—Core section including Cart, Order, Product, and Store. Then enable the following Core (Optional) modules: Catalog, File downloads, Payment, Product Attributes, Reports, Roles, and Taxes. Then in the Extra section enable the following: Product Kit and Stock. For our Payment method and module enable the Credit card, PayPal, and Test Gateway modules. We will not be shipping any items so we do not need to enable shipping modules at this point. There are a variety of other modules that can be optionally enabled. We will explore some of these in future topics. If you are planning to use the PayPal Express Checkout payment method with Ubercart you should make sure you have enabled the CURL PHP extension for use in your PHP configuration. To do this you can ask your hosting company to enable the CURL extension in your php.ini file. Otherwise if you have access to the php.ini file you can open the file and uncomment the CURL extension to enable it. Then save your php.ini file and restart the Web server. When you check your PHP info via the Drupal status report you should see the following section showing you that the PHP CURL extension is enabled.     Now, you should see the following Ubercart modules that you have enabled on your main modules configuration page:   Ubercart installs a new menu item called Store next to the menu item called Dashboard in the Administer menu bar, which includes the options shown in the following screenshot:   The first thing you'll notice is a warning message telling you that one or more problems exist with your Drupal install. Click on the Status report link. On the Status report page you'll see a warning telling you to enable credit card encryption. In order to use Ubercart for payment processing for your online store transactions you first need to set up an encryption location for your credit card data.   To do this click on the credit card security settings link. That will load the Credit card settings screen. Under Basic Settings, for now let's enable the Test Gateway. Later we'll discuss integrating PayPal but for testing purposes we can use the Test Gateway configuration.   Click on the Security Settings tab. Here we need to set up our card number encryption settings. We can first create a folder outside of our document root (outside of our Drupal directory) but on our web server to hold our encrypted data. We'll create a folder at the root level of our MAMP install called "keys". Go ahead and do this then type in /Applications/MAMP/keys in your Card number encryption key file path field. Also make sure the folder allows for write permissions.   Now click on the PayPal Website Payments Pro tab and disable the gateway for use. Click on the Test Gateway tab and leave this enabled for use. Click on Credit card settings and leave the defaults selected. Under Customer messages you can specify any custom messages you want to show the user if their credit card fails during the transaction process. Click Save configuration. When you save your configuration you should get the following success message: Credit card encryption key file generated. Card data will now be encrypted. The configuration options have been saved. Now, we have successfully set up our payment processing with the Test gateway enabled. We're ready to start using Ubercart. To begin using Ubercart, we will need to: Edit the Configuration settings, which are shown in the following screenshot: Clicking on the Store link allows you to configure several options that control how information on the site is displayed, as well as specify some basic contact information for the site To edit the settings for a section, click on the tab for that section. On the Store settings page, we simply need to update the Store name, Store owner, e-mail address, phone and fax numbers for the store. You can also enter store address information. If your store is not located in the United States, you will also need to modify the Currency Format settings. If you are shipping items you may need to tweak the Weight and Length formats. You can also specify a store help page where you'll provide help information. You can simply create a new page in Drupal and alias it, and then type the alias in here. Once you finish entering your Store settings click the Save configuration button Configuring Ubercart user permissions You should also create a role for store administration, by clicking on User management and then Roles. We will call our role Store Administrator. Click