How-To Tutorials - Web Development

  WordPress 3 Complete Create your own complete website or blog from scratch with WordPress Learn everything you need for creating your own feature-rich website or blog from scratch Clear and practical explanations of all aspects of WordPress In-depth coverage of installation, themes, plugins, and syndication Explore WordPress as a fully functional content management system Clear, easy-to-follow, concise; rich with examples and screenshots         Read more about this book       (For more resources on WordPress, see here.) Q: What is WordPress? A: WordPress is an open source blog engine. Open source means that nobody owns it, everybody works on it, and anyone can contribute to it. Blog engine means a software application that can run a blog. It's a piece of software that lives on the web server and makes it easy for you to add and edit posts, themes, comments, and all of your other content. More expansively, WordPress can be called a publishing platform because it is by no means restricted to blogging.   Q: Why choose WordPress? A: WordPress is not the only publishing platform out there, but it has an awful lot to recommend it. A long time in refining Active in development Large community of contributors Amazingly extendable Compliant with W3C standards Multilanguage capable     Q: What are the system requirements for WordPress? A: The minimum system requirement for WordPress is a web server with the following software installed: PHP Version 4.3 or greater MySQL Version 4.1.2 or greater Although Apache and Nginx are highly recommended by the WordPress developers, any server running PHP and MySQL will do.     Q: What are the new features since 2.7? A: If you're new to WordPress, this list may not mean a whole lot to you, but if you're familiar with WordPress and have been using it for a long time, you'll find this list quite enlightening. The following are the new features: Adding support for "include" and "exclude" to [gallery] Changes Remove link on widgets to Delete because it doesn't just remove it, it deletes the settings for that widget instance Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors Improved revision comparison user interface Lots of new template files for custom taxonomies and custom post types, among others Browsing the theme directory and installing themes from the admin Allowing the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns Choosing username and password during installation rather than using "admin"     Q: How do I upgrade the existing Wordpress version with the latest one? A:If you're upgrading from a very early version of WordPress to a very recent version, you should do it in steps. That is, if you find yourself in a situation where you have to upgrade across a large span of version numbers, for example from 2.2 to 3.0.3, I highly recommend doing it in stages. Do the complete upgrade from 2.2 to 2.3.3, then from 2.3.3 to 2.5, then from 2.5 to 2.7, and finally from 2.7 to 3.0.3. When doing this, you can usually do the full content and database backup just once, but verify in between versions that the gradual upgrades are going well before you move onto the next one. You can download the previous stable versions of WordPress from this page: http://wordpress.org/download/release-archive/. Of course, another option would be to simply do a new installation of the latest version of WordPress and then move your previous content into it, and I encourage you to consider this course of action. However, sometimes contents are harder to move than it is to do the upgrades; this will be up to you to decide your specific server situation and your comfort level with the choices.   Q: What is the WordPress Codex? A: The WordPress Codex is the central repository of all the information the official WordPress team has published to help people work with WordPress. The Codex has some basic tutorials for getting started with WordPress, such as a detailed step-by-step discussion of installation, lists of every template tag and hook, and a lot more.     Q: Is WordPress available for download? A: WordPress is available in easily downloadable formats from its website, http://wordpress.org/download/. WordPress is a free, open source application, and is released under GNU General Public License (GPL). Take a look at the following screenshot in which the download links are available on the right side: The .zip file is shown as a big blue button because that'll be the most useful format for the most people. If you are using Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems, your computer will be able to unzip that downloaded file automatically. (The .tar.gz file is provided because some Unix users prefer it.)     Q: What is the WordPress Admin Panel? A: WordPress installs a powerful and flexible administration area where you can manage all of your website content, and do much more. You can always get to the WP Admin by going to this URL: http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/. Your first time here, you'll be re-directed to the login page. In the future, WordPress will check to see if you're already logged in and, if so, you'll skip the login page. Following is the login page:     Q: How do I create a post on the blog that I created? A: To create a post, just click on New Post on the top menu. You'll be taken to the following page: Every post should have, at minimum, a title and some content. So go ahead and write in some text for those two things. When you are happy with it, click on the Publish button.     Q: What do I do if I have lost my password? A: If you have lost your password and can't get into your WP Admin panel, you can easily retrieve your password by clicking on the Lost your password? link on the login page. A newly generated password will be e-mailed to you at the e-mail address you gave during the WordPress installation. This is why you need to be sure that you enter a valid e-mail address. Otherwise, you will not be able to retrieve your password.   Q: What do you mean by Categories and Tags? A: Categories and tags are two types of information that you can add to a blog post. We use them to organize the information in your blog by topic and content (rather than just by, say, date), and to help visitors find what they are looking for on your blog.   Q: Which editor is used for writing and editing posts? A: WordPress comes with a Visual editor, otherwise known as a WYSIWYG editor. This is the default editor for typing and editing your posts. If you're comfortable with HTML, you may prefer to write and edit your posts using the HTML editor—particularly useful if you want to add special content or styling. To switch from the rich text editor to the HTML editor, click on the HTML tab next to the Visual tab at the top of the content box: You'll see your post in all its raw HTML glory, and you'll get a new set of buttons that lets you quickly bold and italicize text, as well as add link code, image code, and so on. You can make changes and swap back and forth between the tabs to see the result.     Q: What are Timestamps and how are they useful? A: WordPress will also let you alter the timestamp of your post. This is useful if you are writing a post today that you wish you'd published yesterday, or if you're writing a post in advance and don't want it to show up until the right day. By default, the timestamp will be set to the moment you publish your post. To change it, just find the Publish box, and click on the Edit link (next to the calendar icon and Publish immediately), and fields will show up with the current date and time for you to change: Change the details, click on the OK button, and then click on Publish to publish your post (or save a draft).     Q: Is there any way in which I can protect my content? A: WordPress gives you the option to hide posts. You can hide a post from everyone but yourself by marking it Private, or you can hide it from everyone but the people with whom you share a password by marking it as Password protected. To implement this, look at the Publish box at the upper right of the Edit Post page. If you click on the Edit link next to Visibility: Public, a few options will appear: If you click on the Password protected radio button, you'll get a box where you can type a password. Visitors to your blog will see the post title along with a note that they have to type in a password to read the post. If you click on the Private radio button, the post will not show up on the blog at all to any viewers, unless you are the viewer and you are logged in. If you leave the post Public and check the Stick this post to the front page checkbox, this post will be the first post on the front page, regardless of its publication date. Be sure to click on the OK button if you make any changes.     Q: What is a Widget? A: A widget is a small box of content, dynamic or not, that shows up somewhere on a widget-enabled site. Often, that location is in the sidebar of a blog, but that's not a rule. A widget area can be anywhere a theme developer wants it to be. Common widgets contain: A monthly archive of blog posts Recent comments posted on the blog A clickable list of categories A tag cloud A search box, and so on     Q: How do I add an Image gallery to my post? A: You can add an image gallery to any page or post in your website using WordPress's built-in Image Gallery functionality. There are just three simple steps: Choose a post or page for your image gallery. Upload the images you want in that gallery. Add a plugin, such as lightbox plugin, that will streamline your gallery, and save it. A lightbox effect is when the existing page content fades a little and a new item appears on top of the existing page. We can easily add the same effect to your galleries by adding a plugin. There are a number of lightbox plugins available, but the one I like these days uses jQuery Colorbox. Find this plugin, either through the WP Admin or in the Plugins Repository (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jquery-colorbox/), and install it.   Summary In this article we covered some of the most frequently asked questions on WordPress 3. Further resources on this subject: WordPress 2.8 Themes Cookbook [Book] Getting Started with WordPress 3 [Article] How to Create an Image Gallery in WordPress 3 [Article] Performing Setup Tasks in the WordPress Admin Panel [Article]

Moodle Security Moodle is an open source CMS (Course Management System)/LMS (Learning Management System)/VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). Its primary purpose is to enable educational institutions and individuals to create and publish learning content in a coherent and pedagogically valuable manner, so that it can be used for successful knowledge transfer towards students. That sounds harmless enough. Why would anybody want to illegally access an educational platform? There are various motives of computer criminals. In general, they are people committed to the circumvention of computer security. This primarily concerns unauthorized remote computer break-ins via a communication network such as the Internet. Some of the motives could be: Financial: Stealing user and/or course information and selling it to other third-parties Personal: Personal grudge, infantile display of power, desire to alter assigned grades, and so on Weak points Moodle is a web application and as such must be hosted on a computer connected to some kind of network (private or public—Internet / Intranet). This computer must have the following components: Operating System (OS) Web server PHP Database server Moodle Each of these pieces can be used as a point of attack by a malicious user(s) in order to obtain access to the protected information. Therefore, it is our task to make all of them as secure as possible. The main focus will be directed towards our Moodle and PHP configuration. The secure installation of Moodle In this section we follow a secure installation of Moodle. In case you do not already have an installed instance of Moodle, we will show you the quickest way to do that, and at the same time focus on security. If you already have Moodle installed, go to the following section where you will see how to secure an existing installation of Moodle Starting from scratch In order to install Moodle on your server you need to install and configure the web server with support for PHP and the database server. We will not go into the specifics of setting up a particular web server, PHP, and/or database server right now, since it depends on the OS your server has installed. Also we will not explain in detail tasks like creating directories, setting up file permissions, etc as they are OS specific and out of the scope of this article. This section assumes you already know about your OS and have already configured your web server with an empty database. Every installation of Moodle must have: Web server with PHP support Dedicated database Two dedicated directories—one for Moodle and another for platform data We assume that your web server is Apache (Linux) or IIS (Windows), and that you use PHP 5.1.x or later and MySQL 5.0 or later. Installation checklist The following checklist will guide you through the basic installation procedure for Moodle. Download the latest stable version of Moodle from http://download. moodle.org/. (At the time of writing this article it is 1.9.8+). You have two options available on the download page—moodle-weekly-19.tgz or moodle-weekly-19.zip archive. In case you use Linux you can choose either. In case of Windows, ZIP file is the preferred choice. The reason for this is simple. Every Windows server comes, by default, with installed support for managing Zip archives. On the other hand, TGZ is readily available on every Linux distribution. Unpack the compressed file you just downloaded. This will produce a directory with the name moodle which contains all of the platform files. Move that directory to the web-root of your web server. After doing that it is recommended to make all files read-only for safety reasons. Create a directory called moodledata somewhere on the disk. Make sure that it is not in the web-root of your web server since that would incur a serious security breach. Doing that might expose all platform files submitted by course participants and teachers together with the course content to the outside world. Create an empty database (we suggest the name moodle or moodledb). The default database character set must be configured to utf8 and collation set to utf8_general_ci. It is recommended to have a special user for accessing this database with limited permissions. In case of credentials theft, a malicious user could only operate on data from one database, minimizing the potential damage. That database user account will need permissions for creating, altering, and deleting the tables, creating/dropping the indexes and reading/writing the data. Here is what you need to execute in your MySQL console for creating a database and user: CREATE DATABASE moodle CHARSET 'utf8' COLLATION 'utf8_general_ ci'; CREATE USER 'moodle'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'somepass'; GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER ON loomdb.* TO loom@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'somepass'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; Start the installation by opening the http://url to local installation of the moodle (for example http://localhost/moodle) in your browser. Make sure it is a more recent browser with pop ups and JavaScript enabled. We recommend Internet Explorer 8+ or Firefox 3.6+. You will see the following screenshot. On the next screen, we need to specify the web address of the platform and the location of the moodle directory on the disk. Now, we must configure database access. Choose MySQL as database type, localhost as host server, set the name of the database (moodle), database user, and its password (moodle/moodle). You should leave the table prefix as is. Moodle checks the server configuration on this screen and displays the outcome. We can proceed with the installation only if all of the minimal requirements are met. During installation, Moodle generates a configuration file within the moodle directory called config.php. It is important to make this file read-only after installation for security reasons. In case Moodle cannot save config.php it will offer to download or copy content of the file and manually place it in the appropriate location on the server. See the following screenshot: We are now presented with terms of usage and license agreement. To proceed click yes. We can now start the installation itself. During that process Moodle will create all of the tables in the database, session files in the moodledata directory, and load some initial information. Make sure you check Unattended operation at the bottom. That way, the process will be executed without user intervention. After the database setup is finished, we are offered a new screen where we must configure the administrative account. With this user you manage your platform, so be careful about disclosing this information to other users. Field name Description Recommended action Username Defines user name inside the Moodle. By default it is admin. We recommend leaving the default value unchanged. New password Defines user logon password. Must supply valid password. First name Defines name of the admin. Must supply valid name. Surname Defines surname of the admin. Must supply valid name. E-mail address Defines user e-mail address. Must supply valid e-mail. E-mail display Define the visibility of your e-mail address within the platform. We recommend leaving it as is (visible to all). E-mail active Defines whether e-mail is activated or not. Set it to enable. City/Town Defines name of the city where you live. Moodle requires this value. Select Country Name of your country. Set it to your country name. Timezone Sets your time zone so that server can display time calculated for your location in some reports. If not sure what your time zone is, leave it as is.   Preferred language Choose the platform language. By default, Moodle comes only with support for English language. If you want to add more languages visit http://download.moodle.org/ lang16/ and download and install the appropriate files.   After configuring administrative user there is just one more step to complete and that is setting up the site title and short name. In the Full site name field, place the long name you would like to set for your website; it can have multiple words. In the Short name for the site field put one word without spaces which will represent your website. In the Front Page Description field put a longer description (one paragraph) that explains in more detail the purpose of your site. This is optional and does not affect the Moodle functionality at all You have now finished installing Moodle and should see the following screenshot:

