David Nash

I came across this and there were no Google matches, which I thought was strange.

So if you’ve installed Symphony CMS under Ubuntu (I have 10.04, Lucid Lynx) and get the message “no suitable XSLT processor was found”, it means that you need to install the package “php5-xsl”.

I like GUIs so I used Synaptic, but I’m sure you could also do something like “sudo apt-get install php5-xsl”.

Then restart Apache with “sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload” to load the XSLT module.

It’s been a long time between posts, mainly because I’ve been so busy. Lately I’ve been working with Symphony CMS. Which means I’ve been writing templates using XSLT, which I think is excellent for writing templates. My XML skills have really advanced over the last 6 months. Using XSLT you can transform one bit of XML into another bit of XML. And because XHTML is XML, it means that I can transfer the XML data output from my Symphony data sources to XHTML.

The documentation that does exist for Symphony is quite good, but there seems to be a lot that simply isn’t there. Hopefully that will improve in the future.

I’ve already used Symphony on a couple of projects. It’s a CMS that looks after the developer as much as (perhaps more than) the content author. The learning curve for the developer is pretty steep but once I got over it, it’s been very smooth sailing. If it’s possible to sail down a curve.

I don’t usually like to re-blog – I prefer original content and a list of links. But I’m making an exception for this – firstly, it’s really cool, and secondly, I’ve been too busy to post anything for a while.

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1007

Ron and his team ran some A/B testing online that compared a traditional Web form layout with a narrative “Mad Libs” format. In Vast.com’s testing, Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40%.

I think forms are a crucial part of any website. The web is mostly one-way, and only via forms can you get feedback. You need forms to do anything interesting. Yet they’re SO boring.

They’re boring to fill out, they’re boring to code. I think anything that makes them a little bit interesting helps a whole lot. I hope to code some forms like this in the future and I hope this turns into a real trend on the web.

This took me a little while to work out. I’m using PHP5’s SimpleXML to parse XML into a PHP object. The XML has entries like <HELLO-THERE>.

But you can’t use $xml->HELLO-THERE because it reads the hyphen as a minus.

Instead, use $xml->{”HELLO-THERE”}

Easy!

It seems like every time I deploy a Silverstripe site I either lose the admin password, or it changes somehow. Then I have to search for ‘lost silverstripe password’ or something to work out how to reset it. This is basically for my own reference:

1. edit /mysite/_config.php
2. add Security::setDefaultAdmin('admin','password'); to the bottom
3. profit!

1. Download all files from eg http://example.com, upload to eg http://localhost/example/.
2. Export mysql database from example.com
3. Create a local mysql database with the same user, password and database name. These can be found in wp-config.php
4. Import the database into your new local account
5. Log in to the database, and do:
[sourcecode language='sql']
update wp_options set option_value=’http://localhost/example/’ where option_id=1
[/sourcecode]
You’ll now be able to log in at http://localhost/example/wp-admin, using the same username and password as http://example.com/wp-admin.
5. In Wordpress, click ‘Settings’ and change the blog address to your local address.
6. Profit!

By default vim opens .ss files with some other file format syntax highlighting.

To enable HTML (actually XHTML) syntax highlighting on your .SS Silverstripe template files, create (or edit) your ~/.vim/filetype.vim file. Then enter this:

au BufNewFile,BufRead *.ss      setf xhtml

Then open a .ss file and it’ll give you nice HTML syntax highlighting. And because it’s in your home directory, it’ll keep working even after you upgrade vim.

Edit cms/javascript/tinymce.template.js – you can use any configuration options you find at http://wiki.moxiecode.com/index.php/TinyMCE:Configuration

I was trying to use this to enable force_br_newlines but with no luck – although the other settings seem to work okay.

When I write HTML and CSS I’ll usually create a mockup – I take a high quality JPG of the design and put it into a very simple page that shows the JPG, centered on the screen. Then in Firefox I switch back and forth between the page I’m working on and the mockup so that I can get the design pixel-perfect.

Well today all that will change. I’ve discovered the Pixel Perfect Firefox Extension which allows me to overlay the mockup over what I’m designing.  You can set the opacity and quickly toggle the overlay on and off.

I’m not sure about centering – it doesn’t seem to do that automatically. But I think I could use the MeasureIt extension to get the width of the main column, set it in CSS with ‘margin: 0 auto’ to centre it, and then drag the overlay to match and base everything off that.

My job just got slightly easier again.

Awesome!

I was asked to do some quick mods to client’s Wordpress blog. He wanted to replace the banner image. He’s using Wordpress 2.7 and has the default Kubrick theme.

This isn’t as easy as you would think as it’s generated by PHP so that the colours can be dynamically set.

Here’s what I did:

1. Download wp-content/themes/default/images/kubrickheader.jpg
2. Modify it, save and upload as wp-content/themes/default/images/kubrickheader_NEW.jpg
3. Edit wp-content/themes/default/header.php. On line 42 you should see <div id=”headerimg”>
4. Modify this so it reads:

<div id="headerimg" style="background: url(<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/kubrickheader_NEW.jpg) no-repeat -1px 0">

Upload header.php and it should now be using your new header. I used the “-1px 0″ because the header was out of horizontal  alignment by 1 pixel. I don’t know if that’s because of the header image he sent or if that’s the way Wordpress’s dynamic banner image works. You might need to remove that part.

This probably isn’t the best way to do it but it’s a quick and easy solution.