How-To Tutorials - Web Development

In the 3rd part of this article series, we learnt about: Added a Tabbed Pane component to your SwingAndTweet application, to show your own timeline on one tab and your friend’s timeline on another tab Used a JScrollPane component to add vertical and horizontal scrollbars to your friends’ timeline list Used the getFriendsTimeline() method from the Twitter4J API to get the 20 most recent tweets from your friend’s timeline Applied font styles to your JLabel components via the Font class Added a black border to separate each individual tweet by using the BorderFactory and Color classes Added the date and time of creation of each individual tweet by using the getCreatedAt() method from the twitter4j.Status interface, along with the Date class. All those things, we learnt in the third part of the article series were a big improvement for our Twitter client, but wouldn’t it be cool if you could click on the URL links from your friends’ time line and then a web browser window would open automatically to show you the related webpage? Well, after reading this part of the article series, you’ll be able to integrate this functionality into your own Twitter client among other things. Here are the links to the earlier articles of this article series: Read Build your own Application to access Twitter using Java and NetBeans: Part 1 Read Build your own Application to access Twitter using Java and NetBeans: Part 2 Read Build your own Application to access Twitter using Java and NetBeans: Part 3 Using a JEditorPane component Till now, we’ve been working with JPanel objects to show your Twitter information inside the JTabbedPane component. But as you can see from your friends’ tweets, the URL links that show up aren’t clickable. And how can we make them clickable? Well, fortunately for us there’s a Swing component called JEditorPane that will let us use HTML markup, so the URL hyperlinks will show up as if you were on a web page. Cool, huh? Now let’s start with the dirty job… Open your NetBeans IDE along with your SwingAndTweet project, and make sure you’re in the Source View. Scroll up to the import declarations section and type import javax.swing.JEditorPane; right below the last import declaration, so your code looks as shown below: Now scroll down to the last line of code, JLabel statusUser;, and type JEditorPane statusPane; just below that line, as shown in the following screenshot: The next step is to add statusPane to the JTabbedPane1 component in your application. Scroll through the code until you locate the //code for the Friends timelineline and the try-block code below that line; then type the following code block just above the for statement: String paneContent = new String();statusPane = new JEditorPane();statusPane.setContentType("text/html");statusPane.setEditable(false); The following screenshot shows how your code must look like after inserting the above block of code (the red square indicates the lines you must add): Now scroll down through the code inside the for statement and type paneContent = paneContent + statusUser.getText() + "<br>" + statusText.getText() + "<hr>"; right after the jPanel1.add(individualStatus); line, as shown below: Then add the following two lines of code after the closing brace of the try block: statusPane.setText(paneContent);jTabbedPane1.add("Friends - Enhanced", statusPane); The following screenshot shows how your code must look like after the insertion: Run your application and log into your Twitter account. A new tab will appear in your Twitter client, and if you click on it you’ll see your friends’ latest tweets, as in the following screenshot: If you take a good look at the screen, you’ll notice the new tab you added with the JEditorPane component doesn’t show a vertical scroll bar so you can scroll up and down to see the complete list. That’s pretty easy to fix: First add the import javax.swing.JScrollPane; line to the import declarations section and then replace the jTabbedPane1.add("Friends - Enhanced", statusPane); line you added on step 9 with the following lines: JScrollPane editorScrollPane = new JScrollPane(statusPane, JScrollPane.VERTICAL_SCROLLBAR_AS_NEEDED, // vertical bar policy JScrollPane.HORIZONTAL_SCROLLBAR_NEVER ); // horizontal bar policyjTabbedPane1.add("Friends - Enhanced", editorScrollPane); Your code should now look like this: Run your Twitter application again and this time you’ll see the vertical scrollbar: Let’s stop for a while to review our progress so far. In the first step above the exercise, you added an import declaration to tell the Java compiler that we need to use an object from the JEditorPane class. In step 3, you added a JEditorPane object called statusPane to your application. This object acts as a container for your friends’ tweets. And in case you’re wondering why we didn’t use a regular JPanel object, just remember that we want to make the URL links in your friends’ tweets clickable, so when you click on one of them, a web browser window will pop up to show you the web page associated to that hyperlink. Now let’s get back to our exercise. In step 4, you added four lines to your application’s code. The first line: String paneContent = new String(); creates a String variable called paneContent to store the username and text of each individual tweet from your friends’ timeline. The next three lines: statusPane = new JEditorPane();statusPane.setContentType("text/html");statusPane.setEditable(false); create a JEditorPane object called statusPane, set its content type to text/html so we can include HTML markup and make the statusPane non-editable, so nothing gets messed up when showing your friends’ timeline. Now that we have the statusPane ready to roll, we need to fill it up with the information related to each individual tweet from your friends. That’s why we need the paneContent variable. In step 6, you inserted the following line: paneContent = paneContent + statusUser.getText() + "<br>" + statusText.getText() + "<hr>"; inside the for block to add the username and the text of each individual tweet to the paneContent variable. The <br> HTML tag inserts a line break so the username appears in one line and the text of each tweet appears in another line. The <hr> HTML tag inserts a horizontal line to separate one tweet from the other. Once the for loop ends, we need to add the information from the paneContent variable to the JEditorPane object called statusPane. That’s why in step 7, you added the following line: statusPane.setText(paneContent); and then the jTabbedPane1.add("Friends - Enhanced", statusPane); line creates a new tab in the jTabbedPane1 component and adds the statusPane component to it, so you can see the friends timeline with HTML markup. In step 10, you learned how to create a JScrollPane object called editorScrollPane to add scrollbars to your statusPane component and integrate them into the jTabbedPane1 container. In this example, the JScrollPane constructor requires arguments: the statusPane component, the vertical scrollbar policy and the horizontal scrollbar policy. There are three options you can choose for your vertical and horizontal scrollbars: show them as needed, never show them or always show them. In this specific case, we need the vertical scrollbar to show up as needed, in case the list of your friends’ tweets doesn’t fit the screen, so we use the JScrollPane.VERTICAL_SCROLLBAR_AS_NEEDED policy. And since we don’t need the horizontal bar to show up because the statusPane component can adjust its horizontal size to fit your application’s window, we use the JScrollPane.HORIZONTAL_SCROLLBAR_NEVER policy. The last line of code from step 10 adds the editorScrollPane component to the jTabbedPane1 container instead of adding the statusPane component directly, because now the JEditorPane component is contained within the JScrollPane component. Now let’s see how to convert the URL links to real hyperlinks.

There are many topics to explore in this article, so let's make a start with mathematical PowerPoint presentations. PowerPoint and Mathematics We have already seen how we can use the Microsoft Equation Editor to include mathematics notation in Microsoft Word documents (we copied them from the document into our Moodle course). Microsoft PowerPoint also includes the Equation Editor, and we can use this facility to create some quite elegant online explanations of difficult mathematical ideas. Here is a quick recap (using Microsoft PowerPoint instead of Microsoft Word): Click the slide to which you want to add an equation. On the Insert menu, click Object. In the Object type list, click Microsoft Equation 3.0 (if Microsoft Equation 3.0 is not listed, then you will need to install it. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/228569). In the Equation Editor, use the buttons and menus to type your equation. To return to Microsoft PowerPoint, on the File menu in Equation Editor, click Exit. The equation will now be included on your slide. Add a special Equation Editor button to any Microsoft Office application toolbar. For example in Office 2003, in the View menu, point to Toolbars, and then click Customize. Click the Commands tab, and in the Categories list, click Insert. In the Commands box, click Equation Editor, and then drag it from the Commands box to a gray area within any toolbar. Then click Close. Click on the new toolbar button to install and display the Equation Editor. Quickly crafting a Pythagorean PowerPoint I'm guessing you're going to be fairly familiar with PowerPoint, so let's make a start by creating a basic presentation, showing our students how they can transpose/rearrange an equation. I'm going to be showing my students how they can find the missing length in a right-angled triangle. Note that I'm an Office 2003 user running Windows Vista. If you aren't using the same version of Office or the same operating system as me, then as you follow my examples your screen might look different from mine: The first step is to create a new presentation. For the first page of this presentation, I've added a new slide and used the Title, Text, and Content layout: I've searched for a Creative Commons image of a ladder on Flickr and drawn a schematic using Microsoft PowerPoint's built-in drawing tools. Here is the completed slide: In the next slides, let's demonstrate how we can turn the ladder problem into a Pythagorean Theorem/algebra problem (without being too scary about the algebra). Let's animate the slide to allow the students to recall the theorem: Now, allow the students to check if they got it right. Right-click on an object and select Custom Animation… to make the presentation a little more interactive: Now I've recalled the Pythagorean Theorem, which I need to relate back to the ladder problem. Again, I've used animations to make the slide interactive: I'm going to complete the presentation by giving my students a little guidance on algebraic transposition and then that's it—I'm done! I hope you'll agree that with some simple custom animations we've made this PowerPoint far more engaging and entertaining than it would otherwise be. Want to avoid creating a truly boring PowerPoint presentation? Navigate your browser to http://www.youtube.com and search for Don McMillan's video on how NOT to use PowerPoint! Uploading to Moodle I could simply upload the PowerPoint as is to my course files area, but I'm a bit worried that without my describing what's going on in the presentation, it isn't going to make a lot of sense to my students. To overcome this problem, I'm going to record an audio commentary. You can insert sound directly into your slides either from the main menu (Insert) or via the Insert tab in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007's ribbon. Providing an audio commentary The presentation I crafted in the previous section is fine on its own, and I do use something similar as part of my face-to-face teaching. But I want my students to be able to study this example in their own time and, to that end, I would like to enhance it with an audio commentary. There are three basic ways I can achieve this (aside from inserting audio into each slide). Each has its own advantages and disadvantages: Record a separate audio track and allow the students to listen to the audio following the presentation at their own pace—almost like a read-along story Upload the presentation to SlideShare and use SlideShare's built-in audio recording tools to narrate the PowerPoint Record a screencast. Either upload it directly to our Moodle course or to a content sharing website (that is, YouTube or TeacherTube) In the following sections we'll investigate each option in turn. Recording a separate narration—using Audacity to narrate a slideshow A great way to record a narration is by using Audacity. Audacity is an extremely popular, free recording and audio editing tool. Download the latest version from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/. Once you have Audacity installed, it is very easy to use. Let's record a narration: The first task, before we begin recording, is to write a script. There's nothing worse than listening to a badly prepared or rambling presentation, so let's make sure it's tightly scripted: When you are ready to begin recording your commentary, press Audacity's "record" button: When you are finished recording, press the "stop" button. Don't worry about making mistakes or there being pregnant pauses because we can easily edit these out in the next step. When you have finished, the recording is displayed: Audacity is loaded with many great audio editing features, so by way of an example, I'm going to pick just one: Fade Out. Use the selection tool to select the final segment of your recording: From the main menu, select Effect | Fade Out. Try experimenting with some of the other audio options that are available: When you are happy with your recording, you'll need to save it. From the main menu, select File | Export as MP3…. Choose a suitable filename and location and click on the Save button. Complete the ID3 Tag dialog: Hit the OK button and Audacity creates your new MP3 file. That's it. We're done! Recording a narration—recap When my PowerPoint is included in my Moodle course, it will be viewed by students who won't have the benefit (or curse) of my commentary when I am giving my face-to-face teaching. It would be great if we could also include an audio commentary so that students can follow the presentation in their own time, at their own pace. To that end we've just used the free audio recording and editing tool, Audacity, to create an audio commentary for our PowerPoint presentation.