Add role to finish building the role. After the role has been added, click the edit permissions link for the role to define the permissions for the new role. Ubercart includes several sections of permissions including: Catalog Credit Card File Downloads Store Payment Product Product attributes Product kit Order Taxes Since this is an administrative role you may just want to give this staff person all permissions for an admin level role on the site. Go ahead and check off the permissions you need to grant and then save your role's permissions.If your site has employees, you may also want to create a separate role (or several roles) that do not give full control over the store for your employees. For example, you may not want an employee to be able to create or delete products, but you would like them to be able to take new orders. Ubercart provided blocks The Ubercart module ships with a core block that you can enable to make it easier for visitors to your site to see what they have ordered and to check out. Go to your blocks administrative page and you can enable the Shopping cart block to show in one of your block regions. I'll put it in the Sidebar second region. These are the basic configuration options which need to be done after you enable the block. Click on the configure link and then you can title your block, select whether to display the shopping cart icon, make the cart block collapsible, add cart help text ,and more. I'll leave the defaults selected for now. You should see a block admin screen similar to the following:  

Showing maps using YOS amMap Adding a map to your site may be a necessity in some cases. For example, you want to show the population of countries, or you want to show a world map to your students for teaching geography. Flash maps are always interesting as you can interact with them and can view them as you like. amMap provides tools for showing Flash maps. The amMap tool is ported as a Joomla! component by yOpensource, and the component is released with the name YOS amMap. This component has two versions—free and commercial. The commercial or pro version has some advanced features that are not available in the free version. The YOS amMap component, together with its module, allows you to display a map of the world, a region, or a country. You can choose the map to be displayed, which areas or countries are to be highlighted, and the way in which the viewers can control the map. Generally, maps displayed through the YOS amMap component can be zoomed, centered, or scrolled to left, right, top, or bottom. You can also specify a color in which a region or a country should be displayed. Installing and configuring YOS amMap To use YOS amMap with your Joomla! website, you must first download it from http://yopensource.com/en/component/remository/?func=fileinfo&id=3. After downloading and extracting the compressed package, you get the component and module packages. Install the component and module from the Extensions | Install/Uninstall screen. Once installed, you can administer the YOS amMap component from Components | YOS amMap. This shows the YOS amMap Control Panel, as shown in the following screenshot: YOS amMap Control Panel displays several icons through which you can configure and publish maps. The first thing you should do is to configure the global settings for amMap. In order to do this, click on the Parameters icon in the toolbar. Doing so brings up the dialog box, as shown in the following screenshot: In the Global Configuration section, you can enter a license key if you have purchased the commercial or the pro version of this component. For the free version, this is not needed. In this section, you can also configure the legal extensions of files that can be uploaded through this component, the maximum file size for uploads, the legal image extensions, and the allowed MIME types of all uploads. You can also specify whether the Flash uploader will be used or not. Once you have configured these fields, click on the Save button and return to YOS amMap Control Panel. Adding map files You can see the list of available maps by clicking on the Maps icon on the YOS amMap Control Panel screen or by clicking on Components | amMap | Maps. This shows the Maps Manager screen, as shown in the next screenshot. As you can see, the Maps Manager screen displays the list of available maps. By default, you find the world.swf, continents.swf, and world_with_antartica.swf map files. You will find some