Alfresco 3 Business Solutions It is becoming more and more common that an ECM solution should include the possibility of storing e-mails in the repository, so they can be managed and searched in the same way all other content can. When we talk about managing e-mails in the content management system, it is important to know exactly what we mean by that. Today most companies and organizations want to use Alfresco for e-mail archiving, which is not something that is easily supported out of the box. E-mail integration solutions There are a number of different ways that an e-mail system can be integrated with the Alfresco CMS system. We will look at three of these and present advantages and disadvantages with each one. The three different e-mail integration solutions are: E-mail client talking directly to Alfresco via the IMAP protocol E-mail client talking to Alfresco via custom built plugin and Web Scripts E-mail server talking to Alfresco via custom module and Web Scripts E-mail client talking directly to Alfresco via the IMAP protocol This is the solution that is available out of the box with Alfresco. From version 3.2 and onwards Alfresco supports the IMAP protocol, which is one way an e-mail client can talk to e-mail servers (the other way is POP). So, with this solution Alfresco can behave like an IMAP e-mail server. The following image illustrates how this solution works: The e-mail clients typically receive an e-mail in their Inbox and then they can drag-and-drop that e-mail into an Alfresco folder via the IMAP channel. Any attachment can be extracted and handled separately to the e-mail in the Alfresco repository. This is a manual process that requires the end user to manage what e-mails he or she wants to be stored in Alfresco. Nothing happens automatically and no e-mails are stored in Alfresco unless a user manually drag-and-drops them there To achieve automatic archiving of e-mails, a user could set up an e-mail rule in their e-mail client that automatically files some or all e-mails into an Alfresco folder. However, we would still have to manually set up this rule on all users' e-mail clients. So we could not say that this would be an archiving solution that is transparent to the user, as it does not automatically force all e-mails to be saved for auditing purposes. Further on, the e-mail client has to be running in order for the e-mail rule to execute. This solution is best thought of as an e-mail management solution where users collaborate and share information in e-mails. The advantages of this solution are: No client installation:In most e-mail clients we can set up an extra IMAP account connecting to Alfresco without the need to install any extra software on the client workstation. This includes Outlook, Lotus Notes, Mozilla Thunderbird, and GroupWise. Users don't have to change working style:This is a big thing, users do not want to start learning a complete new way of managing e-mails, they just want to work in the same way they always have. The Alfresco account just shows up as another e-mail inbox in the e-mail client. Users can drag-and-drop e-mails between mailboxes just as they normally do. They do not have to learn any extra functionality. Users don't have to change working style:This is a big thing, users do not want to start learning a complete new way of managing e-mails, they just want to work in the same way they always have. The Alfresco account just shows up as another e-mail inbox in the e-mail client. Users can drag-and-drop e-mails between mailboxes just as they normally do. They do not have to learn any extra functionality. Supported out-of-the-box:No need to install any extra Alfresco modules, just configure some properties and the solution is ready to go. The disadvantages of this solution are: No document search:Users cannot search for documents in Alfresco and then attach them to an e-mail they want to send. Cannot set custom metadata:Because this solution does not use any custom plugin on the e-mail client side there is no possibility of setting custom metadata for an e-mail, such as for example customer ID, before it is stored in Alfresco. However, you can often solve this problem by creating business rules on the server-side and apply custom metadata based on which folder an e-mail is dropped into. No archiving solution:This is an e-mail collaboration and e-mail sharing solution, it does not force e-mail to be stored in the repository for compliance and regulatory reasons. Because this solution doesn't require any client installation, or updates to the Alfresco server, it will probably be the most popular e-mail management solution. It can also easily be extended with folder rules to create sophisticated e-mail filing solutions. E-mail client talking to Alfresco through custom built plugin and Web Scripts There are one or two products out there that have taken a different approach to integrating e-mail clients with Alfresco. One of these products is Anovio Email Management solution for Outlook 2007 (http://www.anovio.de/aem). This product provides a solution that enables you to also work with documents from the e-mail client, and search for documents via the e-mail client. To do this they had to implement a plugin for the e-mail client that is almost exclusively Outlook, and use Web Scripts to talk to Alfresco. The IMAP channel approach is not used as it can only handle e-mails. The following picture gives us an overview of this solution: This solution is also an e-mail management solution as it is up to the end user to actually save the e-mail into the repository. There is no automatic archiving going on. The advantages of this solution are: Document search: You can do a full text search for documents in the repository via the e-mail client. A document can then be attached to an e-mail that is about to be sent. Users don't have to change working style: Users can drag-and-drop e-mails into the Alfresco repository in a way they are used to. They do not have to use, and learn, the extra document management functionality in the Outlook plugin if they do not want to. Stores attachments directly: Attachments can be stored directly into the repository without storing the e-mail. Stores attachments directly: Attachments can be stored directly into the repository without storing the e-mail. The disadvantages of this solution are: Client installationYou can do a full text search for documents in the repository via the e-mail client. A document can then be attached to an e-mail that is about to be sent. Does not work for all e-mail clientsIt works only with certain e-mail clients, such as for example Outlook 2007, in the case of the Anovio product. Users have to learn new functionalityIf users want to handle documents from the e-mail client then they have to learn new functionality. Also, there are usually new menus and features users have to learn even for the standard e-mail management functionality. No archiving solution:This is an e-mail collaboration and sharing solution, it does not force e-mail to be stored in the repository for compliance and regulation reasons. Not supported out of the box:It is not a part of the Alfresco package, so will need to be purchased separately. This kind of solution can be very good for users that frequently need to attach documents from the Alfresco repository to e-mails that they are sending. However, if there is a larger user base, the maintenance burden could be quite substantial as you would need to install the plugin on every user's PC. E-mail server talking to Alfresco through custom module and Web Scripts This is the classical e-mail archiving solution where the e-mail system integration has been done on the e-mail server-side. This solution is totally transparent for the end users and usually complies with security regulations. What this means is that all e-mails are archived automatically without the user having to do anything, which guarantees that every incoming and outgoing e-mail has been filed and can be audited later. There are—unfortunately, at the time of writing—no such solutions available for Alfresco. But for reference purposes this is how such a solution would typically look: This solution would require us to build an extension module for the e-mail server that captures all inbound and outbound e-mails and stores them in Alfresco without the users having to do anything. So all e-mails are captured and stored for archiving and auditing purposes. Users can then for example, access the e-mails through the standard IMAP channel, if they are stored as standard MIME messages according to RFC-822 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822) The advantages of this solution are: Supports archiving and auditingThis is the only solution that would be compliant with security regulations as users are not involved, and cannot decide if an e-mail should be stored or not. Users don't have to change working styleUsers can use their standard e-mail client to view archived e-mails. The disadvantages of this solution are: Requires server installation:We need to have access to the e-mail server and be able to install the integration module. This might be challenging in many situations when you might not be allowed to install anything on the e-mail server, or the e-mail server might be hosted externally so we would not have access to it. Attachments are not extracted:The attachments would probably not be extracted and sorted into their own subfolder. This is assumed as the purpose of an e-mail archiving solution to store the complete original e-mail for auditing reasons, and not for e-mail management use. Not a collaboration and sharing solutionE-mails are stored in an archiving structure and not in a project or case structure. Users would have more difficulty in collaborating around e-mail content. Duplicate e-mails exist:There would be a lot of duplicate e-mails because of security regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley that requires all e-mails to be stored for auditing purpose, even if it is a duplicate. Not supported out of the boxIt is not a part of the Alfresco package so will need to be purchased separately, if it is available This solution is mentioned here so we can easily tell the difference between an e-mail management solution and an e-mail archiving solution when we discuss this with potential clients. There has been a lot of misunderstanding around what e-mail integration solutions are currently available for Alfresco, where they are sometimes referred to as e-mail archiving solutions, which they are not.

  Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook Over 100 clear step-by-step recipes to create powerful, great-looking Drupal themes Take control of the look and feel of your Drupal website Tips and tricks to get the most out of Drupal's theming system Learn how to customize existing themes and create unique themes from scratch Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible         Read more about this book       (For more resources on Drupal, see here.) Introduction JavaScript libraries take out the majority of the hassle involved in writing code which will be executed in a variety of browsers each with its own vagaries. Drupal, by default, uses jQuery, a lightweight, robust, and well-supported package which, since its introduction, has become one of the most popular libraries in use today. While it is possible to wax eloquent about its features and ease of use, its most appealing factor is that it is a whole lot of fun! jQuery's efficiency and flexibility lies in its use of CSS selectors to target page elements and its use of chaining to link and perform commands in sequence. As an example, let us consider the following block of HTML which holds the items of a typical navigation menu. <div class="menu"> <ul class="menu-list"> <li>Item 1</li> <li>Item 2</li> <li>Item 3</li> <li>Item 4</li> <li>Item 5</li> <li>Item 6</li> </ul></div> Now, let us consider the situation where we want to add the class active to the first menu item in this list and, while we are at it, let us also color this element red. Using arcane JavaScript, we would have accomplished this with something like the following: var elements = document.getElementsByTagName("ul");for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) { if (elements[i].className === "menu-list") { elements[i].childNodes[0].style.color = '#F00'; if (!elements[i].childNodes[0].className) { elements[i].childNodes[0].className = 'active'; } else { elements[i].childNodes[0].className = elements[i].childNodes[0].className + ' active'; } }} Now, we would accomplish the same task using jQuery as follows: $("ul.menu-list li:first-child").css('color', '#F00').addClass('active'); The statement we have just seen can be effectively read as: Retrieve all UL tags classed menu-list and having LI tags as children, take the first of these LI tags, style it with some CSS which sets its color to #F00 (red) and then add a class named active to this element. For better legibility, we can format the previous jQuery with each chained command on a separate line. $("ul.menu-list li:first-child") .css('color', '#F00') .addClass('active'); We are just scratching the surface here. More information and documentation on jQuery's features are available at http://jquery.com and http://www.visualjquery.com. A host of plugins which, like Drupal's modules, extend and provide additional functionality, are available at http://plugins.jquery.com. Another aspect of JavaScript programming that has improved in leaps and bounds is in the field of debugging. With its rising ubiquity, developers have introduced powerful debugging tools that are integrated into browsers and provide tools, such as interactive debugging, flow control, logging and monitoring, and so on, which have traditionally only been available to developers of other high-level languages. Of the many candidates out there, the most popular and feature-rich is Firebug. It can be downloaded and installed from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/ firefox/addon/1843. Including JavaScript files from a theme This recipe will list the steps required to include a JavaScript file from the .info file of the theme. We will be using the file to ensure that it is being included by outputting the standard Hello World! string upon page load. Getting ready While the procedure is the same for all the themes, we will be using the Zen-based myzen theme in this recipe. How to do it... The following steps are to be performed inside the myzen theme folder at sites/all/ themes/myzen. Browse into the js subfolder where JavaScript files are conventionally stored. Create a file named hello.js and open it in an editor. Add the following code: alert("Hello World!!"); Save the file and exit the editor. Browse back up to the myzen folder and open myzen.info in an editor. Include our new script using the following syntax: scripts[] = js/hello.js Save the file and exit the editor. Rebuild the theme registry and if JavaScript optimization is enabled for the site, the cache will also need to be cleared. View any page on the site to see our script taking effect. How it works... Once the theme registry is rebuilt and the cache cleared, Drupal adds hello.js to its list of JavaScript files to be loaded and embeds it in the HTML page. The JavaScript is executed before any of the content is displayed on the page and the resulting page with the alert dialog box should look something like the following screenshot: There's more... While we have successfully added our JavaScript in this recipe, Drupal and jQuery provide efficient solutions to work around this issue of the JavaScript being executed as soon as the page is loaded. Executing JavaScript only after the page is rendered A solution to the problem of the alert statement being executed before the page is ready, is to wrap our JavaScript inside jQuery's ready() function. Using it ensures that the code within is executed only once the page has been rendered and is ready to be acted upon. if (Drupal.jsEnabled) { $(document).ready(function () { alert("Hello World!!"); });} Furthermore, we have wrapped the ready() function within a check for Drupal.jsEnabled which acts as a global killswitch. If this variable is set to false, then JavaScript is turned off for the entire site and vice versa. It is set to true by default provided that the user's browser meets Drupal's requirements. Drupal's JavaScript behaviors While jQuery's ready() function works well, Drupal recommends the use of behaviors to manage our use of JavaScript. Our Hello World example would now look like this: Drupal.behaviors.myzenAlert = function (context) { alert("Hello World!!");}; All registered behaviors are called automatically by Drupal once the page is ready. Drupal.behaviors also allows us to forego the call to the ready() function as well as the check for jsEnabled as these are done implicitly. As with most things Drupal, it is always a good idea to namespace our behaviors based on the module or theme name to avoid conflicts. In this case, the behavior name has been prefixed with myzen as it is part of the myzen theme.

As with the Domain, there are two basic paths in FEM to accessing things in an Object Store. The tree-view in the left-hand panel can be expanded to show Object Stores and many repository objects within them, as illustrated in the screenshot below. Each individual Object Store has a right-click context menu. Selecting Properties from that menu will bring up a multi-tabbed pop-up panel. We'll look first at the General tab of that panel. Content Access Recording Level Ordinarily, the Content Engine (CE) server does not keep track of when a particular document's content was last retrieved because it requires an expensive database update that is often uninteresting. The ContentAccessRecordingLevel property on the Object Store can be used to enable the recording of this optional information in a document or annotation's DateContentLastAccessed property. It is off by default. It is sometimes interesting to know, for example, that document content was accessed within the last week as opposed to three years ago. Once a particular document has had its content read, there is a good chance that there will be a few additional accesses in the same neighborhood of time (not for a technical reason; rather, it's just statistically likely). Rather than record the last access time for each access, an installation can choose, via this property's value, to have access times recorded only with a granularity of hourly or daily. This can greatly reduce the number of database updates while still giving a suitable approximation of the last access time. There is also an option to update the DateContentLastAccessed property on every access. Auditing The CE server can record when clients retrieve or update selected objects. Enabling that involves setting up subscriptions to object instances or classes. This is quite similar to the event subsystem in the CE server. Because it can be quite elaborate to set up the necessary auditing configuration, it can also be enabled or disabled completely at the Object Store level. Checkout type The CE server offers two document checkout types, Collaborative and Exclusive. The difference lies in who is allowed to perform the subsequent checkin. An exclusive checkout will only allow the same user to do the checkin. Via an API, an application can make the explicit choice for one type or the other, or it can use the Object Store default value. Using the default value is often handy since a given application may not have any context for deciding one form over another. Even with a collaborative checkout, the subsequent checkin is still subject to access checks, so you can still have fine-grained control over that. In fact, because you can use fine-grained security to limit who can do a checkin, you might as well make the Object Store default be Collaborative unless you have some specific use case that demands Exclusive. Text Index Date Partitioning Most of the values on the CBR tab, as shown in the figure next, are read-only because they are established when the Content Search Engine (CSE) is first set up. One item that can be changed on a per-Object Store basis is the date-based partitioning of text index collections. Partitioning of the text index collections allows for more efficient searching of large collections because the CE can narrow its search to a specific partition or partitions rather than searching the entirety of the text index. By default, there is no partitioning. If you check the box to change the partition settings, the Date Property drop-down presents a list of date-valued custom properties. In the screenshot above, you see the custom properties Received On and Sent On, which are from email-related documents. Once you select one of those properties, you're offered a choice of partitioning granularity, ranging from one month up to one year. Additional text index configuration properties are available if you select the Index Areas node in the FEM tree-view, then right-click an index area entry and select Properties. Although we are showing the screenshot here for reference, your environment may not yet have a CSE or any index areas if the needed installation procedures are not complete. Cache configuration Just as we saw at the Domain level, the Cache tab allows the configuration of various cache tuning parameters for each Object Store. As we've said before, you don't want to change these values without a good reason. The default values are suitable for most situations. Metadata One of the key features of CM is that it has an extensible metadata structure. You don't have to work within a fixed framework of pre-defined document properties. You can add additional properties to the Document class, and you can even make subclasses of Document for specific purposes. For example, you might have a subclass called CustomerProfile, another subclass called DesignDocument, yet another subclass called ProductDescription, and so on. Creating subclasses lets you define just the properties you need to specialize the class to your particular business purpose. There is no need to have informal rules about where properties should be ignored because they're not applicable. There is also generally no need to have a property that marks a document as a CustomerProfile versus something else. The class provides that distinction. CM comes with a set of pre-defined system classes, and each class has a number of pre-defined system properties (many of which are shared across most system classes). There are pre-defined system classes for Document, Folder, Annotation, CustomObject, and many others. The classes just mentioned are often described as the business object classes because they are used to directly implement common business application concepts. System properties are properties for which the CE server has some specifically-coded behavior. Some system properties are used to control server behavior, and others provide reports of some kind of system state. We've seen several examples already in the Domain and Object Store objects. It's common for applications to create their own subclasses and custom properties as part of their installation procedures, but it is equally common to do similar things manually via FEM. FEM contains several wizards to make the process simpler for the administrator, but, behind the scenes, various pieces are always in play. Property templates The foundation for any custom property is a property template. If you select the Property Templates node in the tree view, you will see a long list of existing property templates. Double-clicking on any item in the list will reveal that property template's properties. A property template is an independently persistable object, so it has its own identity and security. Most system properties do not have explicit property templates. Their characteristics come about from a different mechanism internal to the CE server. Property templates have that name because the characteristics they define act as a pattern for properties added to classes, where the property is embodied in a property definition for a particular class. Some of the property template properties can be overridden in a property definition, but some cannot. For example, the basic data type and cardinality cannot be changed once a property template is created. On the other hand, things like settability and a value being required can be modified in the property definition. When creating a new property with no existing property template, you can either create the property template independently, ahead of time, or you can follow the FEM wizard steps for adding a property to a class. FEM will prompt you with additional panels if you need to create a property template for the property being added. Choice lists Most property types allow for a few simple validity checks to be enforced by the CE server. For example, an integer-valued property has an optional minimum and maximum value based on its intended use (in addition to the expected absolute constraints imposed by the integer data type). For some use cases, it is desirable to limit the allowed values to a specific list of items. The mechanism for that in the CE server is the choice list, and it's available for stringvalued and integer-valued properties. If you select the Choice Lists node in the FEM tree view, you will see a list of existing top-level choice lists. The example choice lists in the screenshot below all happen to come from AddOns installed in the Object Store. Double-clicking on any item in the list will reveal that choice list's properties. A choice list is an independently persistable object, so it has its own identity and security. We've mentioned independent objects a couple of times, and more mentions are coming. For now, it is enough to think of them as objects that can be stored or retrieved in their own right. Most independent objects have their own access security. Contrast independent objects with dependent objects that only exist within the context of some independent object. A choice list is a collection of choice objects, although a choice list may be nested hiearchically. That is, at any position in a choice list there can be another choice list rather than a simple choice. A choice object consists of a localizable display name and a choice value (a string or an integer, depending on the type of choice list). Nested choice lists can only be referenced within some top-level choice list. Classes Within the FEM tree view are two nodes describing classes: Document Class and Other Classes. Documents are listed separately only for user convenience (since Document subclasses occur most frequently). You can think of these two nodes as one big list. In any case, expanding the node in the tree reveals hierarchically nested subclasses. Selecting a class from the tree reveals any subclasses and any custom properties. The screenshot shows the custom class EntryTemplate, which comes from a Workplace AddOn. You can see that it has two subclasses, RecordsTemplate and WebContentTemplate, and four custom properties. When we mention a specific class or property name, like EntryTemplate, we try to use the symbolic name, which has a restricted character set and never contains spaces. The FEM screenshots tend to show display names. Display names are localizable and can contain any Unicode character. Although the subclassing mechanism in CM generally mimics the subclassing concept in modern object-oriented programming languages, it does have some differences. You can add custom properties to an existing class, including many system classes. Although you can change some characteristics of properties on a subclass, there are restrictions on what you can do. For example, a particular string property on a subclass must have a maximum length equal to or less than that property's maximum length on the superclass.