Microsoft Office 2003 add-ins For Microsoft Windows users, a natural way of working with the files is by using the Microsoft Office tools. It would be a tedious job for Content Managers to have to search and locate the documents using an Alfresco web client, copy them onto their local desktop, edit them, upload them to Alfresco, and secure them. How about having all of the features mentioned above in your choice of editor itself? Alfresco provides Office add-ins for MS Word 2003, MS Excel 2003, and MS PowerPoint 2003, to allow them to manage the content directly from those tools. This improves the productivity of Content Managers. Support for Microsoft Office 2007 Although the Alfresco add-ins were developed for Microsoft Office 2003, they are also compatible with Microsoft Office 2007. If you are using Microsoft Office 2007 on Windows Vista, then the add-in is not effective, as it provides read-only access to the repository. Unfortunately, this is a known problem with Vista, as Microsoft has rewritten the WebDAV parts of Vista. You may consider the workarounds that are provided at the following URL: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2007/10/19/known-issue-office-2007-on-windows-vista-prompts-for-user-credentials-when-opening-documents-in-a-sharepoint-2007-site.aspx Installation Download the Alfresco office add-ins (ZIP file) from the source forge web site, by visiting the following URL: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=143373&package_id=237030 An individual installer (for Microsoft Word, Excel, and Power Point), as well as a combined installer, is available for download. Select an appropriate add-into download. Unzip the ZIP file and run the Setup.exe file contained within it. The set-up program will download the components that are needed, from the Microsoft web site. Once the set-up is complete, you can open the Office tool and use the add-in. For example, for MS Word 2003, you will notice a new button named Alfresco. For MS Word 2007, you will notice the add-in, as shown in the following screenshot: Configuration Click on the Alfresco button to open the add-in window. You need to configure the add-in, by clicking on the link provided at the bottom of the add-in window. Provide the URL details for the web client, WebDAV, and CIFS, as shown in the upcoming screenshot. No matter how you access the repository, you will still have to go through Alfresco's security rules. Provide the Userid and password for the purpose of authentication. The access to the Alfresco repository will be based on the authorization of the user. Click on the Save Settings button to go the main screen. If you have more than one Alfresco server to connect to, then you might have to manually change the settings as needed. Currently, there is no facility for storing the settings for more than one Alfresco server. Features of MS Word add-in The Alfresco add-in allows you to carry out the following activities directly from Microsoft Word. Refer to the following screenshot for more details: My Alfresco: Displays the My Alfresco dashlets Browse Spaces: Browses the entire repository for spaces and files. Search: Searches the repository for keywords. View Details: Views the details of the selected document. Workflow: Starts workflow for the active document. Tags: Allows you to add tags to the document. Transform to PDF: Transforms the selected MS Word document into PDF. Insert into Word: Inserts the selected document into Microsoft Word for editing. Save to Alfresco: Saves the current document to the current space. If the document has not been given a filename yet, then a pop-up panel will prompt you for one. Editing a file in Word To edit a file in Microsoft Word, double-click on the file name. The file is opened directly for editing. The MS Word file is locked for others, while it is being edited by you, as shown in the upcoming screenshot. You can perform all of the Alfresco repository activities, such as adding new tags and initiating a workflow approval process. Saving the file in Microsoft Word will directly save it in the Alfresco repository. If auto version is enabled, then it will be versioned automatically. When you close the file in MS Word, or exit from MS Word, the file will be unlocked in the repository. Recovering deleted content When you delete an item (either content or space) in Alfresco, the item is not deleted from the server, but is moved to a temporary store called Archive Space Store. This gives you a chance to recover items that were deleted. Deleted items will be kept in the temporary store forever, until you decide to either recover or purge them. These features are available to administrators through the Manage Deleted Items action. To test these features, log in as an administrator, create a couple of dummy files in any space, and then delete them. Click on the User Profile Icon  option, located above the menu item, and then click on the Manage Deleted Items button. The Manage Deleted Items pane appears, as shown in the following screenshot: You can list all of the deleted content by clicking on the Show All button, as highlighted in the preceding screenshot. You can also search for deleted items by name, by content, by date, or by the person who deleted it, by using the search options provided. Select the item that you previously deleted, and then click on the Recover Listed Items icon, as shown in the preceding screenshot. You will notice that the item is recovered to the original space. When an item is recovered, it is removed from the archive space store and moved to the original space from which it was deleted. Purged items are deleted forever and cannot be recovered. Because the deleted items will otherwise be in the temporary store forever, it is a good practice to purge them periodically. It is also recommended that you take regular backups of your data.  

The Problem We need to design and implement a role-based access control (RBAC) system, demonstrate its use, and ensure that the system can provide: a simple data structure a flexible code to provide a usable RBAC interface efficiency so that RBAC avoids heavy overheads Discussion and Considerations Computer systems have long needed controls on access. Early software commonly fell into the category that became known as access control lists (ACL). But these were typically applied at a fairly low level in systems, and referred to basic computer operations. Further development brought software designed to tackle more general issues, such as control of confidential documents. Much work was done on discretionary access control (DAC), and mandatory access control (MAC). A good deal of academic research has been devoted to the whole question of access controls. The culmination of this work is that the model most widely favored is the role-based access control system, such a mouthful that the acronym RBAC is used hereafter. Now although the academic analysis can be abstruse, we need a practical solution to the problem of managing access to services on a website. Fortunately, rather like the relational database, the concepts of RBAC are simple enough. RBAC involves some basic entities. Unfortunately, terminologies are not always consistent, so let us keep close to the mainstream, and define some that will be used to implement our solution: Subject: A subject is something that is controlled. It could be a whole web page, but might well be something much more specific such as a folder in a file repository system. This example points to the fact that a subject can often be split into two elements, a type, and an identifier. So the folders of a file repository count as a type of subject, and each individual folder has some kind of identifier. Action: An action arises because we typically need to do more than simply allow or deny access to RBAC subjects. In our example, we may place different restrictions on uploading files to a folder and downloading files from the folder. So our actions might therefore include 'upload', and 'download'. Accessor: The simplest example of an accessor is a user. The accessor is someone or something who wants to perform an action. It is unduly restrictive to assume that accessors are always users. We might want to consider other computer systems as accessors, or an accessor might be a particular piece of software. Accessors are like subjects in splitting into two parts. The first part is the kind of accessor, with website users being the most common kind. The second part is an identifier for the specific accessor, which might be a user identifying number. Permission: The combination of a subject and an action is a permission. So, for example, being able to download files from a particular folder in a file repository would be a permission. Assignment: In RBAC there is never a direct link between an accessor and permission to perform an action on a subject. Instead, accessors are allocated one or more roles. The linking of an accessor and role is an assignment. Role: A role is the bearer of permissions and is similar to the notion of a group. It is roles that are granted one or more permissions. It is easy to see that we can control what can be done by allocating roles to users, and then checking to see if any of a user's roles has a particular permission. Moreover, we can generalize this beyond users to other types of accessor as the need arises. The model built so far is known in the academic literature as RBAC0. Adding Hierarchy As RBAC can operate at a much more general level than ACL, it will often happen that one role embraces another. Suppose we think of the example of a hospital, the role of consultant might include the role of doctor. Not everyone who has the role of doctor would have the role of consultant. But all consultants are doctors. At present, Aliro implements hierarchy purely for backwards compatibility with the Mambo, and Joomla! schemes, where there is a strict hierarchy of roles for ACL. The ability to extend hierarchy more generally is feasible, given the Aliro implementation, and may be added at some point. The model with the addition of role hierarchies is known as RBAC1. Adding Constraints In general data processing, situations arise where RBAC is expected to implement constraints on the allocation of roles. A typical example would be that the same person is not permitted to have both purchasing and account manager roles. Restrictions of this kind derive from fairly obvious principles to limit scope for fraud. While constraints can be powerful additions to RBAC, they do not often arise in web applications, so Aliro does not presently provide any capability for constraints. The option is not precluded, since constraints are typically grafted on top of an RBAC system that does not have them. Adding constraints to the basic RBAC0 model creates an RBAC2 model, and if both hierarchy and constraints are provided, the model is called RBAC3. Avoiding Unnecessary Restrictions When it comes to design an implementation, it would be a pity to create obstacles that will be troublesome later. To achieve maximum flexibility, few restrictions are placed on the information that is stored by the RBAC system. Subjects and accessors have both types, and identifiers. The types can be strings, and there is no need for the RBAC system to limit what can be used in this respect. A moderate limitation on length is not unduly restrictive. It is up to the wider CMS to decide, for example, what kinds of subjects are needed. Our example for this article is the file repository, and the subjects it needs are known to the designer of the repository. All requests to the RBAC system from the file repository will take account of this knowledge. Identifiers will often be simple numbers, probably derived from an auto-increment primary key in the database. But it would be unduly restrictive to insist that identifiers must be numbers. It may be that control is needed over subjects that cannot be identified by a number. Maybe the subject can only be identified by a non-numeric key such as a URI, or maybe it needs more than one field to pick it out. For these reasons, it is better to implement the RBAC system with the identifiers as strings, possibly with quite generous length constraints. That way, the designers of software that makes use of the RBAC system have the maximum opportunity to construct identifiers that work in a particular context. Any number of schemes can be imagined that will combine multiple fields into a string; after all, the only thing we will do with the identifier in the RBAC system is to test for equality. Provided identifiers are unique, their precise structure does not matter. The only point to watch is making sure that whatever the original identifier may be, it is consistently converted into a string. Actions can be simple strings, since they are merely arbitrary labels. Again, their meaning is important only within the area that is applying RBAC, so the actual RBAC system does not need to impose any restrictions. Length need not be especially large. Roles are similar, although systems sometimes include a table of roles because extra information is held, such as a description of the role. But since this is not really a requirement of