A little bird tells me that Joomla 1.5 sees it's Beta release on the 12th October... now that's not a fully-fledged release for use on your commercial, live website, but that is a step in the right direction for the next generation of this quite incredible Open Source Content Management System.

Although I'm totally engrossed in designing, developing & deploying a 1.0.11 site, I'm excited to see what 1.5 will be like, especially as it has been written from the ground up and is promising to be more accessible, usable, flexible etc...

And it's supposed to be backwards compatible with the versions we're using now :)

Come 12th October 2006 I think I'll go bag me a download for evaluation on one of my test sites...

Firefox 2.0 RC 1 (Release Candidate 1) is out now!

With all the UTF-8 output of the previous HTML Tidy I was using from Site Valet, as mentioned in my post from a week ago, I decided, with a HUGE 68-page article to be readied for use in my CMS, that I didn't fancy de-bugging THAT many pages...

...so I went in search of something a bit more robust and stumbled upon a great HTML Tidy from Infohound.

Even in its Standard form, Infohound's HTML Tidy has options to have the character encoding as ASCII (whoopee) or UTF-8 if you wish and logical emphasis (that's changing <b> and <i> tags to <strong> and <em> accordingly, as advised by the W3C) as well as advanced options to drop font tags and drop proprietary attributes!

So go use it!

Recently I've had to do some projects involving Adobe Acrobat reader - open the PDF, take the text, transplant it into a design. Easy huh? Well, not so easy...

I downloaded the latest version of Acrobat Reader 7 but it wouldn't install and I didn't have my Acrobat 4 disc to hand, so I did a quick trawl if the Net and found oldversion.com "because newer is not always better"

Couldn't agree more.

Sometimes new features are just too much - the GUI becomes more (im)mature (personally I reckon a lot of GUIs get "dumbed down" to cater for less technically-minded people) the extra buttons are just useless, the program becomes bloatware, old tools disappear...

So grabbing an executable version of Acrobat 4 was awesome.

Thanks oldversion.com :)

I was just helping out over at the Everything's Gone Green green news & lifestyle website when I noticed that their Categories over in the RHS of their page were out of order.

So a quick sniff around the web showed up the excellent WordPress plugin by David Coppit: Category Order 1.9.5 (at the WordPress Plug-Ins section, near the foot of the page)

I can't explain it any better myself, so here's a quote from David Coppit's page...

"Allows the blog administrator to set an explicit ordering, spacing, and indentation of categories in the category list that appears in the sidebar. The administrator specifies the ordering in the new "Category Order" management page. There is also an option for placing the category post count inside the link."

Now Everything's Gone Green's categories are in order - Books at the top, Uncategorized at the bottom...

Joomla TIP: I was just converting my static HTML content over to Joomla CMS when I realised that creating new categories can lead to a reverse alphabetical ordering. So the Joomla tip of the day is to enter new categories and content in reverse order, starting with the Zs and finally inputting the As.

:)

PS: Note that if you DO enter the categories etc. in reverse order then your category IDs will be in reverse order too... with, for instance, your A as 26 and your Z as 1... So if keeping your category ID in order is important to you then do bear this point in mind

:)

A great item for any designer's toolbox is the HTML or Tidy Online.

Whilst shifting thousands of pages of legacy HTML code from one system to another (flat, individual HTML pages to Content Management System (CMS)) I found that numerous people had hacked the code over a period of 5 years...

...and HTML tidy made "cleaning" the code a little easier.

What this was particularly handy for was for placing readable HTML code in a WYSIWYG or online text editor window ni the browser-based CMS. Being able to wrap the text to 72 characters meant it is so much more easy to manage in the CMS.

Oh, and if you're using CMS like Joomla then don't forget to save the HTML files to a source folder and when pasting the new code into the interface, remove all the code before, after and inclusive of the body tags.

Advantages of HTML tidy

• Indents Code
• Export to XHTML
• Limits the text wrap (default 72 chars)
• Provides Error reporting

Disadvantages

• Strips HTML special character coding unless you use the ASCII-friendly HTML Tidy from infohound
  
• Can add extra kilobytes to the eventual file
• Watch out for {mospeagebreak} commands in Mambo and Joomla - if you split those command lines they do not read in the CMS!
• PDF-printouts in Joomla! will be literal - a 72 character wrap of your HTML will produce narrower Joomla PDF output!
  

Another useful featured stumbled upon...

Using the latest Firefox 2 Beta 2 build I was cutting & pasting some code from a web page back back into Dreamweaver when I right-clicked the highlighted code and noticed some new right-click functions... underneath the usual Copy & Select All were these little beauties...

Highlight Keyword...
Show Keyword Density...
Search Google for...
View Selection Source

Wow! Show Keyword Density huh?
I tried it... I'd highlighted too much text... no result.
I highlighted a key phrase... Childcare Vouchers...
Bingo!

How handy is that?

Now, what are the bets that that little feature will stay or go in the final version of Firefox 2?

Ever looked at a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and wondered why all the !important declarations all over the place?

Well, I was creating some stylesheets the other day for a site and was getting exceedingly frustrated with the cross-browser compatibility issues. Although I was writing clean HTML, accessible & standards-compliant, the difference in layout between Internet Explorer and Firefox was quite annoying.

The pixel-perfect design was great in Firefox, but when I checked the layout in IE it was "out". This is apparently all to do with IE's misinterpretation of CSS and therefore you have to like it, lump it, or hack it!

So, these !important declarations?

Historically they exist to ensure that author's styles take precedence over user's styles, you can take a more in-depth look over at W3 about !important rules. But in my CSS case they are also useful to differentiate styles between proper standards-compliant browsers and IE.

You see, IE can't handle or understand the !important declaration so CSS coders use it to help out.

In my CSS I wanted a fixed-width element which was skewed in IE by around 9px including all the other padding, margin elements etc. So to cure this I inserted the lines into my stylesheet...

width: 115px !important;
width: 124px;

What does this do?

All compliant browsers will read the first line, see it as important and display a 115px wide element.

IE doesn't understand the !important declaration so it moves onto the next line and displays a 124px width element.

Easy Huh?

And why did I make all those declarations bold and red? Well, that's what you get from being a life-long user of TopStyle Pro ;)

So...

I want to incorporate some Chitika eMiniMall code into my blog and the option is there to change the colours... border, title, text, background; not too disimilar to the Google AdSense code options.

I can't remember the pale shade of blue I used so I screen grab the blog page and...

...Oh. I'm at a machine right now that doesn't have my regular Fireworks 4 or Fireworks 8 installed, so I have to use another graphics package... an old copy of Corel Photo Paint 8.

Ah, another problem: Photo Paint 8 is more DTP & print so the RGB values from the dropper aren't quite what I want... 223, 234, 246... what's that in hex? I'm a web designer not a print designer!

A quick google for it and I find the RGB to Hex convertor.

Yes. DFEAF6. Just what I needed. Thank you :)

So, you want to test your Joomla! CMS installation on a local machine huh?

Well, historically it hasn't always been easy to load up Microsoft's IIS and run sites, and that's coming from someone who has been in this game for nearly ten years now.

You can imagine my relief when I stumbled across Joomla Stand Alone Server, or JSAS for short, from Joomla Solutions. JSAS installed quickly & easily and allowed a Joomla installation to run on a local machine with all the features of a fully-fledged server.

JSAS installs Apache, MySQL and the Zend engine, then allows you to add new sites, installing your own modules, components, templates etc and running the CMS without having to use & abuse your bandwidth.

Excellent. I just wish I'd known about JSAS a year ago!

There's a shiny new version of Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 out now.

Get it while it's hot.