Although I usually try to prevent working with Joomla!, recently I had to build a customized website in this CMS. For this website, I created three interacting components with backend management panels from scratch. As I never had worked with Joomla! 1.7.x or above, I followed the tutorial ‘Developing a Model-View-Controler (MVC) Component for Joomla!2.5‘ which I located through Google. Although this tutorial is rather long (18 parts, of which about 15 are completed), the tutorial only covers the creation of a basic component and does not elaborate on the functionality of the used classes or the underlying logic. With the new knowledge gained, I was able to produce two of the components without major problems. However, during the creation of a third component I ran into a problem caused by a ‘feature’ of the Joomla! CMS: automatic pluralization. Read more »
Category Archives: Web Development
I have been working for many years with the Gnome 2 shell now, but the recent positive reviews on Unity and Gnome 3 have also reached me. As I am not a huge fan of Unity for variety of reason (including its lay-out and lack of customization), I have decided to try out Gnome 3 within Ubuntu. Since Gnome 3 is finally ‘supported’ for Ubuntu, the method of upgrading Gnome has slightly changed. Using the second beta of Ubuntu I have written this small article so everyone install Gnome 3 within Ubuntu. Read more »
Under Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) I have been using PlayOnLinux for a while to install a variety of Windows programs (for example: Internet Explorer 7). After my upgrade from the 10.x Ubuntu series to the newest 11.04 version, I noticed that I was no longer able to install any programs within PlayOnLinux. The Ubuntu repositories offer version 3.8.8 of PlayOnLinux (at the moment of writing) resulting in the message ‘Sorry, PlayOnMac 2.5 and PlayOnLinux 3.8 are no longer supported.’ when attempting to install software. This short blog describes how you can update your PlayOnLinux version to the newest 4.x series that works correctly under Ubuntu 11.04. Read more »
As a web developer, I am constantly aware of the problem that every browser seems to have a mind of its own when rendering a webpage. Especially earlier versions of Internet Explorer are a big problem for a lot of developers as these browsers were not updated with new options and/or visual fixes (only security updates). As a result, most web developers want to test their creations in various versions of Internet Explorer to make sure that everyone can experience their website as intended. Earlier, I wrote an article that explained how you can run Internet Explorer 7 under Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. However, the package provided by PlayForLinux seems to be broken now and I had to find a new way to test websites before putting them online. In this blog I will explain a new method that actually runs Windows within Ubuntu enabling developers to exactly mimic the conditions of real users. Read more »
A guide to better bug reporting
08-03-'11As a developer I continually receive bug reports from colleagues, clients and (sometimes) website visitors. While most of my colleagues file proper bug reports, this is not often not the case for clients and website visitors as they are unaware of the complexity involved in debugging processes. In this article, I will give some guidelines that will enable you as a reader to file better bug reports making it easier for developers to fix the reported issue. This results in a win-win situation as you will most likely benefit from the proposed fix. Please note that I will write this article from a webdevelopers perspective, but that most of the information given in this article will also be useful when filing reports for other software (and sometimes hardware). Read more »
Almost two years back, devongovett published a small JQuery plugin on his blog. The goal of this plugin was to allow developers to add the ‘text-overflow: ellipsis’ behavior to their websites in all browsers using JQuery. This CSS3 feature adds an extra option to the ‘text-overflow’ property that allows developers to automatically add three ending dots (e.g. ‘…’) to website content that is to large to fit their container. All browsers except FireFox support this new CSS3 feature and it was suspected that this feature would therefor be added to FireFox 3.1 (released June 30, 2009 under version number 3.5). Currently, I am running the most recent stable version of FireFox (being 3.6) and developers are still waiting for Mozilla to include this feature in their browser. For one of my current projects I also required the ‘text-overflow: ellipsis’ behavior so I rewrote the script from devongovett to work with MooTools 1.3. Read more »
I recently switched to JEdit to create new PHP project, as I was having problems with my GEdit application. Though I initially liked most of the featured offered by JEdit and its various plugins, I was annoyed by the fact that every file opens in a new Window making my workspace look really messy. On the internet I could not find an solution with ease, but two articles for Linux and Windows gave me an idea on how to fix the issue on both platforms. In this article you will find the solutions I used that are based on the information found on those pages. Read more »
Howto: Solving the FireFox opacity-bug
05-01-'11 A friend of me notified me that one of my latest creations seemed to have a color-bug in its tagcloud at the bottom. Using Linux and various browsers, I could not reproduce anything that looked like the problem he described, so I fired up my Windows machine and started FireFox and Chrome. On this Windows machine the problem was easily identified in FireFox, but in Chrome and other browsers everything seemed fine. After various tests I concluded that the issue was a FireFox-only issue which made texts with a lowered opacity look really odd colored. Read more »
Two years ago I bought an eeePC 1000H for all my e-mailing, webbrowsing and textwriting on the road. In addition, this netbook is a perfect tool to try out new software like the MeeGo 1.1 operating system. The eeePC 1000H is supposed to be supported completely by MeeGo 1.1 according to this page, but today I found out otherwhise. In this article I have combined information from many sources that helped me to get MeeGo 1.1 up and running on my eeePC 1000H. As the hardware of this netbook is comparable to other netbooks in the eeePC-family, this article might also be of interessent to users of other netbooks (e.g. eeePC 901). Read more »
The Millennium Bug 2.0
08-11-'10Almost everyone with some relation to ICT clearly remembers the millennium bug that preceded the internet bubble in 2001. The problem was caused by date formats that were written with a two number format for years (e.g. 00-00-00). On midnight, at the start of the new millennium, the 99 for the year would be changed to 00 again, making software programs believe that the new year would be 1900 instead of 2000. With the Millennium problem solved ten years ago, programmers are now looking into the future and found another time-related bug that might break many programs. Read more »
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