RBAC, the system built here will not demand descriptions for roles, and will permit a role to be any arbitrary string. While descriptions can be useful, it is easy to provide them as an optional extra. Avoiding making them a requirement keeps the system as flexible as possible, and makes it much easier to create roles on the fly, something that will often be needed. Some Special Roles Handling access controls can be made easier and more efficient by inventing some roles that have their own special properties. Aliro uses three of these: visitor, registered, and nobody. Everyone who comes to the site is counted as a visitor, and is therefore implicitly given the role visitor. If a right is granted to this role, it is assumed that it is granted to everybody. After all, it is illogical to give a right to a visitor, and deny it to a user who has logged in, since the user could gain the access right just by logging out. For the sake of efficient implementation of the visitor role, two things are done. One is that nothing is stored to associate particular users with the role, since everyone has it automatically. Second, since most sites offer quite a lot of access to visitors prior to login, the visitor role is given access to anything that has not been connected with some more specific role. This means, again, that nothing needs to be stored in relation to the visitor role. Almost as extensive is the role registered, which is automatically applied to anyone who has logged in, but excludes visitors who have not logged in. Again, nothing is stored to associate users with the role, since it applies to anyone who identifies themselves as a registered user. But in this case, rights can be granted to the registered role. Rather like the visitor role, logic dictates that if access is granted to all registered users, any more specific rights are redundant, and can be ignored. Finally, the role of "nobody" is useful because of the principle that where no specific access has been granted, a resource is available to everyone. Where all access is to be blocked, then access can be granted to "nobody" and no user is permitted to be "nobody". In fact, we can now see that no user can be allocated to any of the special roles since they are always linked to them automatically or not at all. Implementation Efficiency Clearly an RBAC system may have to handle a lot of data. More significantly, it may need to deal with a lot of requests in a short time. A page of output will often consist of multiple elements, any or all of which may involve decisions on access. A two pronged approach can be taken to this problem, using two different kinds of cache. Some RBAC data is general in nature, an obvious example being the role hierarchy. This applies equally to everyone, and is a relatively small amount of data. Information of this kind can be cached in the file system so as to be available to every request. Much RBAC information is linked to the particular user. If all such data were to be stored in the standard cache, it is likely that the cache would grow very large, with much of the data irrelevant to any particular request. A better approach is to store RBAC data that is specific to the user as session data. That way, it will be available for every request by the same user, but will not be cluttered up with data for other users. Since Aliro ensures that there is a live session for every user, including visitors who have not yet logged in, and also preserves the session data at login, this is a feasible approach. Where are the Real Difficulties? Maybe you think we already have enough problems to solve without looking for others? The sad fact is that we have not yet even considered the most difficult one! In my experience, the real difficulties arise in trying to design a user interface to deal with actual control requirements. The example used in this article is relatively simple. Controlling what users can do in a file repository extension does not immediately introduce much complexity. But this apparently simple situation is easily made more complex by the kind of requests that are often made for a more advanced repository. In the simple case, all we have to worry about is that we have control over areas of the repository, indicating who can upload, who can download, and who can edit the files. Those are the requirements that are covered by the examples below. Going beyond that, though, consider a situation that is often discussed as a possible requirement. The repository is extended so that some users have their own area, and can do what they like within it. A simple consequence of this is that we need to be able to grant those users the ability to create new folders in the file repository, as well as to upload and edit files in the existing folders. So far so good! But this scenario also introduces the idea that we may want the user who owns an area of the repository to be able to have control over certain areas, which other users may have access to. Now we need the additional ability to control which users have the right to give access to certain parts of the repository. If we want to go even further, we can raise the issue of whether a user in this position would be able to delegate the granting of access in their area to other users, so as to achieve a complete hierarchy of control. Handling the technical requirements here is not too difficult. What is difficult is designing user interfaces to deal with all the possibilities without creating an explosion of complexity. For an individual case it is feasible to find a solution. An attempt to create a general solution would probably result in a problem that would be extremely hard to solve. Summary In this part of the article we had a look at the highly flexible role-based access control system. We established the principles using standard notions of RBAC. We discussed about the specific details, such as the way accessors and subjects are identified are adapted to the particular situation of a CMS framework. In part 2 of the article, we will look at the database implementation and the code for administering RBAC. We will also consider in outline how questions about access can be answered.  

  jQuery Plugin Development Beginner's Guide Build powerful, interactive plugins to implement jQuery in the best way possible Utilize jQuery's plugin framework to create a wide range of useful jQuery plugins from scratch Understand development patterns and best practices and move up the ladder to master plugin development Discover the ins and outs of some of the most popular jQuery plugins in action A Beginner's Guide packed with examples and step-by-step instructions to quickly get your hands dirty in developing high quality jQuery plugins         Read more about this book       (For more resources on jQuery, see here.) Before we get started, there is another little thing worth mentioning: provide many different opportunities to introduce new concepts and ideas, even while keeping the complexity of the whole plugin at a minimum. We can now go on to create our plugin, starting with basic functionalities, and subsequently adjusting its goals. We will add new, improved functionalities that, however, do not make the whole code look too difficult to understand—even after some time or for someone who's just starting out with jQuery. Tooltip plugins in general A lot has been said about tooltip plugins, but it's worth repeating the most important points with particular regard to the way tooltips are supposed to work, and how we want our tooltip to behave. First of all, we might want to get an idea of what tooltips look like and a sample of what we will accomplish by the end of this article. Here is an example: Also, with some more work and proper application of effects, images, and other relatively advanced techniques, we can also obtain something more complex and nicer looking, thus giving the user the chance to specify the style and behavior for the tooltip, as follows: The idea is actually very simple. The elements we have selected will trigger an event every time we hover the mouse pointer over them. The tooltip will then pop out, right at the mouse cursor position, retrieving the text portion from the title attribute of the said element. Finally, whenever we move the mouse over the same element, the plugin will move and follow the mouse cursor until it goes off the boundaries of the element. Positioning the tooltip The first problem we have to face is, of course, how to make the tooltip appear in the right position. It would be no trouble at all if we just had to make some text, image, or anything else show up. We've done it many times and it's no problem at all—just make their positioning absolute and set the right top and side distances. However, we need to take into account the fact that we don't know exactly where the mouse cursor might be and, as such, we need to calculate distances based upon the mouse cursor position itself. So, how can we do it? It's simple enough; we can use some of the JavaScript event properties to obtain the position. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer always tries to put a spoke in our wheel. In fact, the magnificent browser does not (according to this table, which is quite accurate: http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/w3c_cssom.html#mousepos) support pageX and pageY, which would normally return the mouse coordinates relative to the document. So we need to think about a workaround for Internet Explorer, as jQuery (from version 1.0.4 onwards) does not normalize some of the event properties according to W3C standards (http://api.jquery.com/category/events/event-object/). The following diagram (also provided in the " target="_blank">code bundle) should clarify what the visible viewport is (that is, the browser window—the red box): Whenever we scroll down, different parts of the document (blue) are shown through the browser window and hidden due to space constraints. The scroll height (green) is the part of the document currently not displayed. Custom jQuery selectors Suppose we have a page with some text written in, which also contains a few links to both internal pages (that is, pages on the same server) and external websites. We are presented with different choices in terms of which elements to apply the tooltip to (referring to links as an example, but they apply to any kind of element as well), as follows: All the links All the links with a specific class (for example, tooltip) All the links with the title attribute not empty All the links pointing to internal pages All the links pointing to external websites Combinations of the above We can easily combine the first three conditions with the others (and with themselves) using CSS selectors appropriately. For example: $("a"), all the links $("a.tooltip"), links having a tooltip class $("a[title]"), links with a title attribute (still have to check if empty) $("a.tooltip[title]"), links with a tooltip class and a title attribute As for internal and external pages, we have to work with jQuery selectors instead. Time for action – creating custom jQuery selectors Although jQuery makes it easy to select elements using standard CSS selectors, as well as some other selectors, jQuery's own selectors are the ones that help the developer to write and read code. Examples of custom selectors are :odd, :animated, and so on. jQuery also lets you create your own selectors! The syntax is as follows: // definition$.expr[':'].customselector = function(object, index,properties, list) { // code goes here};// call$("a:customselector") The parameters are all optional except for the first one (of course!), which is required to perform some basic stuff on the selected object: object: Reference to current HTML DOM element (not jQuery, beware!) index: Zero-based loop index within array properties: Array of metadata about the selector (the 4th argument contains the string passed to the jQuery selector) list: Array of DOM elements to loop through The return value can be either: true: Include current element false: Exclude current element Our selector (for external links detection) will then look, very simply, like the following code: $.expr[':'].external = function(object) { if(object.hostname) // is defined return(object.hostname != location.hostname); else return false;}; Also note that, to access the jQuery object, we have to use the following (since object refers to the DOM element only!): $.expr[':'].sample = function(object) { alert('$(obj).attr(): ' + $(object).attr("href") + 'obj.href: ' + object.href);}; Merging pieces together We have slowly created different parts of the plugin, which we need to merge in order to create a working piece of code that actually makes tooltips visible. So far we have understood how positioning works and how we can easily place an element in a determined position. Also, we have found out we can create our own jQuery selectors, and have developed a simple yet useful custom selector with which we are able to select links pointing to either internal or external pages. It needs to be placed at the top of the code, inside the closure, as we will make use of the dollar symbol ($) and it may conflict with other software.