extra maps with the amMap bundle. You can also download the original amMap package from http://www.ammap.com/download. After downloading the ZIP package, extract it, and you will find many maps in the maps subfolder. Any map from this folder can be uploaded to the Joomla! site from the Maps Manager screen. Creating a map There are several steps for creating a map using YOS amMap. First we need to upload the package for the map. For example, if we want to display the map of the United States of America, then we need to upload the map template, the map data file, and the map settings file for the United States of America. To do this first upload the map template from the Maps Manager screen. You will find the map template for USA in the ammap/maps folder. Then we need to upload the data and the settings files. For doing so, click on the Upload link on the YOS amMap Control Panel screen. Then, in the Upload amMap screen, which is shown in the next screenshot, type the map's title (United States) in the Title field. Before clicking on the Browse button besides the Package File field, you first add the ammap_data.xml and the ammap_settings.xml files to a single ZIP file, unitedstates.zip. Now, click on the Browse button, and select this unitedstates.zip file. Then click on the Upload File & Install button. Once uploaded successfully, you see this map listed in the YOS amMap Manager screen, as shown in the next screenshot. You get this screen by clicking on the amMaps link on the toolbar. As you can see, the map that we have added is now listed in the YOS amMap Manager screen. However, the map is yet in an unpublished state, and we need to configure the map before publishing it. We need to configure its data and settings files, which are discussed in the following sections. Map data file The different regions of a map are identified by the map data file. This is an XML file and it defines the areas to be displayed on the map. The typical structure of a map data file can be understood by examining ammap_data.xml. The file has many comments that explain its structure. This file looks like as follows: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><map map_file="maps/world.swf" tl_long="-168.49" tl_lat="83.63" br_long="190.3" br_lat="-55.58" zoom_x="0%" zoom_y="0%" zoom="100%"><areas> <area title="AFGHANISTAN" mc_name="AF"></area> <area title="ALAND ISLANDS" mc_name="AX"></area> <area title="BANGLADESH" mc_name="BD"></area> <area title="BHUTAN" mc_name="BT"></area> <area title="CANADA" mc_name="CA"></area> <area title="UNITED ARAB EMIRATES" mc_name="AE"></area> <area title="UNITED KINGDOM" mc_name="GB"></area> <area title="UNITED STATES" mc_name="US"></area> <area title="borders" mc_name="borders" color="#FFFFFF" balloon="false"></area></areas><movies> <movie lat="51.3025" long="-0.0739" file="target" width="10" height="10" color="#CC0000" fixed_size="true" title="build-in movie usage example"></movie> <movie x="59.6667%" y="77.5%" file="icons/pin.swf" title="loaded movie usage example" text_box_width="250" text_box_height="140"> <description> <![CDATA[You can add description text here. This text will appear the user clicks on the movie. this description text can be html-formatted (for a list which html tags are supported, visit <u><a href="http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/8/main/00001459.html">this page</a></u>. You can add descriptions to areas and labels too.]]> </description> </movie></movies><labels> <label x="0" y="50" width="100%" align="center" text_size="16" color="#FFFFFF"> <text><![CDATA[<b>World Map]]></text> <description><![CDATA[]]></description></label></labels><lines> <line long="-0.0739, -74" lat="51.3025, 40.43" arrow="end" width="1" alpha="40"></line> </lines></map> This code is a stripped-down version of the default ammap_data.xml file. Let us examine its structure and try to understand the meaning of each markup: <map> </map>: You define the map's structure using this markup. First, by using the map_file attribute, we declare the map file that should be used to display this map. This markup has some other attributes through which we declare the top and the left offset in longitude and latitude. We can also specify the zooming level using the zoom_x, zoom_y, and zoom attributes. <areas> </areas>: Areas are the regions or countries on a map. These are defined in the map. We only need to define the areas that we want to display. For example, in the sample, we have defined eight countries