Getting Started with IBM FileNet P8 Content Manager Install, customize, and administer the powerful FileNet Enterprise Content Management platform Quickly get up to speed on all significant features and the major components of IBM FileNet P8 Content Manager Provides technical details that are valuable both for beginners and experienced Content Management professionals alike, without repeating product reference documentation Gives a big picture description of Enterprise Content Management and related IT areas to set the context for Content Manager Written by an IBM employee, Bill Carpenter, who has extensive experience in Content Manager product development, this book gives practical tips and notes with a step-by-step approach to design real Enterprise Content Management solutions to solve your business needs        The following will be covered in the next article. A discussion of an Object Store and what's in it An example of creating a custom class and adding custom properties to it FEM must run on a Microsoft Windows machine. Even if you are using virtual machine images or other isolated servers for your CM environment, you might wish to install FEM on a normal Windows desktop machine for your own convenience. Domain and GCD Here's a simple question: what is a P8 Domain? It's easy to give a simple answer—it's the top-level container of all P8 things in a given installation. That needs a little clarification, though, because it seems a little circular; things are in a Domain because a Domain knows about them. In a straightforward technical sense, things are in the same Domain if they share the same Global Configuration Database (GCD) . The GCD is, literally, a database. If we were installing additional CE servers, they would share that GCD if we wanted them to be part of the same Domain. When you first open FEM and look at the tree view in the left-hand panel, most of the things you are looking at are things at the Domain level. We'll be referring to the FEM tree view often, and we're talking about the left-hand part of the user interface, as seen in the following screenshot: FEM remembers the state of the tree view from session to session. When you start FEM the next time, it will try to open the nodes you had open when you exited. That will often mean something of a delay as it reads extensive data for each open Object Store node. You might find it a useful habit to close up all of the nodes before you exit FEM. Most things within a Domain know about and can connect directly to each other, and nothing in a given Domain knows about any other Domain. The GCD, and thus the Domain, contains: Simple properties of the Domain object itself Domain-level objects Configuration objects for more complex aspects of the Domain environment Pointers to other components, both as part of the CE environment and external to it It's a little bit subjective as to which things are objects and which are pointers to other components. It's also a little bit subjective as to what a configuration object is for something and what a set of properties is of that something. Let's not dwell on those philosophical subtleties. Let's instead look at a more specific list: Properties: These simple properties control the behavior of or describe characteristics of the Domain itself. Name and ID: Like most P8 objects, a Domain has both a Name and an ID. It's counterintuitive, but you will rarely need to know these, and you might even sometimes forget the name of your own Domain. The reason is that you will always be connecting to some particular CE server, and that CE server is a member of exactly one Domain. Therefore, all of the APIs related to a Domain object are able to use a defaulting mechanism that means "the current Domain". Database schemas: There are properties containing the database schemas for an Object Store for each type of database supported by P8. CM uses this schema, which is an actual script of SQL statements, by default when first fleshing out a new Object Store to create tables and columns. Interestingly, you can customize the schema when you perform the Object Store creation task (either via FEM or via the API), but you should not do so on a whim. Permissions: The Domain object itself is subject to access controls, and so it has a Permissions property. The actual set of access rights available is specific to Domain operations, but it is conceptually similar to access control on other objects. Domain-level objects: A few types of objects are contained directly within the Domain itself. We'll talk about configuration objects in a minute, but there are a couple of non-configuration objects in the Domain. AddOns: An AddOn is a bundle of metadata representing the needs of a discrete piece of functionality that is not built into the CE server. Some are provided with the product, and others are provided by third parties. An AddOn must first be created, and it is then available in the GCD for possible installation in one or more Object Stores. Marking Sets: Marking Sets are a Mandatory Access Control mechanism, Security Features and Planning. Individual markings can be applied to objects in an Object Store, but the overall definition resides directly under Domain so that they may be applied uniformly across all Object Stores. Configuration objects: Directories: All CM authentication and authorization ultimately comes down to data obtained from an LDAP directory. Some of those lookups are done by the application server, and some are done directly by the CE server. The directory configuration objects tell the CE server how to communicate with that directory or directories. Subsystem configurations: There are several logical subsystems within the CE that are controlled by their own fl avors of subsystem configuration objects. Examples include trace logging configuration and CSE configuration. These are typically configured at the domain level and inherited by lower level topology nodes. A description of topology nodes is coming up in the next section of this article. Pointers to components: Content Cache Areas: The Domain contains configuration information for content caches, which are handy for distributed deployments. Rendition Engines: The Domain contains configuration and connectivity information for separately installed Rendition Engines (sometimes called publishing engines). Fixed Content Devices: The domain contains configuration and connectivity information for external devices and federation sources for content. PE Connection Points and Isolated Regions: The domain contains configuration and connectivity information for the Process Engine. Object Stores: The heart of the CE ecosystem is the collection of ObjectStores. Text Search Engine: The Domain contains configuration and connectivity information for a separately-installed Content Search Engine. In addition to the items directly available in the tree view shown above, most of the remainder of the items contained directly within the Domain are available one way or another in the pop-up panel you get when you right-click on the Domain node in FEM and select Properties. The pop-up panel General tab contains FEM version information. The formatting may look a little strange because the CM release number, including any fix packs, and build number are mapped into the Microsoft scheme for putting version info into DLL properties. In the previous figures, 4.51.0.100 represents CM 4.5.1.0, build 100. That's reinforced by the internal designation of the build number, dap451.100, in parentheses. Luckily, you don't really have to understand this scheme. You may occasionally be asked to report the numbers to IBM support, but a faithful copying is all that is required. Topology levels There is an explicit hierarchical topology for a Domain. It shows up most frequently when configuring subsystems. For example, CE server trace logging can be configured at any of the topology levels, with the most specific configuration settings being used. What we mean by that should be clearer once we've explained how the topology levels are used. You can see these topology levels in the expanded tree view in the left-hand side of FEM in the following screenshot: At the highest level of the hierarchy is the Domain, discussed in the previous section. It corresponds to all of the components in the CE part of the CM installation. Within a domain are one or more sites. The best way to think of a site is as a portion of a Domain located in a particular geographic area. That matters because networked communications differ in character between geographically separate areas when compared to communications within an area. The difference in character is primarily due to two factors—latency and bandwidth. Latency is a characterization of the amount of time it takes a packet to travel from one end of a connection to another. It takes longer for a network packet to travel a long distance, both because of the laws of physics and because there will usually be more network switching and routing components in the path. Bandwidth is a characterization of how much information can be carried over a connection in some fixed period of time. Bandwidth is almost always more constrained over long distances due to budgetary or capacity limits. Managing network traffic traveling between geographic areas is an important planning factor for distributed deployments. A site contains one or more virtual servers. A virtual server is a collection of CE servers that act functionally as if they were a single server (from the point of view of the applications). Most often, this situation comes about through the use of clustering or farming for high availability or load balancing reasons. A site might contain multiple virtual servers for any reason that makes sense to the enterprise. Perhaps, for example, the virtual servers are used to segment different application mixes or user populations. A virtual server contains one or more servers. A server is a single, addressable CE server instance running in a J2EE application server. These are sometimes referred to as physical servers, but in the 21st century that is often not literally true. In terms of running software, the only things that tangibly exist are individual CE servers. There is no independently-running piece of software that is the Domain or GCD. There is no separate piece of software that is an Object Store (except in the sense that it's a database mediated by the RDBMS software). All CE activity happens in a CE server. There may be other servers running software in CM—Process Engine, Content Search Engine, Rendition Engine, and Application Engine. The previous paragraph is just trying to clarify that there is no piece of running software representing the topology levels other than the server. You don't have to worry about runtime requests being handed off to another level up or down the topological hierarchy. Not every installation will have the need to distinguish all of those topology levels. In our all-in-one installation, the Domain contains a single site. That site was created automatically during installation and is conventionally called Initial Site, though we could change that if we wanted to. The site contains a single virtual server, and that virtual server contains a single server. This is typical for a development or demo installation, but you should be able to see how it could be expanded with the defined topology levels to any size deployment, even to a deployment that is global in scope. You could use these different topology levels for a scheme other than the one just described; the only downside would be that nobody else would understand your deployment terms. Using topology levels We mentioned previously that many subsystems can be configured at any of the levels. Although it's most common to do domain-wide configuration, you might, for example, want to enable trace logging on a single CE server for some troubleshooting purpose. When interpreting subsystem configuration data, the CE server first looks for configuration data for the local CE server (that is, itself). If any is found, it is used. Otherwise, the CE server looks for configuration data for the containing virtual server, then the containing site, and then the Domain. Where present, the most specific configuration data is used. A set of configuration data, if used, is used as the complete configuration. That is, the configuration objects at different topology levels are not blended to create an "effective configuration". CE has a feature called request forwarding. Because the conversation between the CE server and the database holding an Object Store is chattier than the conversation between CE clients and the CE server, there can be a performance benefit to having requests handled by a CE server that is closer, in networking terms, to that database. When a CE server forwards a request internally to another CE server, it uses a URL configured on a virtual server. The site object holds the configuration options for whether CE servers can forward requests and whether they can accept forwarded requests. Sites are the containers for content cache areas, text index areas, Rendition Engine connections, storage areas, and Object Stores. That is, each of those things is associated with a specific site.