(For more resources on Plone, see here.) Graphic design tools Any serious skinner needs a graphic design tool with certain capabilities in order to take the design files and assemble them into a finished web site. In particular, layers and the ability to slice pieces of a design and export those pieces are essential. Layers allow a themer to hide pieces not needed in a finished CSS theme, such as text that will eventually become real HTML on a page. Slices, meanwhile, are the pieces of an overall design that are exported during the layer manipulation process. They are the images the end user eventually sees on the rendered page. This is different from cropping, which actually alters the size of the canvas; slices are just pieces of the overall design, cut with precision, exported, and then manipulated with CSS. The most commonly used graphic design tools used for web design are Adobe® Photoshop®, Adobe® Fireworks® (formerly Macromedia) tool, and open source tools such as GIMP. It is not generally recommended to use tools such as Adobe® Illustrator®, Corel Draw and other vector-based packages. Web designs primarily use raster-based media, meaning that raster images are based on pixels and thus scale with loss of clarity. Conversely, vector-based images can be scaled infinitely without degrading, but are typically not appropriate for web design. Adobe Photoshop The most popular tool for processing image files is Adobe Photoshop. The files generated for designs are PSD, or Photoshop Document files. Adobe Photoshop meets the basic requirements of being able to manipulate the vector and raster images, layers, and slices, and offers a lot of additional functionality. The ability to control anti-aliasing and the quality and size of an exported image is essential in web design, and Adobe Photoshop (also, Adobe Fireworks) is quite powerful in this respect. A quick look at the Layers panel illustrates how sections can be grouped together, moved, or be shown or hidden via the "eyeball" icon. This show/hide functionality is very important. One situation where this becomes valuable is when you have a PSD file that indicates graphical buttons with text over them. For accessibility reasons, you may want to render the text as real HTML-rendered text, and not as an image. You need to be able to export the buttons in both their on and off states in order to get a proper rollover effect, and you need to hide the graphical text in order to do this. One site that illustrates this concept is http://greenforall.org. Using Adobe Photoshop, the layers where the text appears on the top navigation were hidden, and just the background on/off images were imported. On the finished web site, the top menu used the background images and real rendered text. The other core functionality that Adobe Photoshop offers is the ability to slice images and export them. The Copper River Watershed Project web site (http://www.copperriver.org) illustrates how slices might be used. The original Adobe Photoshop document is here: If you look closely, you can see a few key slices: the "Go" button next to the search field has been sliced, as has the Tour Our Watershed map and the gradation on the top navigation, which will be tiled horizontally. Below the orange navigation is a long slice that spans from the left-hand shadow over to the right-hand shadow. This image can be used to tile the length of the page. Additionally, the entire Information For... box has been sliced; in this case, for the final implementation, the text overlaying this slice was hidden and replaced with rendered text. If you look at the finished web site, you can see how these slices were applied. Photoshop provides a great deal of power, but in general, you may only use about 20% of the power it offers. You can visit http://adobe.com to see the tutorials on how to use the Adobe Photoshop effectively. Additionally, you may want to investigate Photoshop Elements; it doesn't allow you to slice images for the Web, but for the current price of $139.99, it's still a great tool for many web design activities: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin. Adobe Fireworks At the time Macromedia was purchased by Adobe in 2005, the interface was a little clumsy at times, but it did have a basic implementation of layers and slices. Over the past few years, based on the demos available, it appears that the interface has seen some great improvements, though it does not have the same power or market share as Adobe Photoshop has. However, at nearly $400 less than Adobe Photoshop, it's a great option. According to the Adobe web site, "Adobe Fireworks CS4 software is used to rapidly prototype web sites and application interfaces and to create and optimize images for the Web more quickly and accurately. It is ideal for web designers, web developers, and visual designers." It differs from Photoshop in that "Adobe Photoshop software is the industry standard for digital imaging, with a broad array of features and functionality used by photographers, graphic designers, web designers, and many other creative professionals. Fireworks is a much more focused tool, with the features for prototyping vectors and bitmaps for the web and application interfaces." The real selling point here, though, is integration with Adobe Photoshop, as a design may be shared between multiple people, each using different graphical programs. The ability to manipulate the vector and raster images is also important. Additionally, like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks provides the ability to work with layers and slices, and preserves many of the settings in an Adobe Photoshop PSD file. It's not as good at compositing and photo manipulation as Photoshop, but is a lot stronger with text, shapes, and final optimization. Selective JPEG optimization is also very handy, and allows you to heavily compress the portions of a JPEG while keeping text legible. Additionally, it's great for generating image maps (not often used in Plone), rollovers, and other common tricks. Finally, it allows you to view your work with either Windows or Mac gamma. Gamma correction basically refers to the ability to correct for differences in how computers (and especially computer monitors) interpret color values. There are two factors here: the ability to predict what an image, say a photograph, will look like on another monitor and the ability to match the colors from different sources on a single page—Adobe Fireworks excels at both. While Adobe Fireworks is not as feature-rich as Adobe Photoshop, it is still an extremely competent tool for slicing and exporting design elements at implementation time, not to mention more affordable. GIMP GIMP, also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program, can be downloaded for free from http://www.gimp.org. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring, and is covered by the GNU GPL license. According to the GIMP's web site, it can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, and more. From the perspective of how it compares to the key aspects of Adobe Photoshop® and Adobe Fireworks®, it has full support of layers and channels, plug-ins that allow for the easy addition of new file formats (that is, it can read Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Fireworks files), and best of all, it is open source. You can visit http://www.gimp.org/docs to download the user manual for the current release. GIMP also lists several user groups and resources at http://www.gimp.org/links that may be helpful. Even so, the latest releases are still quite recent, so development is still happening For a free solution to the image processing needs, GIMP is an excellent choice, but weak in terms of the user interface and layer compatibility with Adobe Photoshop. Browser add-ons and important notes Now that you have sense of the tools that are available for manipulating design files and exporting the necessary images for building your web site, let's look at how browsers affect the web site building process, either through add-on tools or through sheer bugginess. It's also worth mentioning that users should reference the A-List of popular browsers to see which browsers are still considered to be supported by web developers: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/index.html. This can help to ease the quality assurance load during web site testing. Many of these A-List browsers come with browser-specific tools that allow you to inspect your web site to descry the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) ID and class selectors, manipulate your CSS on-the-fly, optimize your site, explore color options, and more. We'll look at the available options for three major browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, but you should always be conscious of general browser penetration statistics so that you know which browsers are still in popular use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers. Now, let's get back to our key browsers. Internet Explorer From a themer's perspective, Internet Explorer is the most finicky browser against which to implement, as older versions of Internet Explorer followed the W3C's (World Wide Web Consortium's) standards differently than many other popular browsers. According to http://positioniseverything.net, a leading collector of browser fixes, "All browsers have CSS bugs, and IE leads the pack in this area, but that is not the end of the story. Microsoft has seen fit to engineer their browser to deliberately violate the standards in several critical ways. It might just be a misguided attempt to 'make it simple' for newbie coders, or it might be a cynical ploy to crush the competition, but in any case it creates huge headaches for those of us who desire to employ CSS positioning on our pages." While this may be true, many fixes for Internet Explorer have been identified, and thankfully, IE6, one of the more problematic browsers in recent years, is finally becoming obsolete. It was replaced by IE7, which was a vast improvement, but still did not implement the W3C conventions for CSS faithfully. As of this writing, Internet Explorer 8 was released and showing signs of having finally made strides toward real compliance to W3C standards. What this equates to is that web developers tend do their initial browser testing in browsers that are more compliant; that means doing most upfront testing in Firebug and Safari, and then rounding out the testing at the end against IE6, IE7, and IE8. Where possible, it's also important to test against other major browsers and handheld media. For testing against Internet Explorer, IE provides a tool called the Web Developer Toolbar for debugging. It is available for both IE6 and IE7 as an add-on and can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en. Web Developer Toolbar will no longer be the tool of choice for IE8, however, instead use the developer tools included with IE8. To use the developer tools in IE8, press Shift+F12 or click the "Developer Tools" icon in the command bar to begin using the tool. For IE6 and IE7, Web Developer Toolbar provides several features for exploring and understanding web pages. These features enable you to: Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a web page. Locate and select the specific elements on a web page. Selectively disable the Internet Explorer settings. View HTML object class names, IDs, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys. Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags. Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links. Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text. Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution. Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain. Display a fully-featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages. Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element. Right clicking on a style rule will allow you to trace the rules to a specific CSS file, if one is found. View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS. The Developer Toolbar can be popped up within the Internet Explorer browser window or opened as a separate window. If you are using a PC to test your sites, VMware, parallels, or a Windows emulator, you should download the Toolbar from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125120, install it, and restart IE. You can then click the Developer Toolbar icon in the command bar to display or hide the Developer Toolbar. Alternately, you can open the View menu and then use the Explorer Bar menu. In Internet Explorer 7, open the Tools menu and then use Toolbars/Explorer Bars to display or hide the Developer Toolbar. There are a few caveats here: The Developer Toolbar icon may not be visible by default. If you do not see it after restarting Internet Explorer, click the right-facing arrows at the end of the IE7 command bar to view all the available Toolbar buttons. Some menu items are unavailable (grayed out) when running Internet Explorer in Protected Mode on Windows Vista. To use those options, temporarily turn off Protected Mode or right-click the Internet Explorer icon in the Programs menu and choose Run as administrator. In IE6 or in IE7 with tabbed browsing off, using the validation links will navigate the current window to the validation page. To launch the validation links in a new window, open the Tools menu, click Internet Options, and uncheck Reuse windows for launching shortcuts in the Advanced tab, or use IE7 with tabbed browsing enabled. Generally, you can use this tool by expanding the left side of the panel displayed to navigate through your site's structure. It displays CSS IDs and classes in a hierarchical fashion. On the right-hand side, it displays the properties assigned to each of those IDs or classes. You can modify those by using the + icon in the center Attributes section to add a new property and using that to add to or alter the existing CSS. As stated before, the left-hand pane allows you to expand and walk through the structure of your web site. When you refresh, unfortunately, the entire tree closes. To continue troubleshooting a specific element on the page, you must drill down to it again or use the "selector" tool. It's somewhat clumsy, but it works and is invaluable when debugging web pages in Internet Explorer.  

