Blog entries from Bill Tomczak

Finding the top menu

Bill Tomczak — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:07:42 +0100

I was recently asked if there was a way to get the topmost menu item in which a page sits. Let's say you have a menu like this:

Item 1
--Item 1.1
--Item 1.2
----Item 1.2.1
Item 2
--Item 2.1
--Item 2.2

Let's say you wanted to do something special with all the menus in the 'Item 1' tree and something slightly different for all the items in the 'Item 2' tree. You'd want to know which tree you were on. Here is a bit of simple php code you can use ...

What's your problem?

Bill Tomczak — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:35:04 +0100

We've been working on a rather largish site recently and over the course of recent weeks, I have been reminded of a lesson learned way back in my dark ages when I was designing desktop database applications.

When developing any application but especially a customized application designed for a specific person or company, it can be easy to confuse problems with solutions. In that database I designed so many years ago, the client had been doing things largely on paper for a very long tim...

I have seen the light (suphp)

Bill Tomczak — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:43:38 +0100

Recently, based on recommendations from Jen and myself, another web designer of note moved her hosting to Liquidweb. I'm sorry to say she had an agonizing period of adjustment. It was all about the dreaded file permissions and ownership.

In Mambo and J10, it was often necessary to set certain files and directories to be writable by anyone. Due to the way web servers have traditionally been set up, the only way a system like Joomla could upload files and modify the website's directory s...

J!10 vs J!15 - some thoughts

Bill Tomczak — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 06:00:00 +0100

With the impending end of official support for Joomla! 1.0 and as I prepare for my session at the upcoming CMS conference, I've found myself revisiting the ongoing question of whether to build sites in 1.0 or 1.5.

As a developer who has enthusiastically embraced 1.5, my knee jerk reaction is that of course (!) we should all be building new sites in 1.5 and drop 1.0 like a hot potato. How could anyone even question this? Some of the comments to the official annoucement (see here) served ...

Flash version 10

Bill Tomczak — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 06:00:00 +0100

There has been some buzz lately about Flash version 10 breaking the media manager in Joomla. This won't be fixed until after 1.5.8 so what to do in the meantime? Since it only affects the media manager in the administrator, at least the problem only affects your staff. Your choices are to either wait to upgrade Flash until Joomla fixes the problem. If it's too late for that, all you need to do is disable the media manager's flash uploader. Go to "Global Configuration/System" and rig...

404 page not found handling

Bill Tomczak — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Once we had decided against using sh404sef, we were still left with the need to handle '404 Page Not Found' errors. Clear and explicit information on this wasn't particularly easy to find, so I thought I'd document how we did it here.

In J!15, errors are normally handled by - surprise! - a template file. Look in the the system template folder for the file error.php. Standard J!15 error handling sends the user to this page for any unrecoverable error. Including 404 errors. If you c...

sh404sef and 404 error pages

Bill Tomczak — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 05:00:00 +0100

My last entry here was inspired by the possible use of sh404sef in the site we just launched (YAY!). We ultimately decided against using it for this site. Despite many great features that would make it a valuable addition to any site there were just too many issues I couldn't address in the time frame available before launch.

The initial motivating factor that made us look into it was a need to handle "404 page not found errors". Joomla 1.5 (J!15) does have the abi...

sh404SEF and some other extensions

Bill Tomczak — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Oh gosh! Been awhile since I wrote here. We've been completely swamped by the impending launch of one of the most complex sites I've worked on. We're using a bunch of extensions with a variety of compliance to Joomla 1.5 coding standards. None of them perfect, but some pretty darn close.

Joomsuite has been a mixed blessing. Having the code encrypted makes it more difficult for me to be excited about it. The idea is fantastic, but I'm finding it's capabilities - at least for our pu...

Template Overrides - Part 3

Bill Tomczak — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Creating a template override can be very simple or highly complex. It will depend on the Joomla core generation code you want to override and what you want to do. A relatively simple example that has been requested often in 4Web's work removes those pesky row numbers in the weblinks listing.

Normally, the listing of weblinks within a category will display something like this:

# Web Link Hits 1