VirtualBox 3.1: Beginner's Guide Virtualization is a powerful tool that can make your PC duties easier, no matter if you're a programmer, a systems administrator, a power user, or even a beginner. Have you ever wanted to test the popular Joomla! Content Management System (CMS), but couldn't spare the time and effort to install it in your PC, along with the Apache web server and the MySQL database server? Are you afraid to install Apache, MySQL and PHP in your only PC because it could mess things up? Well, you can forget about all the hassle thanks to Oracle VirtualBox, a powerful virtualization software product that lets you create one or more virtual machines, or VMs, inside your physical PC. Each VM is completely isolated from your main PC and all the other VMs, so it's like having several computers in one physical package, but you don't need the extra space to accommodate all the additional LCDs and PC cases. Cool, huh? In this article, I'm going to show you one of the quickest ways to set up a fully-functional web server right from your own home/office. And why would you need to do something like that? Well, if you want to create a website to establish your own presence on the Internet, there are some costs involved. First of all, you need to pay for a web hosting service and a domain name. So, if you want to learn how to create websites, this would be a perfect way to do it, since all the software we´ll use is free, and with the DynDNS dynamic DNS service, you don't need to pay for a domain name because you can also use one for free. Furthermore, since you're going to host your website on your virtual machine, you can also forget about the web hosting fee. Are these reasons good enough to start experimenting with virtual machines? I'm pretty sure they are! I decided to use the Joomla! Content Management System (CMS) because it has all you need to establish your Internet presence. The TurnkeyLinux Joomla! virtual appliance includes everything you need to have a website running right out of the box, so you won't have to go through the hassle of installing all the required web server software (Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.). And in case something goes wrong, you can just wipe out your virtual machine and start again from scratch. How about that? The first steps in the tutorial will tell you how to create a virtual machine (VM) with VirtualBox, how to get a preconfigured ISO image from the TurnkeyLinux website with all the necessary stuff to install the Apache web server, the MySQL database server and the Joomla! CMS in your VM. Oh, and if you're wondering how to make your web server available on the Internet, don't worry: I'll also show you how to get a free DynDNS account, and how to configure your Cable/DSL router to open port 80 (the HTTP web server port). That way, visitors from the Internet will be able to navigate in your brand-new Joomla! website. You'll need a PC or Mac system with Windows/Linux/Mac OS X installed, at least 1 GB of RAM and a Cable/DSL connection to the Internet, so you can configure your Cable/DSL router to let your virtual machine work as a full-fledged web server. Getting Virtualbox Download the most recent version of Oracle VirtualBox from the official website: VirtualBox 4.0 for Windows VirtualBox 4.0 for Mac OS X VirtualBox 4.0 for Linux Once the download is completed, follow the instructions included in the User Manual to install VirtualBox in your specific operating system. Downloading the Turnkey Joomla Appliance You can download the Joomla appliance from the TurnkeyLinux website. Just click on the following link to start downloading it to your computer: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/download?file=turnkey-joomla-11.0-lucid-x86.iso. Creating a new virtual machine Open VirtualBox, click on New to open the New Virtual Machine Wizard and then click on Next. Type MyJoomlaVM in the Name field, select Linux as the Operating System and Ubuntu as the Version, and click on Next to continue: The Memory dialog will show up next. Select at least 384 MB (you can press the Left and Right arrow keys to increase/decrease the memory value) in the Base Memory Size slider (depending on the total memory available in your PC) and click Next to continue: Leave the default values in the Virtual Hard Disk window and click Next four times to finish configuring your virtual machine with the default values. Then click Finish twice in the Summary dialogs that will show up afterwards, and you’ll be taken back to the VirtualBox main screen. Your MyJoomlaVM virtual machine will appear in the virtual machine list, as shown below: Now we need to tweak some network settings so your virtual machine can behave as a real PC with its own IP address. Click the Settings button to open the MyJoomlaVM – Settings window, and then select the Network section: Make sure the Adapter 1 tab is selected; then click on the Attached to list box and select Bridged Adapter instead of NAT: Click on the OK button to close the MyJoomlaVM – Settings window and return to the VirtualBox main screen. Installing the Joomla TurnkeyLinux appliance To start your virtual machine, double-click on its name in the virtual machines’ list or select it and click on the Start button: The first time you open a virtual machine, the First Run Wizard dialog shows up. This wizard helps you to install an operating system to your virtual machine. Click Next to go to the Select Installation Media window, where you can select a media source to install an operating system in your virtual machine. In this case you’re going to select the Turnkey Joomla ISO live CD image you downloaded before. Click on the folder icon located at the right-side of the Media Source list box: The Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file dialog will open up. Use this dialog to locate and select the Joomla Turnkey ISO image your previously downloaded; then click on Open to return to the Select Installation Media dialog and click Next to continue. The Summary window will appear next, showing the media you selected. Click on Finish to exit the First Run Wizard and start your virtual machine. Wait until the TurnkeyLinux boot screen shows up; then make sure the Install to hard disk option is highlighted and hit Enter to proceed (you can also wait until installation begins automatically): Wait until the Debian Installer Live screen appears. Use the keyboard to select the Guided – use the entire disk option and hit Enter to continue: The next screen will ask you if you want to write the changes to disk. Select Yes and hit Enter to continue. The Debian Installer will start installing Ubuntu and the Joomla appliance in your virtual machine. After a while, a screen will appear asking if you want to install the GRUB boot loader to the master boot record. Select Yes and hit Enter to continue. The next screen will tell you that the installation is complete, and will ask if you want to restart your computer (virtual machine). Make sure Yes is selected and hit Enter to continue. Wait until your virtual machine boots up and asks you to type a new password for the root account. Type a secure password and hit Enter to continue. Type the password again and hit Enter to proceed. Now the system will ask for the MySQL server 'root' account’s password. Type a password of your choice and hit Enter. Repeat the procedure to confirm the password. Finally, the system will ask you to type a password for the Joomla 'admin' account. Choose a secure password, type it and hit Enter. Once again, repeat the procedure to confirm the password. The next step is to write the email address for the Joomla 'admin' account. Type a real email address and hit Enter to proceed. Next you’ll see a Link TKLBAM to the Turnkey Hub screen. In this case we’re not going to use the Turnkey Hub (a backup/restore system), so don’t type anything and hit Enter to continue. The next screen that will show up is Security Updates. You can leave the default option (Install) and hit Enter to proceed. (Be patient while the security updates get installed in your virtual machine; sometimes it can take several minutes.) Once the security updates finish installing in your virtual machine, the JOOMLA appliance services screen will pop up, and your virtual machine will be ready to roll: Write down the IP address assigned to your Joomla virtual machine (in the above picture it’s 192.168.1.79, but your IP address may vary). Then, open a web browser and type http://youripaddress (remember to replace youripaddress with the IP address you wrote down) to verify your Joomla virtual machine is working. The next screen should appear in your browser: Finally, you need to unmount the TurnkeyLinux Joomla ISO image from your machine’s virtual drive. This is to avoid booting up the ISO image again instead of booting up from your hard drive. Go to the Devices menu and select CD/DVD Devices > Remove disk from virtual drive: That’s it for now. Now let’s see how to get a free domain name and configure your Cable/DSL router to accept incoming connections for your Joomla virtual machine.

  WordPress 3 Complete Create your own complete website or blog from scratch with WordPress Learn everything you need for creating your own feature-rich website or blog from scratch Clear and practical explanations of all aspects of WordPress In-depth coverage of installation, themes, plugins, and syndication Explore WordPress as a fully functional content management system Clear, easy-to-follow, concise; rich with examples and screenshots         Read more about this book       (For more resources on Wordpress, see here.) The reader can benefit from the previous article on Getting Started with WordPress 3. After you've successfully installed WordPress, it's time for our first look at the WP Admin. There are some immediate basic changes that I recommend doing right away to make sure your installation is set up properly. You can always get to the WP Admin by going to this URL: http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/. Your first time here, you'll be re-directed to the login page. In the future, WordPress will check to see if you're already logged in and, if so, you'll skip the login page. Following is the login page: To log in, just enter the username and password you chose during the installation. Then click on Log In. Note for the future that on this page there is a link you can use to retrieve your lost password. Whenever you log in, you'll be taken directly to the Dashboard of the WP Admin. Following is a screenshot of the WP Admin that you will see immediately after you log into the blog you just installed: You'll see a lot of information and options here. We will focus on the items that we need to touch upon right after a successful installation. First, let's take a brief look at the top of the WP Admin and the Dashboard. The very top bar, which I'll refer to as the top bar, is mostly a medium grey and contains: A link to the front page of your WordPress website A rollover drop-down menu with handy links to New Post, Drafts, New Page, Upload, and Comments Your username linked to your profile A link to log out You'll also notice the Screen Options tab, which appears on many screens within the WP Admin. If you click on it, it will slide down a checklist of items on the page to show or hide. It will be different on each page. I encourage you to play around with that by checking and unchecking items, as you find you need them or don't need them. On the left, of course, is the main menu: You can click on any word in the main menu to be taken to the main page for that section, or you can click on the rollover arrow to slide down the subpages for that section. For example, if you click on the arrow next to Settings, you'll see the subpages for the Settings section: The top menu and the main menu exist on every page within the WP Admin. The main section on the right contains information for the current page you're on. In this case, we're on the Dashboard. It contains boxes that have a variety of information about your blog, and about WordPress in general. Before WordPress 3, the first thing you'd have to do would be to change the password to something easier to remember. However, now that you can choose your password during installation, this is no longer necessary. Let's jump right to general site settings.  

  WordPress 2.7 Complete Create your own complete blog or web site from scratch with WordPress Everything you need to set up your own feature-rich WordPress blog or web site Clear and practical explanations of all aspects of WordPress In-depth coverage of installation, themes, syndication, and podcasting Explore WordPress as a fully functioning content management system Concise, clear, and easy to follow; rich with examples         Read more about this book       (For more resources on Wordpress, see here.) WordPress is available in easily downloadable formats from its website, http://wordpress.org/download/. WordPress is a free, open source application, and is released under GNU General Public License (GPL). This means that anyone who produces a modified version of software released under the GPL is required to keep those same freedoms, that people buying or using the software may also modify and redistribute, attached to his or her modified version. This way, WordPress and other software released under GPL are kept open source. Where to build your WordPress website The first decision you have to make is where your blog is going to live. You have two basic options for the location where you will create your site. You can: Use WordPress.com Install on a server (hosted or your own) Let's look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of each of these two choices. The advantage of using WordPress.com is that they take care of all of the technical details for you. The software is already installed; they'll upgrade it for you whenever there's an upgrade; and you're not responsible for anything else. Just manage your content! The big disadvantage is that you lose almost all of the theme and plugin control you'd have otherwise. WordPress.com will not let you upload or edit your own theme, though it will let you (for a fee) edit the CSS of any theme you use. WordPress.com will not let you upload or manage plugins at all. Some plugins are installed by default (most notably Akismet, for spam blocking, and a fancy statistics plugin), but you can neither uninstall them nor install others. Additional features are available for a fee as well. The following table is a brief overview of the essential differences between using WordPress.com versus installing WordPress on your own server:   WordPress.com Your own server Installation You don't have to install anything, just sign up Install WordPress yourself, either manually or via your host's control panel (if offered) Themes Use any theme made available by WordPress.com Use any theme available anywhere, written by anyone (including yourself) Plugins No ability to choose or add plugins Use any plugin available anywhere, written by anyone (including yourself) Upgrades WordPress.com provides automatic upgrades You have to upgrade it yourself when upgrades are available Widgets Widget availability depends on available themes You can widgetize any theme yourself Maintenance You don't have to do any maintenance You're responsible for the maintenance of your site Advertising No advertising allowed Advertise anything Using WordPress.com WordPress.com (http://wordpress.com) is a free service provided by the WordPress developers, where you can register a blog or non-blog website easily and quickly with no hassle. However, because it is a hosted service, your control over some things will be more limited than it would be if you hosted your own WordPress website. As mentioned before, WordPress.com will not let you edit or upload your own themes or plugins. Aside from this, WordPress.com is a great place to maintain your personal site if you don't need to do anything fancy with a theme. To get started, go to http://wordpress.com, which will look something like the following: To register your free website, click on the loud orange-and-white Sign up now button. You will be taken to the signup page. In the following screenshot, I've entered my username (what I'll sign in with) and a password (note that the password measurement tool will tell you if your password is strong or weak), as well as my e-mail address. Be sure to check the Legal flotsam box and leave the Gimme a blog! radio button checked. Without it, you won't get a website. After providing this information and clicking on the Next button, WordPress will ask for other choices (Blog Domain, Blog Title, Language, and Privacy), as shown in following screenshot. You can also check if it's a private blog or not. Note that you cannot change the blog domain later! So be sure it's right. After providing this information and clicking on Signup, you will be sent to a page where you can enter some basic profile information. This page will also tell you that your account is set up, but your e-mail ID needs to be verified. Be sure to check your inbox for the e-mail with the link, and click on it. Then, you'll be truly done with the installation. Installing WordPress manually The WordPress application files can be downloaded for free if you want to do a manual installation. If you've got a website host, this process is extremely easy and requires no previous programming skills or advanced blog user experience. Some web hosts offer automatic installation through the host's online control panel. However, be a little wary of this because some hosts offer automatic installation, but they do it in a way that makes updating your WordPress difficult or awkward, or restricts your ability to have free rein with your installation in the future. Preparing the environment A good first step is to make sure you have an environment setup that is ready for WordPress. This means two things: making sure that you verify that the server meets the minimum requirements, and making sure that your database is ready. For WordPress to work, your web host must provide you with a server that does the following two things: Support PHP, which must be at least Version 4.3. Provide you with write access to a MySQL database. MySQL has to be at least Version 4.1.2. You can find out if your host meets these two requirements by contacting your web host. If your web server meets these two basic requirements, you're ready to move on to the next step. As far as web servers go, Apache is the best. However, WordPress will also run on a server running the Microsoft IIS server (though using permalinks will be difficult, if possible at all). Enabling mod_rewrite to use pretty permalinks If you want to use permalinks, your server must be running Unix, and Apache's mod_rewrite option must be enabled. Apache's mod_rewrite is enabled by default in most web hosting accounts. If you are hosting your own account, you can enable mod_rewrite by modifying the Apache web server configuration file. You can check the URL http://www.tutorio.com/tutorial/enable-mod-rewrite-on-apache to learn how to enable mod_rewrite on your web server. If you are running on shared hosting, then ask your system administrator to install it for you. However, it is more likely that you already have it installed on your hosting account. Downloading WordPress Once you have checked out your environment, you need to download WordPress from http://wordpress.org/download/. Take a look at the following screenshot in which the download links are available on the right side: The .zip file is shown as a big blue button because that'll be the most useful format for the most people. If you are using Windows, Mac, or Linux operating systems, your computer will be able to unzip that downloaded file automatically. (The .tar.gz file is provided because some Unix users prefer it.) A further note on location We're going to cover installing WordPress remotely. However, if you plan to develop themes or plugins, I suggest that you also install WordPress locally on your own computer's server. Testing and deploying themes and plugins directly to the remote server will be much more time-consuming than working locally. If you look at the screenshots I will be taking of my own WordPress installation, you'll notice that I'm working locally (for example, http://wpbook:8888/ is a local URL). After you download the WordPress .zip file, extract the files, and you'll get a folder called wordpress. It will look like the following screenshot:  