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) Accessing documentation PhpStorm offers four different operations that will help you to access the documentation: Quick Definition, Quick Documentation, Parameter Info, and External Documentation. The first one, Quick Definition, presents the definition of a given symbol. You can use it for a variable, function, method, or class. Quick Documentation allows easy access to DocBlocks. It can be used for all kinds of symbols: variables, functions, methods, and classes. The next operation, Parameter Info, presents simplified information about a function or method interface. Finally, External Documentation will help you to access the official PHP documentation available at php.com. Their shortcuts are as follows: Quick Definition (Ctrl + Shift + I, Mac: alt + Space bar) Quick Documentation (Ctrl + Q, Mac: F1) Parameter Info (Ctrl + P, Mac: command + P) External Documentation (Shift + F1, Mac: shift + F1) The Esc (Mac: shift + esc) hotkey will close any of the previous windows. If you place the cursor inside the parenthesis of $s = str_replace(); and run Parameter Info (Ctrl + P, Mac: command + P), you will get the hint showing all the parameters for the str_replace() function. If that is not enough, place the cursor inside the str_replace function name and press Shift + F1 (Mac: shift + F1). You will get the manual for the function. If you want to test the next operation, open the project created in the Quick start – your first PHP application section and place the cursor inside the class name Controller in the src/My/HelloBundle/Controller/DefaultController.php file. The place where you should place the cursor is denoted with bar | in the following code: class DefaultController extends Cont|roller { } The Quick Definition operation will show you the class definition: The Quick Documentation operation will show you the documentation defined with PhpDoc blocks: It is a formal standard for commenting on the PHP code. The official documentation is available at http://www.phpdoc.org. Generators PhpStorm enables you to do the following: Implement magic methods Override inherited methods Generate constructor, getters, setters, and docblocks All of these operations are available in Code | Generate (Alt + Insert, Mac: command + N). Perform the following steps: Create a new class Foo and place the cursor at the position of | : class Person { | } The Generate dialog box will contain the following operations: The Implement Methods dialog box contains all available magic methods: Create the class with two private properties: class Lorem { private $ipsum; private $dolor; } Then go to Code | Generate | Getters and Setters. In the dialog box select both properties: Then press OK. PhpStorm will generate the following methods: class Lorem { private $ipsum; private $dolor; public function setDolor($dolor) { $this->dolor = $dolor; } public function getDolor() { return $this->dolor; } public function setIpsum($ipsum) { $this->ipsum = $ipsum; } public function getIpsum() { return $this->ipsum; } } Next, go to Code | Generate | DocBlocks and in the dialog box select all the properties and methods: PhpStorm will generate docblocks for each of the selected properties and methods, for example: /** * @param $dolor */ public function setDolor($dolor) { $this->dolor = $dolor; } Summary We just learned that in some cases you don't have to type the code at all, as it can be generated automatically. Generators discussed in this article lifted the burden of type setters, getters and magic functions from your shoulders. We also dived into different ways to access documentation here. Resources for Article : Further resources on this subject: Installing PHP-Nuke [Article] An Introduction to PHP-Nuke [Article] Creating Your Own Theme—A Wordpress Tutorial [Article]

Rendering images using content elements Content elements offer a variety of ways for editors to include images. We will examine these here. Here is a typical selection menu that editor is presented with: A great way to start is to assemble pages from the Regular text element and the Text with image elements Getting Ready Make sure Content (default) is selected in Include static, and the CSS Styled Content template is included in the Include static (from extensions) field of the template record of the current page or any page above it in the hierarchy (page tree). To verify, go to the Template module, select the appropriate page, and click edit the whole template record. How to do it... Create the Text with image element. Under the Text tab, enter the text you want to appear on the page. You can use the RTE (Rich Text Editor) to apply formatting, or disable it. We will cover RTE in more detail later in this article. Under the Media tab, select your image settings. If you want to upload the image, use the first field. If you want to use an existing image, use the second field. Under Position, you are able to select where the image will appear in relation to the text. How it works... When the page is rendered in the frontend, the images will be placed next to the text you entered, in the position that you specify. The specific look will depend on the template that you are using. There's more An alternative to the Text with images is an Images only content element. This element gives you similar options, except limits the options to just a display of images. The rest of the options are the same. You can also resize the image, add caption, alt tags for accessibility and search engine optimization, and change default processing options. See the official TYPO3 documentation for details of how these fields work, (http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/). See also Render video and audio using content elements and rgmediaimages extension Embedding images in RTE Rich Text Editor is great for text entry. By default, TYPO3 ships with htmlArea RTE as a system extension. Other editors are available, and can be installed if needed. Images can be embedded and manipulated within the RTE. This provides one place for content editors to use in order to arrange content how they want it to appear at the frontend of the site. In this recipe, we will see how this can be accomplished. The instructions apply to all forms that have RTE-enabled fields, but we will use the text content element for a simple demonstration. In the Extension Manager, click on htmlArea RTE extension to bring up its options. Make sure that the Enable images in the RTE [enableImages] setting is enabled. If you have a recent version of DAM installed (at least 1.1.0), make sure that the Enable the DAM media browser [enableDAMBrowser] setting is unchecked. This setting is deprecated, and is there for installations using older versions of DAM. How to do it... Create a new Regular text element content element. In the RTE, click on the icon to insert an image as shown in the following screenshot: Choose a file, and click on the icon to insert it into the Text area. You should see the image as it will appear at the frontend of the site. Save and preview. The output should appear similar to the following screenshot: How it works... When you insert an image through the RTE, the image is copied to uploads folder, and included from there. The new file will be resampled and sized down, so, it usually occupies less space and is downloaded faster than the original file. TYPO3 will automatically determine if the original file has changed, and update the file used in the RTE—but you should still be aware of this behaviour. Furthermore, if you have DAM installed, and you have included an image from DAM, you can see the updated record usage. If you view the record information, you should see the Content Element where the image is used:

(For more resources on Afresco 3, see here.) Workflows can be configured for both web forms and non-generated web content. In order to submit content to the Staging Sandbox, workflows need to be configured. We will discuss shortly how form-based and file-based workflow can be configured, and also how content can be submitted to the Staging box. Associating workflows to web forms Workflow for web forms can be configured using the Create Web Form Wizard or the Edit Web Form wizard. Using these approaches, workflows can be configured for all web projects and for a specific web project. Assuming that we have already created a web form, we will use the same web form to drive a workflow. In this example, we have to use the Edit Web Form Wizard. Follow these steps to assign a workflow for the web form: Ensure that the Alfresco server is up and running. Go to Company Home Data Dictionary | Web Forms|. Click on the Edit Web Form action under the training (web form name) space. Clicking on this will open Edit Web Form Wizard. Click on Next twice to reach the Configure Workflow window. Select the Yes radio button and click on Next. Click on Finish. Associating workflows to web projects To assign a workflow for a specific project, you can use two approaches. The first approach is by using the Create Web Project Wizard that will be used if you are creating a new web project. The second approach is by using the Edit Web Project Wizard. We will be using the second approach since we have already created the Cignex web project. Follow these steps to associate workflow for a web form: Ensure that the Alfresco server is up and running. Go to Company Home Web Projects | Cignex|. Select Edit Web Project Settings from the action menu. Click on Next. On the next screen, click on Next. In the Step Three window, you will notice the added web forms in the panel as shown in the following screenshot. You can see the Configure Workflow button available for each web form. This button is enabled only for those web forms for which we have configured workflows. Notice the attention icon next to the workflow. This indicates a workflow has been selected but not configured: On clicking the Configure Workflow button, the Configure Workflow window is opened. This window is used to configure form-based workflows (web form generated content). This is specific for web forms only. Fill out the details as shown in the following screenshot: Click on OK. Now, if you notice, the attention icon disappears. Click on Next. You will again see the Configure Workflow window. Click on the Add to List button to add the workflow for the web project. Once the workflow is added in the panel, you can configure file-based workflows (non-web form generated content). They are configured based on filename pattern matching. In Workflow Settings, note the default regex pattern matches .*. This default means that any asset web form generated, and non-web form generated, will go through this review process. Also, you can add the Web Site Submission workflow multiple times in this wizard. For each instance you can configure a different chain of reviewers for different sections of the websites or types of assets by modifying the regex pattern match in Workflow Settings, for example, .css, .html. Please note that the Configure Workflow window can be used for both file and non-web form generated assets. But this window is mainly used for non-web form generated assets. Click on Finish. Submitting content to the Staging box Content can be submitted in two ways. The first option is by using the Edit Web Content Wizard or the Create Web Content Wizard. With this option you can submit only form-based content. The second option is by using the Submit Selected or Submit All option provided under Modified Items. With this option you can submit both form-based assets and non-form based assets. Using the Edit Web Content wizard We assume that the web content is already created. So we are going to use the Edit Web Content wizard. Log in as Mark Steven, who is the Content Manger of the Cignex project. Follow these steps to directly submit content to the workflow: Go to Company Home Web Projects | Cignex|. Select the Browse Website option to browse all files and folders. Go to the common/inc folder. Click on the Edit action placed next to the training.html file. Click on Next. The Summary window is opened. It has the functionality to directly submit content to the workflow (this functionality is also available in the Create Web Content Wizard). Select those checkboxes to submit directly. This saves you from initiating a separate submission process. Click on Finish.