to be displayed and one straight line. Each area element has several attributes, among which you need to mention mc_name and title. You specify the area's name in mc_name, which is predefined in the map template. The title element will be displayed as the title of that map area. For example, <area mc_name="BD" title="Bangladesh"></area> means the areas marked as BD in the map template will be displayed with the title Bangladesh. In order to specify the mc_name element, you need to follow the map template designer's instructions. <movies> </movies>: Movies are some extra clips that can be displayed as a separate layer on the map. For example, to display the capital of each country, a movie clip could be displayed in the specified latitude and longitude. You can also display some other animations or text using a movie definition. <labels> </labels>: The <labels> markup contains the text to be displayed on the map. You can add any text on a map by defining a label element. To view and edit the map data file, ammap_data.xml, click on the map name on the YOS amMap Manager screen. This opens-up the amMap: [Edit] screen, as shown in the following screenshot: The amMap: [Edit] screen displays several configurations for the map. From the Details section you can change the map name, publish the map, and enable security. From the Design section you can view and edit the data and the settings files. Clicking on Data will show the data file. You can edit the data file from the online editor. As we want to display the map of USA, we will make the following changes on this screen: Select usa.swf in the Maps list. Change the data file as follows: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><map map_file="maps/usa.swf" zoom="100%" zoom_x="7.8%"zoom_y="0.18%"><areas> <area mc_name="AL" title="Alabama"/> <area mc_name="AK" title="Alaska"/> <area mc_name="AZ" title="Arizona"/> <area mc_name="AR" title="Arkansas"/> <area mc_name="CA" title="California"/> <area mc_name="CO" title="Colorado"/> <area mc_name="CT" title="Connecticut"/> <area mc_name="DE" title="Delaware"/> <area mc_name="DC" title="District of Columbia"/> <area mc_name="FL" title="Florida"/> <area mc_name="GA" title="Georgia"/> <area mc_name="HI" title="Hawaii"/> <area mc_name="ID" title="Idaho"/> <area mc_name="IL" title="Illinois"/> <area mc_name="IN" title="Indiana"/> <area mc_name="IA" title="Iowa"/> <area mc_name="KS" title="Kansas"/> <area mc_name="KY" title="Kentucky"/> <area mc_name="LA" title="Louisiana"/> <area mc_name="ME" title="Maine"/> <area mc_name="MD" title="Maryland"/> <area mc_name="MA" title="Massachusetts"/> <area mc_name="MI" title="Michigan"/> <area mc_name="MN" title="Minnesota"/> <area mc_name="MS" title="Mississippi"/> <area mc_name="MO" title="Missouri"/> <area mc_name="MT" title="Montana"/> <area mc_name="NE" title="Nebraska"/> <area mc_name="NV" title="Nevada"/> <area mc_name="NH" title="New Hampshire"/> <area mc_name="NJ" title="New Jersey"/> <area mc_name="NM" title="New Mexico"/> <area mc_name="NY" title="New York"/> <area mc_name="NC" title="North Carolina"/> <area mc_name="ND" title="North Dakota"/> <area mc_name="OH" title="Ohio"/> <area mc_name="OK" title="Oklahoma"/> <area mc_name="OR" title="Oregon"/> <area mc_name="PA" title="Pennsylvania"/> <area mc_name="RI" title="Rhode Island"/> <area mc_name="SC" title="South Carolina"/> <area mc_name="SD" title="South Dakota"/> <area mc_name="TN" title="Tennessee"/> <area mc_name="TX" title="Texas"/> <area mc_name="UT" title="Utah"/> <area mc_name="VT" title="Vermont"/> <area mc_name="VA" title="Virginia"/> <area mc_name="WA" title="Washington"/> <area mc_name="WV" title="West Virginia"/> <area mc_name="WI" title="Wisconsin"/><area mc_name="WY" title="Wyoming"/></areas><labels> <label x="0" y="60" width="100%" color="#FFFFFF" text_size="18"> <text>Map of the United States of America</text> </label></labels></map> As you can see, we have defined regions (states) on the map of USA, and towards the end of the file, we have added a label for the map. Select Yes for the Published field in the Details section. When you are done making these changes click on the Save button to save these changes. Now we will look into the map settings file. Map data files for countries are available with the amMap package. Thus, if you download amMap 2.5.1, you will get the map settings files for different countries. For example, the map data file for USA will be in the amMap_2.5.1/examples/_countries/usa folder.  