  PHP jQuery Cookbook Over 60 simple but highly effective recipes to create interactive web applications using PHP with jQuery Create rich and interactive web applications with PHP and jQuery Debug and execute jQuery code on a live site Design interactive forms and menus Another title in the Packt Cookbook range, which will help you get to grips with PHP as well as jQuery About Holiday List Calendar This widget will help you in knowing the list of holidays in various countries. Here in this example, I have listed holidays pertaining to only two counties, namely India and US. You can make use of this widget on your websites or blogs to tell your readers about holidays and their importance if necessary. Adding jQuery to your page Download the latest version of jQuery from the jQuery site. This site can be added as a reference to your web pages accordingly. You can reference a local copy of jQuery after downloading <script> tag in the page. You can also directly reference the remote copy from jQuery or Google Ajax API. Pre-requisite Knowledge In order to understand the code, one should have some knowledge of AJAX concepts and XML Structure, basic knowledge of HTML, advance knowledge of CSS3 and lastly and mostly important one should know advance level of jQuery coding. Ingredients Used jQuery [Advance Level] CSS3 HTML XML Photoshop [Used for coming up with UI Design] HTML Code <div id="calendar-container"> <div class="nav-container"> <span>Year<br/><select id="selectYear"></select></span> <span class="last">Month<br /><a href="#" id="prevBtn" class="button gray"><</a> <select id="selectMonth"></select> <a href="#" id="nextBtn" class="button gray">></a></span> </div> <div class="data-container"></div> </div> XML Structure <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <calendar> <year whichyear="2010" id="1"> <month name="January" id="1"> <country name="India"> <holidayList date="Jan 01st" day="Friday"><![CDATA[Sample Data]]></holidayList> <holidayList date="Jan 14th" day="Friday"><![CDATA[Sample Data]]></holidayList> <holidayList date="Jan 26th" day="Wednesday"><![CDATA[Sample Data]]></holidayList> </country> <country name="US"> <holidayList date="Jan 01st" day="Saturday"><![CDATA[Sample Data]]></holidayList> <holidayList date="Jan 17th" day="Monday"><![CDATA[Sample Data]]></holidayList> </country> </month> <month name="January" id="1"> --------------------- --------------------- --------------------- </month> </year> </calendar> CSS Code body{ margin: 0; padding: 0; font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 100%; background: #333333; } #calendar-container{ width:370px; padding:5px; border:1px solid #bcbcbc; margin:0 auto; background-color:#cccccc; -webkit-border-radius: .5em; -moz-border-radius: .5em; border-radius: .5em; -webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 4px rgba(0,0,0,.2); -moz-box-shadow: 0 1px 4px rgba(0,0,0,.2); box-shadow: 0 1px 4px rgba(0,0,0,.2); } .nav-container{ padding:5px; } .nav-container span{display:inline-block; text-align::left; padding-right:15px; border-right:1px solid #828282; margin-right:12px; text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #ffffff; font-weight:bold;} .nav-container span.last{padding-right:0px; border-right:none; margin-right:0px;} .data-container{ font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:14px; } #selectMonth{width:120px;} .data-container ul{margin:0px; padding:0px;} .data-container ul li{ list-style:none; padding:5px;} .data-container ul li.list-header{border-bottom:1px solid #bebebe; border-right:1px solid #bebebe; background-color:#eae9e9; -webkit-border-radius: .2em .2em 0 0; -moz-border-radius: .2em .2em 0 0; border-radius: .3em .3em 0 0; background:-moz-linear-gradient(center top , #eae9e9, #d0d0d0) repeat scroll 0 0 transparent; margin-top:5px; text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #ffffff;} .data-container ul li.padding-left-10px {background-color:#EEEEEE; border-bottom:1px solid #BEBEBE; border-right:1px solid #BEBEBE; font-size:12px;} /* button ---------------------------------------------- */ .button { font-size: 25px; font-weight: 700; display: inline-block; zoom: 1; /* zoom and *display = ie7 hack for display:inline-block */ *display: inline; vertical-align: bottom; margin: 0 2px; outline: none; cursor: pointer; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px #555555; padding: 0px 10px 3px 10px; -webkit-border-radius: .2em; -moz-border-radius: .2em; border-radius: .2em; -webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,.2); -moz-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,.2); box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,.2); } .button:hover { text-decoration: none; } .button:active { position: relative; top: 1px; } select{ -webkit-border-radius: .2em .2em .2em .2em; -moz-border-radius: .2em .2em .2em .2em; border-radius: .2em; -webkit-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,.2); -moz-box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,.2); box-shadow: 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,.2); padding:5px; font-size:16px; border:1px solid #4b4b4b; } /* color styles ---------------------------------------------- */ .gray { color: #e9e9e9; border: solid 1px #555; background: #6e6e6e; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#888), to(#575757)); background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #888, #575757); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#888888', endColorstr='#575757'); } .gray:hover { background: #616161; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#757575), to(#4b4b4b)); background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #757575, #4b4b4b); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#757575', endColorstr='#4b4b4b'); } .gray:active { color: #afafaf; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#575757), to(#888)); background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #575757, #888); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#575757', endColorstr='#888888'); } .grayDis{ color: #999999; background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(#575757), to(#888)); background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #575757, #888); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient(startColorstr='#575757', endColorstr='#888888'); } h2{ color:#ffffff; text-align:center; margin:10px 0px;} #header{ text-align:center; font-size: 1em; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, sans-serif; padding:1px; margin:10px 0px 80px 0px; background-color:#575757; } .ad{ width: 728px; height: 90px; margin: 50px auto 10px; } #footer{ width: 340px; margin: 0 auto; } #footer p{ color: #ffffff; font-size: .70em; margin: 0; } #footer a{ color: #15ADD1; }  

  WordPress 3 Complete Create your own complete website or blog from scratch with WordPress Learn everything you need for creating your own feature-rich website or blog from scratch Clear and practical explanations of all aspects of WordPress In-depth coverage of installation, themes, plugins, and syndication Explore WordPress as a fully functional content management system Clear, easy-to-follow, concise; rich with examples and screenshots         Read more about this book       (For more resources on Wordpress, see here.) Let's get started. Choosing a post or page For my food blog, I'm going to create a new page named My Food Photos for my image gallery. You can always do this on an existing page or post. Following is my new page: Note where I have left my cursor. I made sure to leave it in a spot on the page where I want my gallery to appear, that is, underneath my introductory text (After creating this page, I will also navigate to Appearance | Menus to add it as a subpage under About.). Uploading images Now click on the Upload/Insert image icon and upload some photos (you can choose multiple photos at once). For each photo you upload, enter the title (and a caption if you'd like). When you're done, click on the Save All Changes button. You'll be taken to the Gallery tab, which will show all of the photos you've uploaded to be attached to this page: If you want to upload more photos at this point, just click on the From Computer tab at the top, and upload another photo. When you've uploaded all the photos you want (you can add more later), you may want to change the order of the photos. Just enter the numbers 1 through 6 (or however many photos you have) in the Order column: Make sure you click Save All Changes. On most computers, you can, instead of entering numbers, simply drag-and-drop images. WordPress will then generate the order numbers for you automatically. Then, you can review the Gallery Settings. There are a number of ways to use the gallery, but there is a single approach that I've found works for most people. You can experiment on your own with other settings and plugins, of course! I suggest you set Link thumbnails to to be Image File instead of Attachment Page. You can leave the other settings as they are for now. Once all of your settings are done, click on the Insert gallery button. This overlay box will disappear, and you'll see your post again. The page will have the gallery icon placeholder in the spot where you left the cursor, as seen in the following screenshot: If you're in the HTML view, you'll see the gallery shortcode in that spot: Note that because I'm uploading these photos while adding/editing this particular page, all of these photos will be "attached" to this page. That's how I know they'll be in the gallery on this page. Other photos that I've uploaded to other posts or pages will not be included in this gallery. Learning moreThe [gallery] shortcode is quite powerful! For example, you can actually give it a list of Media ID numbers—any Media item in your Media Library—to include, or you can tell it to just exclude certain items that are attached to this post or page. You can also control how the Thumbnail version of each image shows whether the medium or large. There is more! Take a look at the codex to get all of the parameters: http://codex.wordpress.org/Gallery_Shortcode Now, publish or save your page. When you view the page, there's a gallery of your images as follows: If you click on one of the images, you'll be linked to the larger version of the image. Now, this is not ideal for navigating through a gallery of images. Let's add a plugin that will streamline your gallery. Using a lightbox plugin A lightbox effect is when the existing page content fades a little and a new item appears on top of the existing page. You've seen this effect already in the WP Admin when you clicked on Add/Insert image. We can easily add the same effect to your galleries by adding a plugin. There are a number of lightbox plugins available, but the one I like these days uses jQuery Colorbox. Find this plugin, either through the WP Admin or in the Plugins Repository (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jquery-colorbox/), and install it. Once you've activated the plugin, navigate to Settings | jQuery Colorbox: Use the Theme pull-down to choose the theme you want (the preview image will update to give you an idea of what it will look like); I've chosen Theme #4. Then you can choose to either Automate jQuery Colorbox for all images or Automate jQuery Colorbox for images in WordPress galleries. You can choose whether to automate for all images; I certainly suggest you automate for images in galleries. You can experiment with the other settings on this page (if you routinely upload very large images, you'll want to use the areas that let you set the maximum size of the colorbox and resize images automatically). You'll want to disable the warning (the very last check box on the page). Then, click on Save Changes. Now, when I go to my image gallery page and click on the first image, the colorbox is activated, and I can click Next and Back to navigate through the images: Summary In this article we saw how to add and manage built-in image galleries to display photos and other images. Further resources on this subject: WordPress 3 Complete [Book] WordPress 2.9 E-Commerce [Book] Getting Started with WordPress 3 [Article] How to Write a Widget in WordPress 3 [Article] Understanding jQuery and WordPress Together [Article] Tips and Tricks for Working with jQuery and WordPress [Article]

  Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook Solve real-world shell scripting problems with over 110 simple but incredibly effective recipes Master the art of crafting one-liner command sequence to perform tasks such as text processing, digging data from files, and lot more Practical problem solving techniques adherent to the latest Linux platform Packed with easy-to-follow examples to exercise all the features of the Linux shell scripting language Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible Compressing with gunzip (gzip) gzip is a commonly used compression format in GNU/Linux platforms. Utilities such as gzip, gunzip, and zcat are available to handle gzip compression file types. gzip can be applied on a file only. It cannot archive directories and multiple files. Hence we use a tar archive and compress it with gzip. When multiple files are given as input it will produce several individually compressed (.gz) files. Let's see how to operate with gzip. How to do it... In order to compress a file with gzip use the following command: $ gzip filename $ ls filename.gz Then it will remove the file and produce a compressed file called filename.gz. Extract a gzip compressed file as follows: $ gunzip filename.gz It will remove filename.gz and produce an uncompressed version of filename.gz. In order to list out the properties of a compressed file use: $ gzip -l test.txt.gz compressed uncompressed ratio uncompressed_name 35 6 -33.3% test.txt The gzip command can read a file from stdin and also write a compressed file into stdout. Read from stdin and out as stdout as follows: $ cat file | gzip -c > file.gz The -c option is used to specify output to stdout. We can specify the compression level for gzip. Use --fast or the --best option to provide low and high compression ratios, respectively. There's more... The gzip command is often used with other commands. It also has advanced options to specify the compression ratio. Let's see how to work with these features. Gzip with tarball We usually use gzip with tarballs. A tarball can be compressed by using the –z option passed to the tar command while archiving and extracting. You can create gzipped tarballs using the following methods: Method - 1 $ tar -czvvf archive.tar.gz [FILES] Or: $ tar -cavvf archive.tar.gz [FILES] The -a option specifies that the compression format should automatically be detected from the extension. Method - 2First, create a tarball: $ tar -cvvf archive.tar [FILES] Compress it after tarballing as follows: $ gzip archive.tar If many files (a few hundreds) are to be archived in a tarball and need to be compressed, we use Method - 2 with few changes. The issue with giving many files as command arguments to tar is that it can accept only a limited number of files from the command line. In order to solve this issue, we can create a tar file by adding files one by one using a loop with an append option (-r) as follows: FILE_LIST="file1 file2 file3 file4 file5" for f in $FILE_LIST; do tar -rvf archive.tar $f done gzip archive.tar In order to extract a gzipped tarball, use the following: -x for extraction -z for gzip specification Or: $ tar -xavvf archive.tar.gz -C extract_directory In the above command, the -a option is used to detect the compression format automatically. zcat – reading gzipped files without extracting zcat is a command that can be used to dump an extracted file from a .gz file to stdout without manually extracting it. The .gz file remains as before but it will dump the extracted file into stdout as follows: $ ls test.gz $ zcat test.gz A test file # file test contains a line "A test file" $ ls test.gz Compression ratio We can specify compression ratio, which is available in range 1 to 9, where: 1 is the lowest, but fastest 9 is the best, but slowest You can also specify the ratios in between as follows: $ gzip -9 test.img This will compress the file to the maximum. Compressing with bunzip (bzip) bunzip2 is another compression technique which is very similar to gzip. bzip2 typically produces smaller (more compressed) files than gzip. It comes with all Linux distributions. Let's see how to use bzip2. How to do it... In order to compress with bzip2 use: $ bzip2 filename $ ls filename.bz2 Then it will remove the file and produce a compressed file called filename.bzip2. Extract a bzipped file as follows: $ bunzip2 filename.bz2 It will remove filename.bz2 and produce an uncompressed version of filename. bzip2 can read a file from stdin and also write a compressed file into stdout. In order to read from stdin and read out as stdout use: $ cat file | bzip2 -c > file.tar.bz2 -c is used to specify output to stdout. We usually use bzip2 with tarballs. A tarball can be compressed by using the -j option passed to the tar command while archiving and extracting. Creating a bzipped tarball can be done by using the following methods: Method - 1 $ tar -cjvvf archive.tar.bz2 [FILES] Or: $ tar -cavvf archive.tar.bz2 [FILES] The -a option specifies to automatically detect compression format from the extension. Method - 2First create the tarball: $ tar -cvvf archive.tar [FILES] Compress it after tarballing: $ bzip2 archive.tar If we need to add hundreds of files to the archive, the above commands may fail. To fix that issue, use a loop to append files to the archive one by one using the –r option. Extract a bzipped tarball as follows: $ tar -xjvvf archive.tar.bz2 -C extract_directory In this command: -x is used for extraction -j is for bzip2 specification -C is for specifying the directory to which the files are to be extracted Or, you can use the following command: $ tar -xavvf archive.tar.bz2 -C extract_directory -a will automatically detect the compression format. There's more... bunzip has several additional options to carry out different functions. Let's go through few of them. Keeping input files without removing them While using bzip2 or bunzip2, it will remove the input file and produce a compressed output file. But we can prevent it from removing input files by using the –k option. For example: $ bunzip2 test.bz2 -k $ ls test test.bz2 Compression ratio We can specify the compression ratio, which is available in the range of 1 to 9 (where 1 is the least compression, but fast, and 9 is the highest possible compression but much slower). For example: $ bzip2 -9 test.img This command provides maximum compression.  

Have you got questions on Inkscape you want answers for? You've come to the right place. Whether you're new to the web design software or there are a couple of issues puzzling you, we've put together this FAQ to answer some of the most common Inkscape queries. What is Inkscape? Inkscape is an open source, free program that creates vector-based graphics that can be used in web, print, and screen design as well as interface and logo creation, and material cutting. Its capabilities are similar to those of commercial products such as Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand, and CorelDraw and can be used for any number of practical purposes. It is a software for web designers who want to add attractive visual elements to their website. What License is Inkscape released under? Inkscape is a free, open source program developed by a group of volunteers under the GNU General Public License (GPL). You not only get a free download but can use the program to create items with it and freely distribute them, modify the program itself, and share that modified program with others. What platforms does Inkscape run on? Inkscape is available for download for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, or Solaris operating systems. Where can you download Inkscape from? Go to the official Inkscape websiteand download the appropriate version of the software for your computer. How do you run Inkscape on MAC OS X operating system? To run on the Mac OS X operating system, it typically runs under X11—an implementation of the X Window System software that makes it possible to run X11-based applications in Mac OS X. The X11 application has shipped with the Mac OS X since version 10.5. When you open Inkscape on a Mac, it will first open X11 and run Inkscape within that program. Loss of some shortcut key options will occur but all functionality is present using menus and toolbars. Is the X11 application a part of the MAC OS X operating system? If you have Mac OS X version 10.5 or above. If you have a previous version of the MAC OS X operating system, you can download the X11 application package 2.4.0 or greater from this website: http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/X112.4.0. What is the interface of Inkscape like? The Inkscape interface is based on the GNOME UI standard which uses visual cues and feedback for any icons. For example: Hovering your mouse over any icon displays a pop-up description of the icon. If an icon has a dark gray border, it is active and can be used. If an icon is grayed out, it is not currently available to use with the current selection. All icons that are in execution mode (or busy) are covered by a dark shadow. This signifies that the application is busy and won't respond to any edit request. There is a Notification Display on the main screen that displays dynamic help messages to key shortcuts and basic information on how to use the Inkscape software in its current state or based on what objects and tools are selected. Within the main screen there is the main menu, a command, snap and status bar, tool controls, and a palette bar. What are Paths? Paths have no pre-defined lengths or widths. They are arbitrary in nature and come in three basic types: open paths (have two ends), closed paths (have no ends, like a circle), or compound paths (uses a combination of two open and/or closed paths). In Inkscape there are a few ways we can make paths: the Pencil (Freehand), Bezier (Pen), and Calligraphy tools—all of which are found in the tool box. They can also be created by converting a regular shape or text object into paths. What shapes can be created in Inkscape? Inkscape can also create shapes that are part of the SVG standard. These are: Rectangles and squares 3D boxes Circles, ellipses, and arcs Stars Polygons Spirals To create any of these shapes, see the following screenshot. Select (click) the shape tool icon in the tool box and then draw the shape on the canvas by clicking, holding, and then dragging the shape to the size you want on the canvas. What is slicing? It is a term used to describe breaking of an image created in a graphics program apart so that it can be re-assembled in HTML to create a web page. To do this, we'll use Web Slicer Extension: from the main menu select Extensions | Web | Slicer | Create a slicer rectangle.