Creating Accessible Tables Tables got a bad review in accessibility circles, because they used to create complex visual layouts. This was due to the limitations in the support for presentational specifications like CSS and using tables for layout was a hack—that worked in the real world—when you wanted to position something in a precise part of the web page. Tables were designed to present data of all shapes and sizes, and that is really what they should be used for. The Trouble with Tables So what are tables like for screen reader users? Tables often contain a lot of information, so sighted users need to look at the information at the top of the table (the header info), and sometimes the first column in each row to associate each data cell. Obviously this works for sighted users, but in order to make the tables accessible to a screen reader user we need to find a way of associating the data in each cell with its correct header so the screen reader can inform the user which header relates to each data cell. Screen reader users can navigate between data cells easily using the cursor keys. We will see how to make tables accessible in simple steps. There are methods of conveying the meaning and purpose of a table to the screen reader user by using the caption element and the summary attribute of the table element that you will find more on in the next section. We will learn how to build a simple table using Joomla! and the features contained within the WYSIWYG editors that can make the table more accessible. Before we do that though I want you to ask yourself about why you want to use tables (though sometimes it is unavoidable) and what forms should they take. Simple guidelines for tables: Try to make the table as simple as possible.    If possible don't span multiple cells etc. The simpler the table, the easier it is to make accessible.    Try to include the data you want to present in the body text of your site. Time for Action—Create an Accessible Table (Part 1) In the following example we will build a simple table that will list the names of some artists, some albums they have recorded, and the year in which they recorded the albums. First of all click the table icon from the TinyMCE interface and add a table with a suitable number of columns and rows.            By clicking on the Advanced tab you will see the Summary field. The summary information is very important. It provides the screen reader user a summary of the table. For example, I filled in the following text: "A list of some funk artists, my favorite among their records, and the year they recorded it in". My table then looked as follows: What Just Happened? There is still some work to be done in order to make the content more accessible. The controls that the WYSIWYG editor offers are also a little limited so we will have to edit the HTML by hand. Adding the summary information is a very good start. The text that I entered "A list of some funk artists, my favorite among their records, and the year they recorded it in." will be read out by the screen reader as soon as it receives a focus by the user. Time for Action—Create an Accessible Table (Part 2) Next we are going to add a Caption to the table, which will be helpful to both sighted and non-sighted users. This is how it's done. Firstly, select the top row of the table, as these items are the table heading. Then click on the Table Row properties icon beside the Tables icon and select Table Head under General Properties. Make sure that the Update current Row is selected in the dialogue box in the bottom left. You will apply these properties to your selected row. If you wish to add a caption to your table you need to add an extra row to the table and then select the contents of that row and add the Caption in the row properties dialogue box. This will tell the browser to display the caption text, in this case Funky Table Caption, else it will remain hidden. What Just Happened? By adding caption to the table, you provide useful information to the screen reader user. This caption should be informative and should describe something useful about the table. As the caption element is wrapped in a heading it is read out by the screen reader when the user starts exploring the table—so it is slightly different to the summary attribute, which is read out automatically. Does it Work? What we just did using the WYSIWYG editor, TinyMCE, is enough to make a good start towards creating a more accessible table, but we will have to work a little more in order to truly make the table accessible. So we will now edit the HTML. The good news is that you have made some good steps in the right direction and the final step is of associating the data cells with their suitable headers, as this is something that we cannot really do with the WYSIWYG editor alone, and is essential to make your tables truly accessible.

  Before activities aim at motivating students to listen and getting them to anticipate texts and focus on key vocabulary in advance. Forum and Mindmap are two modules which enable us to do this. During activities focus on the detail of the text and include listening and matching, gap-fill, ordering tasks, identifying attitude, and summarizing tasks. Quiz and Lesson modules are well suited to this. After activities get students to review and evaluate texts they have listened to. Forum and Questionnaire are good for this purpose. The article is organized as follows: Activity and ease of setup Focus Module Description 1  * Before listening Forum and Mediacenter Students discuss recordings they would like to hear. 2  *   Mindmap Students brainstorm ideas or vocabulary. 3  *** During listening Quiz Students answer gist and detailed questions about recordings. 4  ***   Lesson Students predict text in recordings. 5  * After listening Choice Students vote on recordings. 6  ***   Questionnaire Students review and evaluate the content of recordings 7  *   Forum Students discuss recordings. Since there are various ways we can use Moodle to help students, the introduction to this article looks in detail at the types of players we can use. There is also some guidance on the range of sources of listening material available on the Internet. The final section in the introduction demonstrates how we can show and hide text on Moodle pages while students listen. Players This article offers four main ways of presenting listening material. Built-in Flash player: Recordings have to be made on an external recording program, such as Audacity. You need to do some simple editing of the HTML code on your pages, but it doesn't require any add-on modules and the player fits neatly into the page: The player usefully includes a pause facility. Mediacenter: This podcast player requires the add-on Inwicast module. It allows you to include high-quality recordings whose length is limited only by the maximum upload settings as set in the administration panel. The player is again simple and attractive: Mediacenter helps you organize recordings in one place. Recordings can be used in a variety of formats, such as Flash-FLV, MP4 and MOV, WMV and MP3. If your recording equipment records in another format, such as WAV, for example, you can use tools like Audacity to convert the audio format if necessary. You might find it useful to convert from WAV to MP3 format, which works in Mediacenter. Mediacenter also allows you to link to remote files on other websites. NanoGong player: This requires the add-on NanoGong module. It's well worth including in your Moodle setup, as it allows simple recording and playback on most HTML pages within Moodle. The major constraints as far as Moodle is concerned are the time limit of 2 minutes per recording and the lower recording quality. However, for ease of use and convenience, it's suitable for many of the activities. Embedded flash video players: You can embed Flash video players in Moodle HTML pages by pasting embed code from the source site on your page. Embed, here, means insert it into the page. You must check that there are no copyright issues when you embed video. Some sites allow it, some don't. Some request that you seek permission first. Since the video is sourced from another website, you are using its bandwidth as well as its content. So it is doubly right that you seek permission. Sources of listening material It's worth considering the range of sources of listening materials available. The following are the typical sources: You Your students Your colleagues Local interviewees, such as friends and professionals. You could approach representatives of local services, such as the police or tourist services, and ask if you can make short interviews. Recordings of local announcements from railway stations or airports Internet recordings Websites, such as Woices (http://woices.com) and voicethread (http://voicethread.com/), which combine audio with maps and images Activity 1 has an extended list of listening sources. Recording speed One of the many useful features of Audacity is that it allows us to reproduce recordings at different speeds without the pitch changing. It's well worth including slower recordings if you think your students will benefit from it. Presentations could include two recordings: the first one at a slower speed; the second at a faster, more natural speed. Alternatively, you could start with a recording at a natural speed and make slower speed versions available for students who need remedial help. You can use Audacity to record from the Internet (also known as grabbing). Showing the text before listening In many of the activities, you might want to create a facility for allowing students to see text before and/or after they hear it. Here is a simple way of doing that using ALT tags (Computer-speak for Alternative text). First, prepare a small GIF image that students will hover their mouse cursor over to see the text. In case you don't know, GIF is one of the formats you can save an image in. Other formats you may have heard of are JPG and PNG. You can do that using a simple graphic program like Paint. Alternatively, you can copy this pink square image from http://moodleforlanguages.co.uk/images/pinksquare.gif. To do that, right-click (or Ctrl+click on a Mac) on the image and select Save Image As.... Then, in the HTML area on your Moodle activity, upload the image, and write the text you want to show in the ALT area. The HTML page will now look like this. The text you write in the Alternate text box will appear in a separate box on the screen when you hover the mouse cursor over the pink square. Web conferencingIf you have the add-on module Dimdim, you could also create live listening sessions. Activity 1: Using Forum to motivate students Aim: Help motivate students by discussing what recordings to listen to Moodle modules: Forum Extra programs: Mediacenter (optional) Ease of setup: * As with many language-learning activities, it's important to try to motivate students at the outset. In this activity, students discuss what recordings to listen to. The choice of recordings will depend on the age, interests, and language level of the students. There are thousands of sources on the Internet, many of which you can find through good search engines. Here are some examples: Source Ideas News sites You could also consider getting students to listen to and compare news from different countries. The open directory project is a good place to look: http://www.dmoz.org/News/. Media repositories Sites like YouTube and Google Video are good sources of songs, presentations, TV clips, stories, and many other recordings. Sound archives are also good places to look. Some useful sources are: http://sounds.bl.uk/; http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/collections.shtml; http://tinyurl.com/birminghamdirectory   Poetry sites Many of these include recordings: http://poems.com/ http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/Poetry/Performance_and_Presentation/   Story sites More and more audio books are now available on the Internet often free, as with project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Audio_Books_Project Discussions Public broadcast stations like DW, BBC, CBC and CNN are good sources: http://www.dw-world.de/; http://bbc.co.uk; http://www.cbc.ca/; http://www.cnn.com/services/podcasting/   Film trailers Several websites are devoted to film trailers. For example: http://www.imdb.com/Sections/Trailers/ Soap operas A search for "podcast soap opera" should provide a good catch. Documentaries Again, public broadcast stations ofter an increasingly wide range of documentaries, which you can link to via your Moodle Mediacenter: http://tinyurl.com/publicbroadcast Lectures These can be made by you, your students, or sourced from websites such as http://www.ted.com/. A search for "online lectures" will yield many more sites. Advertisements Try http://www.google.com/Top/Arts/Television/Commercials/ for a directory of advertisements.

This article is suggested reading even for an experienced user. It will show us any possible problems that might occur while upgrading, so we can avoid them. Making backups of the current OpenCart system One thing we should certainly do is backup our files and database before starting any upgrade process. This will allow us to restore the OpenCart system if the upgrade fails and if we cannot solve the reason behind it. Time for action – backing up OpenCart files and database In this section, we will now learn how to back up the necessary files and database of the current OpenCart system before starting the upgrading processes. We will start with backing up database files. We have two choices to achieve this. The first method is easier and uses the built-in OpenCart module in the administration panel. We need to open the System | Backup / Restore menu. In this screen, we should be sure that all modules are selected. If not, click on the Select All link first. Then, we will need to click on the Backup button. A backup.sql file will be generated for us automatically. We will save the file on our local computer. The second method to backup OpenCart database is through the Backup Wizard on cPanel administration panel which most hosting services provide this as a standard management tool for their clients. If you have applied the first method which we have just seen, skip the following section to apply. Still, it is useful to learn about alternative Backup Wizard tool on cPanel. Let's open cPanel screen that our hosting services provided for us. Click on the Backup Wizard item under the Files section. On the next screen, click on the Backup button. We will click on the MySQL Databases button on the Select Partial Backup menu. We will right-click on our OpenCart database file backup and save it on our local computer by clicking on Save Link As. Let's return to the cPanel home screen and open File Manager under the Files menu. Let's browse into the web directory where our OpenCart store files are stored. Right-click on the directory and then Compress it. We will compress the whole OpenCart directory as a Zip Archive file. As we can see from the following screenshot, the compressed store.zip file resides on the web server. We can also optionally download the file to our local computer. What just happened? We have backed up our OpenCart database using cPanel. After this, we also backed up our OpenCart files as a compressed archive file using File Manager in cPanel.