Understanding DotNetNuke roles and role groups We just discussed how to add a user to your site. But are all users created equal? To understand how users are allowed to interact with the portal, we will need to take a look at what a role is and how it factors into the portal. There are plenty of real-world examples of roles we can look at. A police station, for example, can have sergeants, patrol cops, and detectives, and with each position come different responsibilities and privileges. In a police station, there are multiple people filling those positions (roles) with each of those belonging to the same position (role) sharing the same set of responsibilities and privileges. Roles in our portal work the same way. Roles are set up to divide the responsibilities needed to run your portal, as well as to provide different content to different groups of users of your portal. We want our portal to be easy for the administrators to manage. To do this, we will need to settle on the different user roles needed for our site. To determine this, we first need to decide on the different types of users who will access the portal. We will detail these user types in the following list: Administrator: The administrators will have very high security. They will be able to modify, delete, or move anything on the site. They will be able to add and delete users and control all security settings. (This role comes built-in with DotNetNuke.) The default administrator account is created during the creation of the portal. Home Page Admin: The home page admins will have the ability to modify only the information on the home page. They will be responsible for changing what users see when they first access your site. (We will be adding this role.) Forum Admin: The forum moderators will have the ability to monitor and modify posts in your forum. They will have the ability to approve or disapprove messages posted. (We will be adding this role.) Registered User: The registered users will be able to post messages in the forum and be able to access sections of the site set aside for registered users only. (This role comes built into DotNetNuke; however, we would need to provide the proper permissions to this role to perform the mentioned tasks.) Unauthenticated User: The unauthenticated user is the most basic of all the user types. Any person browsing your site will fall under this category, until they have successfully logged in to the site. This user type will be able to browse certain sections of your portal, but will be restricted from posting in the forum and will not be allowed in the Registered Users Only section. (This role comes built into DotNetNuke; however, we would need to provide the proper permissions to this role to perform the mentioned tasks.) Once you formulate the different user roles that will access the site, you will need to re strict users' access. For example, we only want the Home Page Admin to be able to edit items on the home page. To accomplish this, DotNetNuke uses role-based security. Role-based security allows you to give access to portions of your website based on what role the user belongs to. User-based security is also available per page or content section of the portal. However, the benefit of using a role-based security method is that you only have to define the access privileges for a role once. Then you just need to add users to that role and they will possess the privileges that the role defines. The following diagram gives you an idea of how this works: Looking at the diagram, we notice two things: Users can be assigned to more than one role More than one user can be assigned to a single role This gives us great flexibility when deciding on the authorization that users will possess in our portal. To create the roles we have detailed, sign in with an administrator account, and select ADMIN | Security Roles on the main menu or click the Roles link in the Common Tasks section of the control panel. This is available on the top of every DNN page for authorized users. You might need to click the double down arrows on the top-right of the page to maximize the panel. The Security Roles page appears as shown in the following screenshot: Notice that DotNetNuke comes with three roles already built into the system: the Administrators role (which we have been using), the Registered Users role, and the Subscribers role. Before we jump right into creating the role, let us first discuss the role group feature of DotNetNuke, as we will be using this feature when we create our roles. A role group is a collection of roles used, mainly, in large sites with a large number of roles, as a way of managing the roles more effectively. For the site we are building, the benefit of using role groups will be minimal. However, in order to demonstrate how to use them, we will create one for our administrative roles. While on the Security Roles page, click the Add New Role Group link located below the list of roles. This will present us with the Edit Role Group page containing two form fields. Once these fields are filled out, click the Update link at the bottom of this page. A Filer By Role Group drop-down list should now be displayed above the list of roles on the Security Roles page. If you select the Administrative Roles group that we just created, two noticeable things happen on this page. Firstly, the list of roles become empty as no roles are currently assigned to this role group. Secondly, an edit (pencil) icon and a delete (red cross X) icon now appear next to the drop-down list. These icons can be used to update or remove any custom role groups that exist on the site. These red 'X' icons are standard icons used throughout DotNetNuke to represent the ability to delete/remove items. Now that we have created our role group, we want to create the role for Home Page Admin. To do this, you again have two choices. Either select Add New Role from the dropdown in the upper left, or click on the Add New Role link. This will bring up the Edit Security Roles page, as shown in the next screenshot. We will use this page to create the Home Page Admin role that we need. The Basic Settings shown in the screenshot are as follows: Role Name: Make the name of your role short, but descriptive. The name should attempt to convey its purpose. Description: Here you may detail the