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Written by Ben Cheek
| Wednesday, 31 August 2011 14:16
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I've been using JomSocial on a lot of Joomla sites to replace the functionality formerly handled by forum extensions. The Groups feature allows users to have more control and ownership over the on-site conversations.
On of the key short-comings of the default JomSocial template is that the date is not printed on a new discussion (something done by all forum software). Adding this to the template for JomSocial 2.2 is fairly striaght-forward:
Replace this text in /components/com_community/templates/default/groups.discussionlist.php (around line 43):
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<?php echo JText::sprintf('COM_COMMUNITY_GROUPS_DISCUSSION_CREATOR' ,
'<a href="' . CUrlHelper::userLink( $row->user->id ) . '">' .
$row->user->getDisplayName() . '</a>'); ?>
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with
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<?php echo JText::sprintf('COM_COMMUNITY_GROUPS_DISCUSSION_CREATOR_TIME_LINK' ,
(CUrlHelper::userLink( $row->user->id )) , ($row->user->getDisplayName()) ,
JHTML::_('date', $row->created->date, JText::_('DATE_FORMAT_LC')) ); ?>
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This uses a different variable from the langauge file than the original (edit the resulting text there).
This creates a byline for a disucssion with no replies like this:
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 31 August 2011 14:43 |
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Written by Ben Cheek
| Wednesday, 31 August 2011 10:56
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I was having a problem with a client's Joomla website showing a horizontal scrollbar on every page. The main width of all other template divs was correct for the broswer, but the body was being extended right beyond the visiual space.
The culprit in the code was "overflow:visible" in the element styling on the <body> and a couple of divs like this:
<body id="page_bg" style="overflow: visible; z-index: 100;">
and
<div class="center" align="center" style="overflow: visible; z-index: 100;">
This code was not in my template's index.php file, so I knew it was being added by a script or plugin. I had a hunch it was the DHTML menu plugin I was using, SWMenuFree.
Futher research showed it was, and this particular styling was added when MyGosu Menu is selected as the menu system.
Apparently, all the menu systems within SWMenuFree add style code to the template like this. I could have likely changed this behavior by editing the menu JS file /modules/mod_swmenufree/DropDownMenuX_Packed.js. Instead, I decided to use the Transmenu System, which I like a bit better. It too adds style to the elements, but it doesn't create the scrollbar issue:
<body id="page_bg" style="position: static; z-index: 100;">
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 31 August 2011 11:25 |
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Written by Ben Cheek
| Wednesday, 31 August 2011 10:07
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I try to write tech tips whenever I do something technical, even with my personal technology, especially when I couldn't find a single source on the Internet with the solution I needed. Last night, I ran into just such a case with my wife's iPhone 3G. She inherited a jailbroken one (this method will supposedly work with a non-jailbroken one too) and it came with several calendars from the pervious owner. Famously, iPhone's core calendar app doesn't allow you to delete calendars unless you do so as part of iTunes sync.
I used the following method to remove the calendars with her iPhone and my MSI netbook running Ubuntu 10.10:
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 31 August 2011 10:40 |
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Written by Ben Cheek
| Friday, 06 May 2011 15:29
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Protesters parade a characterture of state Minister-President Stefan Mappus in a March 7, 2011 demonstration against the Stuttgart 21 Rail Station [Bernd Klumpp | istockphoto].
The New York Times ran an interesting article this week on the Wutbürger -- the grassroots movement of largely independent "angry citizens" that is disrupting politics all over Germany. Even as Europe looks to Germany for increased leadership and stability, the domestic political lives of German leaders are being complicated by an enraged movement insensitive to the usual ideological rhetoric and formerly tucked the politically-active into one camp or the other.
Despite how frustrated politicians might plead that Wutbürgers are unproductive because they won't join a camp, there's a sense no party truly understands the problem. Gero Neugebauer, head of the Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft (Otto-Suhr Institute for Political Studies), puts it this way:
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Last Updated on Friday, 06 May 2011 17:07 |
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Written by Ben Cheek
| Sunday, 06 February 2011 19:19
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Lambeau Field by YF12s [CC-BY-2.0].
For Super Bowl Sunday, check out this article on CNN by John D. Donahue and Richard J. Zeckhauser who present the unusual ownership of the Packers as an example of the private-public-nonprofit collaboration needed to solve the challenges of now and the near future. I couldn't agree more, but would agrue we must master the three values of openness - clarity - consistency to do so effectively and safely.
We talk about the Four Challenges of our times as Stability, Sustainability, Justice, and Peace (an umbrella for all these is emerging that we call Integral Living -- or the authentic experience of being alive). These challenges are so inter-related, they require a broadly collaborative approach, but it must be done in the right way. While greater openness in terms of partners is important, ambiguity in terms of identity and story could undermine the essential clarity that would make such partnerships effective and responsible and ultimately disrupt the consistency required to build trust to meet these challenges.
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Last Updated on Sunday, 06 February 2011 19:45 |
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Written by Ben Cheek
| Sunday, 06 February 2011 18:33
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Demonstrators on 1.28.11 in Cairo. Photo: Ramy Raoof [CCA 2.0 G].
Chris Walker, a new friend I met while presenting at PRMI, sent me an insightful article on the face of the Egyptian protests from the New York Times. The articles profiles the rise of Egyptian young-professional Khaled Said's martyrdom from a facebook page (also in English) to the face of the current uprising. Chris pointed out how this was an example flattening: of one of the fundamental attributes of the Rise of Complexity. (While at PRMI, I presented EVS, a value-system framework that explains the emergence of the Participatory-Network Age to solve the pervasive fragmentation, mixing, and flattening in the Rise of Complexity, which was birthed as a consequence of the Republic-Industrial Age.) While the use of social media in Egypt (and previously in Iran when the US State Department asked Twitter to fore-go regular maintenance to protect Green Revolutionaries) is important and impressive, the demonstrator's resilience in the face of communications blackouts shows this runs much deeper than technology.
Two things interest me deeply:
First, how story clarification was central to the momentum of the revolt. Just like Neda Agha-Soltan of Iran's Green Revolution, the current uprising in the Middle East is fueled by faces and stories symbolic of the frustration of an entire generation. This time, the whole thing began as riots in Tunisia over the suicide-protest of harassed street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi. His story became a symbol of how the social and economic consequences of a repressive regime are crushing the future. As the fire spread to Egypt, the connected, educated, and largely unemployed youth contextualized the story with the case of Khaled Said, beaten to death in June by two detectives trying to cover up their own corruption. Now, many in the protest have taken up the slogan of Said's facebook page: "We are all Khaled Said!"
Second, I'm interested in how social media has altered the power-story of state-run media. As things were heating up in Egypt, many were surprised by the coverage of Egypt's state run channels who had to walk a thin line between maintaining enough credibility to be useful for propaganda purposes while also serving the interests of their government and military handlers. Accountability in media is based on the competition, and now, even in police-states and dictatorships with strict media controls, the competition is everyone. The reporters felt this deeply, with several career-protecting departures as the demonstrations continued.
Neda Agha-Soltan
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Last Updated on Monday, 07 February 2011 10:29 |
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While working on a site I'm developing, I noticed a strange problem where the text in a certain paragraph bolded when the page scrolled (see right). The bolding was clearly a rendering error, since the bold did not extend to the end of lines and would disappear temporarily when another application opened or saved a file (only to reappear when the page was scrolled in the browser again).
Weird bold text rendering erro...
Down-and-dirty Hack to Display...
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