  SilverStripe 2.4 Module Extension, Themes, and Widgets: Beginner's Guide Create smashing SilverStripe applications by extending modules, creating themes, and adding widgets         Read more about this book       (For more resources on SilverStripe, see here.) Setting up the environment There are many possible scenarios and environments you might require, depending on the complexity of your project. However, we'll keep this short and simple: We'll set up a development environment, which is based on Windows (Windows XP or newer) as it is the most common operating system on desktops and laptops. We'll also set up one live or deployment environment, which is based on Linux as it is the most common operating system for web servers. We'll use Ubuntu in our example as it is freely available and widely used. If you prefer a different distribution some paths and commands will vary, but the general approach should be very similar. In case you want to use a testing or staging environment as well, we'll assume that you simply reuse the previous setup—so we don't need to configure another system. Now that we've decided on the general purpose of the systems and their operating systems, we'll need to choose between different implementations for setting up the web server and database. Specifically, whether to use prebuilt packages or select the components ourselves. To demonstrate both approaches we'll use a prebuilt package on our development machine (as we want to get up and running quickly) and handpick the components on our live site, where we want to have maximum control. To keep our development and live environments closely related, we'll use the same applications for both—disqualifying Windows-only solutions: For the web server we'll use the Apache HTTP Server (http://httpd.apache.org) as it's the most widely used, cross-platform server. Alternatives would be Microsoft's Internet Information Services (http://www.iis.net), which are only available on Windows, and Lighttpd (http://www.lighttpd.net) or Nginx (http://nginx.org), which are both fast, but not as widely used as the Apache web server, and are a little trickier to set up. For the database we'll use the popular MySQL (http://www.mysql.com). Alternatively you could use Microsoft SQL Server (https://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/default.aspx), which requires Windows; PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org), SQLite (http://www.sqlite.org), or an Oracle database (http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/index.html). However, each of these alternatives requires an additional SilverStripe module to support its specific SQL dialect, which generally receive less attention than MySQL. Unless you have a good reason for changing the database, like you're already using MS SQL for everything else, stick with MySQL. For a change the programming language PHP (http://www.php.net) doesn't require any decisions as there are no alternative implementations. For the prebuilt package we'll use XAMPP (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html), which matches our requirements. It uses the Apache HTTP Server and MySQL and is available on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris. If your development machine doesn't use Windows, you should still be able to follow the installation steps with minor variations. On Windows there's also Microsoft's Web Platform Installer (http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx). It doesn't only include the web server, database and PHP, but also SilverStripe itself (http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/silverstripecms.aspx)—which can be downloaded on demand among many other web applications. However, as this is very different to our live site, we won't cover it. If you're looking for a, Windows-only solution this is nevertheless an interesting option as it is very easy to set up. The Windows development system Let's start off by setting up our development system, based on the freely available XAMPP package. Time for action - installing XAMPP We'll assume that the operating system is Windows XP or newer—for Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris you should only need to get a different download file and do some minor variations of the steps described: Download the XAMPP package at http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html. We're using the 7zip package as it doesn't require an installation, is compact to download and also portable: you can copy it to a USB drive and use the environment on any Windows computer. Extract the archive to a top-level folder on your internal drive (C: for example), or your portable external drive (U: for example). To do this, you'll need the free 7zip archive utility, which you can download at http://www.7-zip.org. Open up the file xampp/mysql/bin/my.ini and add the following line in the [mysqld] section: lower_case_table_names=2 This setting is important for exchanging database dumps between Windows and Linux systems. As Windows paths are case insensitive, MySQL lowercases database and table names by default (as they are internally stored as folders and files), but only on Windows. On Linux proper cases are preserved, which leads to problems when using dumps on different platforms. The previous statement forces MySQL on Windows to behave like on Linux. Inside the XAMPP folder, start the file xampp-control.exe and use it to Start Apache, MySql and Mercury. XAMPP's control panel should look like this after starting the three applications: If a service doesn't start, check that its port is not already in use—this is the main reason for problems. To do this, open the command line tool and enter netstat-ao. This will show you the ports currently in use and the process IDs (PIDs) of the processes using them. Using Window's Task-Manager you can then find out the name of the process causing the problem, and stop or reconfigure it. The following screenshot illustrates this scenario—the web server cannot be started as Skype is already using port 80: After successfully starting all three services, navigate to http://localhost in your browser. This should redirect you to XAMPP's welcome page. In case you need to send e-mails for testing purposes, you'll need to perform two additional steps to configure your SMTP server: Enable SMTP relaying of non-local mail. However, ensure that no one can access your mail server from outside or you might be abused as a spam relay (your router or firewall will protect you). In XAMPP's control panel, click on Admin... next to the Mercury label. Next go to Configuration, MercuryS SMTP Server and on the Connection control tab uncheck Do not permit SMTP relaying of non-local mail. Provide a DNS server so domain names can be looked up: Under Configuration, MercuryE SMTP Client fill in the field Name server with your provider's DNS server. That's it for our general purpose development machine. In case you want to run automatic tests or generate translation files, you'll also need to install PHPUnit through PEAR: While XAMPP includes PEAR and PHPUnit, the bundled versions are hopelessly outdated. Furthermore the update process doesn't work reliably, so we'll better start anew. First remove xampp/php/PEAR/, xampp/php/pear.bat, xampp/php/pear.ini, xampp/php/peardev.bat and xampp/php/pear-update.bat. Next enable PHP's cURL extension: Open xampp/php/php.ini, find the line ;extension=php_curl.dll and remove the leading semicolon. Then download http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar into xampp/php/. Next install PEAR on the command line (start it as an admin user). Note that you must be in the folder xampp/php/ for the following commands to work: php go-pear.phar Now we can use PEAR to update its channels and upgrade all packages: pear update-channelspear upgrade --alldeps Finally you can install PHPUnit and all of its dependencies: pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.depear channel-discover components.ez.nopear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.compear install phpunit/PHPUnit That's it, you've successfully installed PHPUnit! The Linux live system Next we'll set up our live system. Thanks to package managers this isn't much harder—you just shouldn't be afraid of the shell. Time for action - installing the requirements by hand In our example we're using Ubuntu, so we'll rely on its package manager Apt, abbreviation of Advanced Package Tool. Note that we won't only install the bare necessities, but also some more tools to make our system ready for production. Open the terminal and install the Apache HTTP Server together with PHP and PHP's GD library (needed for image manipulation) through the following commands. Note that all required dependencies are added automatically, though you may need to manually accept them: sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-gd Next we'll install MySQL and its binding to PHP, again through the terminal. You'll be prompted for a password, which we'll need again later on. sudo apt-get install mysql-server php5-mysql Enable Apache's rewrite module, which SilverStripe requires to use pretty URLs: sudo a2enmod rewrite Edit the file /etc/apache/sites-available/default and replace the line AllowOverride None with AllowOverride All inside the <Directory /var/www/> block. This enables the rewrite module inside the /var/www/ folder. Install Alternative PHP Cache (APC), which will accelerate PHP programs—SilverStripe benefits a lot from this. While there are some alternatives, it is currently planned that APC will be included in PHP 6, which makes it sound like a future-proof decision for our installation: sudo apt-get install php-apc If you want to see APC in action, you'll need its management tool. By default it is located in the file /usr/share/doc/php-apc/apc.php.gz. Unpack and copy it to your web-root to see detailed statistics on how well it's working for you, but protect it against unauthorized access (you can set credentials inside the file). Edit the file /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini, using whatever text-editor you prefer (this can be quite a sensitive topic with programmers). Replace the line ;date.timezone = with date.timezone = US/New_York or your current location. See http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php for all possible values. Note that removing the semicolon at the beginning is important, otherwise the line will be considered a comment. Restart the web server to apply all the settings we've just made: sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload Now it's time to test our installation. Go to the directory /var/www/ which is the default web-root directory: cd /var/www/ It should already contain a file index.html, which you can view if you visit http://127.0.0.1 in your browser (or whichever IP address you can access your server under). However, this is only a static HTML file. To see if PHP is also working, first set the file permissions, assuming our current user is ubuntu (which we'll use to edit files) and the web server is run as www-data (which is the default). So we'll make our user the owner of the files with full permissions, and set the group to the one of the web server with read and execute permissions only: sudo chown ubuntu:www-data -R /var/www/sudo chmod 0755 -R /var/www/ After adding new files, you'll need to rerun these two commands. Next create a file index.php in /var/www/: touch index.php Add the following code to it: <?php phpinfo();?> In your browser load the page http://127.0.0.1/index.php (again use your specific IP address). The output should look something like this: This shows that PHP is working. Also check that you can find mod_rewrite and a full section on APC in the output to be sure they are enabled. That's it, our live system is now ready for action. We haven't installed PEAR as we'll assume that testing and translating is done in the development environment, not on the live server. We've also left out how to install and configure an SMTP server. Unfortunately this is pretty complicated and beyond the scope of this article—especially since you don't want to become a spam relay. If your provider or distribution hasn't already set this up for you, take a look at a specific SMTP server how-to and documentation—Postfix (http://www.postfix.org) is widely used for example.