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook Solve real-world shell scripting problems with over 110 simple but incredibly effective recipes Master the art of crafting one-liner command sequence to perform tasks such as text processing, digging data from files, and lot more Practical problem solving techniques adherent to the latest Linux platform Packed with easy-to-follow examples to exercise all the features of the Linux shell scripting language Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible.    Disk usage hacks Disk space is a limited resource. We frequently perform disk usage calculation on hard disks or any storage media to find out the free space available on the disk. When free space becomes scarce, we will need to find out large-sized files that are to be deleted or moved in order to create free space. Disk usage manipulations are commonly used in shell scripting contexts. This recipe will illustrate various commands used for disk manipulations and problems where disk usages can be calculated with a variety of options. Getting ready df and du are the two significant commands that are used for calculating disk usage in Linux. The command df stands for disk free and du stands for disk usage. Let's see how we can use them to perform various tasks that involve disk usage calculation. How to do it... To find the disk space used by a file (or files), use: $ du FILENAME1 FILENAME2 . . For example: $ du file.txt 4 The result is, by default, shown as size in bytes. In order to obtain the disk usage for all files inside a directory along with the individual disk usage for each file showed in each line, use: $ du -a DIRECTORY -a outputs results for all files in the specified directory or directories recursively. Running du DIRECTORY will output a similar result, but it will show only the size consumed by subdirectories. However, they do not show the disk usage for each of the files. For printing the disk usage by files, -a is mandatory. For example: $  du -a test 4  test/output.txt 4  test/process_log.sh 4  test/pcpu.sh 16  test An example of using du DIRECTORY is as follows: $ du test 16  test There's more... Let's go through additional usage practices for the du command. Displaying disk usage in KB, MB, or Blocks By default, the disk usage command displays the total bytes used by a file. A more human-readable format is when disk usage is expressed in standard units KB, MB, or GB. In order to print the disk usage in a display-friendly format, use –h as follows: du -h FILENAME For example: $ du -sh test/pcpu.sh 4.0K  test/pcpu.sh # Multiple file arguments are accepted Or: # du -h DIRECTORY $ du -h hack/ 16K  hack/ Finding the 10 largest size files from a given directory Finding large-size files is a regular task we come across. We regularly require to delete those huge size files or move them. We can easily find out large-size files using du and sort commands. The following one-line script can achieve this task: $ du -ak SOURCE_DIR | sort -nrk 1 | head Here -a specifies all directories and files. Hence du traverses the SOURCE_DIR and calculates the size of all files. The first column of the output contains the size in Kilobytes since -k is specified and the second column contains the file or folder name. sort is used to perform numerical sort with column 1 and reverse it. head is used to parse the first 10 lines from the output. For example: $ du -ak /home/slynux | sort -nrk 1 | head -n 4 50220 /home/slynux 43296 /home/slynux/.mozilla 43284 /home/slynux/.mozilla/firefox 43276 /home/slynux/.mozilla/firefox/8c22khxc.default One of the drawbacks of the above one-liner is that it includes directories in the result. However, when we need to find only the largest files and not directories we can improve the one-liner to output only the large-size files as follows: $ find . -type f -exec du -k {} ; | sort -nrk 1 | head We used find to filter only files to du rather than allow du to traverse recursively by itself. Calculating execution time for a command While testing an application or comparing different algorithms for a given problem, execution time taken by a program is very critical. A good algorithm should execute in minimum amount of time. There are several situations in which we need to monitor the time taken for execution by a program. For example, while learning about sorting algorithms, how do you practically state which algorithm is faster? The answer to this is to calculate the execution time for the same data set. Let's see how to do it. How to do it... time is a command that is available with any UNIX-like operating systems. You can prefix time with the command you want to calculate execution time, for example: $ time COMMAND The command will execute and its output will be shown. Along with output, the time command appends the time taken in stderr. An example is as follows: $ time ls test.txt next.txt real    0m0.008s user    0m0.001s sys     0m0.003s It will show real, user, and system times for execution. The three different times can be defined as follows: Real is wall clock time—the time from start to finish of the call. This is all elapsed time including time slices used by other processes and the time that the process spends when blocked (for example, if it is waiting for I/O to complete). User is the amount of CPU time spent in user-mode code (outside the kernel) within the process. This is only the actual CPU time used in executing the process. Other processes and the time that the process spends when blocked do not count towards this figure. Sys is the amount of CPU time spent in the kernel within the process. This means executing the CPU time spent in system calls within the kernel, as opposed to library code, which is still running in the user space. Like 'user time', this is only the CPU time used by the process. An executable binary of the time command is available at /usr/bin/time as well as a shell built-in named time exists. When we run time, it calls the shell built-in by default. The shell built-in time has limited options. Hence, we should use an absolute path for the executable (/usr/bin/time) for performing additional functionalities. We can write this time statistics to a file using the -o filename option as follows: $ /usr/bin/time -o output.txt COMMAND The filename should always appear after the –o flag. In order to append the time statistics to a file without overwriting, use the -a flag along with the -o option as follows: $ /usr/bin/time -a -o output.txt COMMAND We can also format the time outputs using format strings with the -f option. A format string consists of parameters corresponding to specific options prefixed with %. The format strings for real time, user time, and sys time are as follows: Real time - %e f User - %U f sys - %S By combining parameter strings, we can create formatted output as follows: $ /usr/bin/time -f "FORMAT STRING" COMMAND For example: $ /usr/bin/time -f "Time: %U" -a -o timing.log uname Linux Here %U is the parameter for user time. When formatted output is produced, the formatted output of the command is written to the standard output and the output of the COMMAND, which is timed, is written to standard error. We can redirect the formatted output using a redirection operator (>) and redirect the time information output using the (2>) error redirection operator. For example: $ /usr/bin/time -f "Time: %U" uname> command_output.txt 2>time.log $ cat time.log Time: 0.00 $ cat command_output.txt Linux Many details regarding a process can be collected using the time command. The important details include, exit status, number of signals received, number of context switches made, and so on. Each parameter can be displayed by using a suitable format string. The following table shows some of the interesting parameters that can be used: For example, the page size can be displayed using the %Z parameters as follows: $ /usr/bin/time -f "Page size: %Z bytes" ls> /dev/null Page size: 4096 bytes Here the output of the timed command is not required and hence the standard output is directed to the /dev/null device in order to prevent it from writing to the terminal.  

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook Collecting information about the operating environment, logged in users, the time for which the computer has been powered on, and any boot failures are very helpful. This recipe will go through a few commands used to gather information about a live machine. Getting ready This recipe will introduce the commands who, w, users, uptime, last, and lastb. How to do it... To obtain information about users currently logged in to the machine use: $ who slynux   pts/0   2010-09-29 05:24 (slynuxs-macbook-pro.local) slynux   tty7    2010-09-29 07:08 (:0) Or: $ w 07:09:05 up  1:45,  2 users,  load average: 0.12, 0.06, 0.02 USER     TTY     FROM    LOGIN@   IDLE  JCPU PCPU WHAT slynux   pts/0   slynuxs 05:24  0.00s  0.65s 0.11s sshd: slynux slynux   tty7    :0      07:08  1:45m  3.28s 0.26s gnome-session It will provide information about logged in users, the pseudo TTY used by the users, the command that is currently executing from the pseudo terminal, and the IP address from which the users have logged in. If it is localhost, it will show the hostname. who and w format outputs with slight difference. The w command provides more detail than who. TTY is the device file associated with a text terminal. When a terminal is newly spawned by the user, a corresponding device is created in /dev/ (for example, /dev/pts/3). The device path for the current terminal can be found out by typing and executing the command tty. In order to list the users currently logged in to the machine, use: $ users Slynux slynux slynux hacker If a user has opened multiple pseudo terminals, it will show that many entries for the same user. In the above output, the user slynux has opened three pseudo terminals. The easiest way to print unique users is to use sort and uniq to filter as follows: $ users | tr ' ' 'n' | sort | uniq slynux hacker We have used tr to replace ' ' with 'n'. Then combination of sort and uniq will produce unique entries for each user. In order to see how long the system has been powered on, use: $ uptime 21:44:33 up  3:17,  8 users,  load average: 0.09, 0.14, 0.09 The time that follows the word up indicates the time for which the system has been powered on. We can write a simple one-liner to extract the uptime only. Load average in uptime's output is a parameter that indicates system load. In order to get information about previous boot and user logged sessions, use: $ last slynux tty7         :0              Tue Sep 28 18:27   still logged in reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Tue Sep 28 18:10 - 21:46 (03:35) slynux pts/0      :0.0          Tue Sep 28 05:31 - crash (12:39) The last command will provide information about logged in sessions. It is actually a log of system logins that consists of information such as tty from which it has logged in, login time, status, and so on. The last command uses the log file /var/log/wtmp for input log data. It is also possible to explicitly specify the log file for the last command using the –f option. For example: $ last -f /var/log/wtmp In order to obtain info about login sessions for a single user, use: $ last USER Get information about reboot sessions as follows: $ last reboot reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Tue Sep 28 18:10 - 21:48 (03:37) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Tue Sep 28 05:14 - 21:48 (16:33) In order to get information about failed user login sessions use: # lastb test     tty8    :0          Wed Dec 15 03:56 - 03:56  (00:00) slynux tty8    :0          Wed Dec 15 03:55 - 03:55  (00:00) You should run lastb as the root user. Logging access to files and directories Logging of file and directory access is very helpful to keep track of changes that are happening to files and folders. This recipe will describe how to log user accesses. Getting ready The inotifywait command can be used to gather information about file accesses. It doesn't come by default with every Linux distro. You have to install the inotify-tools package by using a package manager. It also requires the Linux kernel to be compiled with inotify support. Most of the new GNU/Linux distributions come with inotify enabled in the kernel. How to do it... Let's walk through the shell script to monitor the directory access: #/bin/bash #Filename: watchdir.sh #Description: Watch directory access path=$1 #Provide path of directory or file as argument to script inotifywait -m -r -e create,move,delete $path -q A sample output is as follows: $ ./watchdir.sh . ./ CREATE new ./ MOVED_FROM new ./ MOVED_TO news ./ DELETE news How it works... The previous script will log events create, move, and delete files and folders from the given path. The -m option is given for monitoring the changes continuously rather than going to exit after an event happens. -r is given for enabling a recursive watch the directories. -e specifies the list of events to be watched. -q is to reduce the verbose messages and print only required ones. This output can be redirected to a log file. We can add or remove the event list. Important events available are as follows: Logfile management with logrotate Logfiles are essential components of a Linux system's maintenance. Logfiles help to keep track of events happening on different services on the system. This helps the sysadmin to debug issues and also provides statistics on events happening on the live machine. Management of logfiles is required because as time passes the size of a logfile gets bigger and bigger. Therefore, we use a technique called rotation to limit the size of the logfile and if the logfile reaches a size beyond the limit, it will strip the logfile and store the older entries from the logfile in an archive. Hence older logs can be stored and kept for future reference. Let's see how to rotate logs and store them. Getting ready logrotate is a command every Linux system admin should know. It helps to restrict the size of logfile to the given SIZE. In a logfile, the logger appends information to the log file. Hence the recent information appears at the bottom of the log file. logrotate will scan specific logfiles according to the configuration file. It will keep the last 100 kilobytes (for example, specified SIZE = 100k) from the logfile and move rest of the data (older log data) to a new file logfile_name.1 with older entries. When more entries occur in the logfile (logfile_name.1) and it exceeds the SIZE, it updates the logfile with recent entries and creates logfile_name.2 with older logs. This process can easily be configured with logrotate.logrotate can also compress the older logs as logfile_name.1.gz, logfile_name2.gz, and so on. The option for whether older log files are to be compressed or not is available with the logrotate configuration. How to do it... logrotate has the configuration directory at /etc/logrotate.d. If you look at this directory by listing contents, many other logfile configurations can be found. We can write our custom configuration for our logfile (say /var/log/program.log) as follows: $ cat /etc/logrotate.d/program /var/log/program.log { missingok notifempty size 30k compress weekly rotate 5 create 0600 root root } Now the configuration is complete. /var/log/program.log in the configuration specifies the logfile path. It will archive old logs in the same directory path. Let's see what each of these parameters are: The options specified in the table are optional; we can specify the required options only in the logrotate configuration file. There are numerous options available with logrotate. Please refer to the man pages (http://linux.die.net/man/8/logrotate) for more information on logrotate.