responsibilities of the role. Role Group: Set this field to the Administrative Roles group that we created earlier. Public Role: Checking this will give registered users of your site the ability to sign up for this role themselves. We will be creating a Newsletter role and will demonstrate how this works when it is created. Auto Assignment: If this is checked, users will automatically be assigned to this role as soon as they register for your portal. CAUTION Do not check the Public Role and Auto Assignment checkboxes, unless you are sure. Checking these options would allow all users of the site to become members of the associated role, which would grant them the privileges assigned to the role. As we want to decide who will be able to modify our home page, we will leave both of these unchecked. To save the settings, click on the Update link. The Advanced Settings section allows you to set up a fee for certain security roles. We will not be configuring any of these settings for this particular exercise. However, we will briefly discuss how these settings can be used in Assigning security roles to users section. Now to complete the roles that we will require for Coffee Connections, we will add two more security roles The first role will be called Newsletter. We will be using this role to allow users to sign up for the newsletter we will be hosting at the Coffee Connections site. Set up the security role with the following information: Role Name: Newsletter Description: Allows users to register for the Coffee Connections Newsletter Role Group: Leave this as the default < Global Roles > as it is not going to be used to grant administrative rights to its members Public Role: Yes (checked) Auto Assignment: No (unchecked) Click on the Update link to save this role. The second role will be called Forum Admin. We will be using this role to administer the forums at the Coffee Connections site. Set up the security role with the following information: Role Name: Forum Admin Description: Allows user to administer Coffee Connections Forum Role Group: Administrative Roles Public Role: No (unchecked) Auto Assignment: No (unchecked)

Let's get started. CallerID Lookup Sources Caller ID lookup sources supplement the caller ID name information that is sent by most telephone companies. A caller ID lookup source contains a list of phone numbers matched with names. When FreePBX receives a call, it can query a lookup source with the number of the caller. If the caller is on the lookup source's list, a name is returned that will be sent along with the call wherever the call gets routed to. The name will be visible on a phone's caller ID display (if the phone supports caller ID), and is also visible in the FreePBX call detail records. In order to set up a caller ID lookup source, click on the CallerID Lookup Sources link under the Inbound Call Control section of the navigation menu on the left side of the FreePBX interface as shown in the following screenshot: The Add Source screen has three common configuration options: Source Description Source type Cache results Source Description is used to identify this lookup source when it is being selected as a caller ID lookup source during the configuration of an inbound route. Source type is used to select the method that this source will use to obtain caller ID name information. FreePBX allows a lookup source to use one of the following methods: ENUM: FreePBX will use whichever ENUM servers are configured in /etc/asterisk/enum.conf to return caller ID name information. By default, this file contains the e164.arpa and e164.org zones for lookups. All ENUM servers in the enum.conf file will be queried. HTTP: FreePBX will query a web service for caller ID name information using the HTTP protocol. A lookup source that uses HTTP to query for information can use services such as Google Phonebook or online versions of the white/yellow pages to return caller ID names. When HTTP is selected as the source type, six additional options will appear for configuration. These options are discussed in the HTTP source type section. MySQL: FreePBX will connect to a MySQL database to query for caller ID name information. Usually, this will be a database belonging to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software package in which all customer information is stored. When MySQL is selected as the Source type, five additional options will appear for configuration. These options are discussed later in the MySQL source type section. SugarCRM: As of FreePBX version 2.5.1, this option is not yet implemented. In the future, this Source type option will allow FreePBX to connect to the database used by the SugarCRM software package to query for caller ID name information. If the Cache results checkbox is selected, then when a lookup source returns results they will be cached in the local AstDB database for quicker retrieval the next time the same number is looked up. Note that values cached in the AstDB will persist past a restart of Asterisk and a reboot of the PBX. Once a caller ID name has been cached, FreePBX will always return that name even if the name in the lookup source changes. Caching must be disabled for a new caller ID name to be returned from the lookup source. Once all configuration options have been filled out, click on the Submit Changes button followed by the orange-colored Apply Configuration Changes bar to make the new lookup source available to inbound routes. Now that we have an available lookup source, we can configure an inbound route to use this source to set caller ID information. Click on the Inbound Routes link under the Inbound Call Control section of the navigation menu on the left side of the FreePBX interface as shown in the following screenshot: Click the name of the inbound route that will use the new lookup source in the menu on the right side of the page (in this example, DID 5551234567) as shown in the following screenshot: Scroll down the page to the CID Lookup Source section. Select the name of the new lookup source from the Source drop-down menu: Click on the Submit button at the bottom of the page, followed by the orange-colored Apply Configuration Changes bar at the top of the page. Calls that are routing using this inbound route will now query our new lookup source for caller ID name information.