What is SEO? Search-engine optimization, or SEO, refers to the process of preparing your website to be spidered, indexed, and ranked by the major search engines so that when Internet users search for your keywords, your website will appear on their results page. Proper search engine optimization is a crucial step to ensure success and should be undertaken with care and diligence. It should also be noted that SEO is an interdisciplinary concern, combining web design functions with marketing and promotional concerns. If aimed properly, SEO would be a powerful weapon in your arsenal. Proper SEO is: Optimizing META data Optimizing page titles Optimizing page content Selecting proper keywords Testing your optimizations Promoting link popularity Using standards-compliant HTML Optimizing image ALT tags Using a logical website structure Validating your content Proper SEO isn't: Keyword spamming Hidden text Cloaking content Link-farming Excessive content or site duplication Paying for questionable links Structural Optimization Optimizing your site's actual structure and presentation is the most immediate approach to SEO. Since these factors are under the immediate control of the webmaster, they represent a foundational approach to the SEO problem. Once you've optimized your site's structural components, you can optimize the promotional aspects of SEO, which we'll discuss momentarily. Items That Search Engines Look for in Your Site's Content It's important to remember that today's search engine rankings are determined by highly sophisticated algorithms. Trying to stay one step ahead of the major engines with bad tactics is not only a very bad idea, but also a waste of time. Well written content will win repeatedly. Giving the search engine robots a well prepared sitepage contributes in promoting your site. Three items that many search engine robots look for are: Relevant page titles to your content Relevant keywords and descriptions (META tags) Relevant, keyword-rich content, presented in clean and valid HTML Take a note of the recurring theme—"relevancy". If your site is relevant in terms of what the user is looking for, you will achieve respectable search engine rankings without any additional promotion. However, this is not a place to stop, as search engines correlate your site's standings among your peers and competitors by evaluating certain external factors. External Views of Your Site by Search Engines Search giant, Google, likes to describe its proprietary algorithm, known as PageRankTM, by discussing how the external factors can accurately define your site's relevancy, when considered along with your site's actual content. Most search engines today follow this formula in determining link popularity. Some popular items that are used to measure are: How many websites link to yours Where they link in your content What words are used in the actual link text (i.e. the description of the page) The topical relevancy of the sites that link to your site The power of web search lies in the search engine's ability to provide accurate and relevant results that someone can quickly use to find the information they seek. More importantly, the other end of the search process guarantees that the visitors we draw from search engines are truly after the information or services we provide. Another way to look at it would be it's the right message, but the wrong person. Thus we see that our interests, the interests of the search engines, and the interests of web surfers actually coincide! If we tune our content properly, and connect our content with similarly relevant content, we can expect to be rewarded with targeted traffic eager to devour our information and buy our services. If we try to deceive the search engines, or common people, we deceive ourselves. It's that simple. Optimizing META Data Metadata is the data about the data. It's the section where you define what a search engine should expect to find on your page. If you've never taken note of META tags before, then take a brief tour of the Web and view the source code of several websites. You'll see how this data is organized, primarily into descriptions and keyword listings. Joomla! provides functionality for modifying and dynamically generating META tags, in the Site | Global Configuration | Metadata dialog, as well as within individual articles via the META tab on the right-hand panel. This is where the dynamic aspect of metadata becomes important—your main page will have certain needs for proper META optimization and your individual Joomla! content articles will require special tuning to make the best of their potential. This is accomplished though key words and phrases scattered through out the text. Keep in mind that each search engine is different; however keeping ratio of about 3 to 1 for keywords and META (keyword) in the top 1/3rd of the page is a decent rule of thumb. Using the Site | Global Configuration | Metadata dialog, is pretty straight forward.You can enter descriptions, keywords and key phrases that are pertinent to your siteon a global level. You should select the META keywords based on the keywords appearing in your content with the greatest frequency. Be honest and use META keywords that actually appear in your content. Search engines penalize you for over use of keywords, known as keyword stuffing. Title Optimization What's in the actual title of your page? The keywords you insert into your site and article's titles play a huge role in successful search engine optimization. As with META tags, the key is to insert frequently-used, but not stuffed, keywords into your title, which correlate the relevancy of the site's title (what we say about our site)with the metadata (how we describe what it's about) and the actual content, which is indisputably "what the website is about". Content Optimization Writing clear content that uses pertinent language in our intended message or service is the key to content optimization. In your content, include naturally-written, keyword-rich content. This will tie into your META tags, title description and other portions of your site to help you achieve content relevance and thus higher search engine rankings. One note of caution—while we use our best keywords frequently within our text; we should not cram these words into our content. So don't be afraid to break out the thesaurus and include some alternative words and descriptions! Good content SEO is about achieving a balance between what the search engines see, and what your readers expect on arrival. Keyword Research and Optimization Researching our keywords not only gives us an idea of how our competitors are optimizing their websites, but also gives us a treasure-trove of alternative keywords that we can use to further optimize our own sites. There are several online tools that can give us an idea of what keywords are most typically searched for, and how the end-users phrase their searches. This provides avital two-way pathway into the visitor's minds, showing not only how they reach the products and information they seek, but also how they perceive those items. You can find a listing of free keyword research tools at:http://www.joomlawarrior.com. For our example, we'll use Google's freely available keyword suggestion tool for its AdWords program, and use Joomla! itself as our intended optimization candidate.See http://www.google.com/adwords for the keyword tool. The following example will demonstrate the AdWords tool and how it helps you determine good keywords for your site. Entering joomla into Google's keyword suggestion tool yields the following display: The three key pieces of information as seen in the previous figure, which help us inmaking a decision about keywords, are as follows: Keywords: This column indicates the keyword whose Search Volume and Advertiser Competition we want to check. Advertiser Competition: This is graphical indicator of how many ads are in rotation for this keyword. Search Volume: Graphical indication of how many people in the world are searching this keyword for a product or service. As we see from the example, when we search for the keyword joomla we see a lower Advertiser Competition than content management system, but a higher SearchVolume. If we then examine open source we see a heavy Advertiser Competition, but the same Search Volume as joomla. What this means is that if we advertise in the crowded keyword space—"open source", we can expect a lot of competition. Changing our keyword to Joomla! would give us less competition and about the same Search Volume. If we advertise something related to Joomla! then that would be the best choice. However, if we were advertising a tool for open source, we would want to spend our money on the keyword "open source". The last take away from this is if we are selling a joomla template, you see from the figure that there isn't much competition (at the time thiswas taken), but a healthy amount of Search Volume.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.) This article explains how to create and embed 2D and 3D charts. They can also be interactive or static and we will insert them into our Moodle courses. We will mainly work with several spreadsheets in order to include diverse tools and techniques that are also present. The main idea is to display data in charts and provide students with the necessary information for their activities. We will also work with a variety of charts and deal with statistics as a baseline topic in this article. We can either develop a chart or work with ready-to-use data. You can design these types of activities in your Moodle course, together with a math teacher. When thinking of statistics, we generally have in mind a picture of a chart and some percentages representing the data of the chart. We can change that paradigm and create a different way to draw and read statistics in our Moodle course. We design charts with drawings, map charts, links to websites, and other interesting items. We can also redesign the charts, comprising numbers, with different assets because we want not only to enrich, but also strengthen the diversity of the material for our Moodle course since some students are not keen on numbers and dislike activities with them. So, let's give another chance to statistics! There are different types of graphics to show statistics. Therefore, we show a variety of tools available to display different results. No matter what our subject is, we can include these types of graphics in our Moodle course. You can use these graphics to help your students give weight to their arguments and express themselves using key points clearly. We teach students to include graphics, read them, and use them as a tool of communication. We can also work with puzzles related to statistics. That is to say, we can invent a graph and give tips or clues to our students so that they can sort out which percentages belong to the chart. In other words, we can create a listening comprehension activity, a reading comprehension activity, or a math problem. We can just upload or embed the chart, create an appealing activity, and give clues to our students so that they can think of the items belonging to the chart. Inserting column charts In this activity, we work with the website http://populationaction.org/. We work with statistics about different topics that are related to each other. We can explore different countries and use several charts in order to draw conclusions. We can also embed the charts in our Moodle course. Getting ready We need to think of a country to work with. We can compare statistics of population, water, croplands, and forests of different countries in order to draw conclusions about their futures. How to do it... We go to the website mentioned earlier and follow some steps in order to get the HTML code to embed it in our Moodle course. In this case, we choose Canada. These are the steps to follow: Enter http://populationaction.org/ in the browser window. Navigate to Publications | Data & Maps. Click on People in the Balance. Click on the down arrow next to the Country or Region Name search block and choose Canada, as shown in the following screenshot: Go to the bottom of the page and click on Share. Copy the HTML code, as shown in the following screenshot: Click on Done. How it works... It is time to embed the charts in our Moodle course. Another option is to draw the charts using a spreadsheet. So, we choose the weekly outline section where we want to add this activity and perform the following steps: Click on Add an activity or resource. Click on Forum | Add. Complete the Forum name block. Click on the down arrow in Forum type and choose Q and A forum. Complete the Description block. Click on the Edit HTML source icon. Paste the HTML code that was copied. Click on Update. Click on the down arrow next to Subscription mode and choose Forced subscription. Click on Save and display. The activity looks as shown in the following screenshot: Embedding a line chart In this recipe, we will present the estimated number of people (in millions) using a particular language over the Internet. To do this, we may include images in our spreadsheet in accordance with the method being used to design the activity. Instead of writing the name of the languages, we insert the flags that represent the language used. We design the line chart taking into account the statistical operations carried out at http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm. Getting ready We carry out the activity using Google Docs. We have to sign in and follow the steps required to design a spreadsheet file. We have several options for working with the document. After you have an account to work with Google Drive, let's see how to make our line chart! How to do it... We work with s spreadsheet because we need to make calculations and create a chart. First, we need to create a document in the spreadsheet. Therefore, we need to perform the following steps: Click on Create | Spreadsheet, as shown in the following screenshot: Write the name of the languages spoken in the A column. Write the figures in the B column (from the http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm website). Select the data from A1 up to the B11 column. Click on Insert | Chart. Edit your chart using the Chart Editor, as shown in the following screenshot: Click on Insert. Add the images of the flags corresponding to the languages spoken. Position the cursor over C1 and click on Insert | Image.... Another pop-up window will appear. You have several ways to upload images, as shown in the following screenshot: Click on Choose an image to upload and insert the image from your computer. Click on Select. Repeat the same process for all the languages. Steps 7 to 11 are optional. Click on the chart. Click on the down arrow in Share | Publish chart..., as shown in the following screenshot: Click on the down arrow next to Select a public format and choose Image, as shown in the following screenshot: Copy the HTML code that appears, as shown in the previous screenshot. Click on Done. How it works... We have just designed the chart that we want our students to work with. We are going to embed the chart in our Moodle course; another option is to share the spreadsheet and allow students to draw the chart. If you want to design a warm-up activity for students to guess or find out which the top languages used over the Internet are, you could add a chat, forum, or a question in the course. In this recipe, we are going to create a wiki so that students can work together. So, select the weekly outline section where you want to add the activity and perform the following steps: Click on Add an activity or resource. Click on Wiki | Add. Complete the Wiki name and Description blocks. Click on the Edit HTML source icon and paste the HTML code that we have previously copied. Then click on Update. Complete the First page name block. Click on Save and return to course. The activity looks as shown in the following screenshot: