Category: Development

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Development

GCalendar

I downloaded and installed the GCalendar Joomla! component, and am very impressed thus far with it. I’m a big fan and think that Google Calendar is the best calendering system around, especially with some of their sharing features.

While Joomla! does have some very impressive calendar components available, I was really hoping to include a Google Calendar and this component makes it fairly easy to do just that.

If you already have a Google Calendar, installation and setup of the component is a breeze. It currently offers a custom calendar display or you can embed the standard Google Calendar display into your site as well. It’s great, you get the features of a Google Calendar and the integration with a Joomla! site. Very impressive.

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Development

Use Google My Maps to create KML data

While in the process of working on some nifty mapping stuff, I wanted to produce some KML data that I could overlay onto a Google Map. I’m so glad that Google My Maps will allow you to easily export your polygons as a KML file.

So easy, just go to Google Maps, go to My Maps and then create a new map. Then use their super easy marker and polygon tools. The polygon tool works like a very primitive pen tool, but is good enough to draw most buildings on a map.

When you’re ready to export what you’ve drawn on your map as KML just click on the View in Google Earth link and it should produce a nice KML file for you.

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Development

Google Webmaster Tools

I’ve always been a fan of the Webmaster Tools that Google offers. If you have a website, you really should make use of some of the really nice features that they offer. The crawling and indexing information found there is great.

In early December they added some new features, with the Site Performance feature being one of the more useful upgrades I’ve found in a while. It can be found under the Labs section and shares very useful info about your site’s speed as well as how well or not so well you rank in terms of load times compared with other sites.

As a guy who continually tries to squeeze each and every millisecond out of load times, this is great information to know! They also offer suggestions as to how you can improve the speed of certain pages on your site as well.

While many of these features can also be found in YSlow as well (which is another must for any developer), it also does warrant a look.

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Development

Mullica Hill Skin Care Joomla install/conversion

Just finished up converting Mullica Hill Skin Care’s site to be powered by Joomla. Their site was a series of basic html files setup in Dreamweaver, and the client had used a Joomla powered site in the past and wanted this site to be powered by Joomla as well.

Joomla is an open source CMS (content management system). It’s pretty awesome and has been an excellent solution for many people I’ve worked with.

The site’s design stayed the same, with barely any changes made to the existing markup with the change over. We’ve also included a blog for the client to use too.

“Let me just say thanks again for converting the site so quickly…it’s so much easier to use!!!:)”

There’s some amazing tools available now for site owners, and it’s always great when I can set them up with the right tools to make their lives easier while at the same time having a current site.

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Development

Insert swf into Joomla article

Joomla TinyMCE Editor settingsI was having a hard time with inserting a swf into a Joomla Article using the TinyMCE editor. It seemed pretty simple, just click the media button, set the path and  you’re done. That seemed fine and simple enough, but the TinyMCE editor was just displaying an image tage, not the object code that I was expecting it to render.

After some time researching this, and trying just about everything I could think of it dawned on me. I have the the Code Cleanup on Save setting for the TinyMCE plugin set to Never, so the editor was never converting the swf code to the necessary code to embed it one the page.

Simply setting the TinyMCE plugin setting Code Cleanup on Save to Always fixed it for me. It’s amazing just how often it’s something so incredibly easy that can be the source of a problem. I’m thinking of a fine script to fix it when all I had to do was simply adjust a setting.

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Development

WordPress 2.9 Embeds

WordPress 2.9 was released today, and the upgrade has some very impressive features. So far the coolest one to me and I’m sure that will be for many of my clients is the Embeds functionality.

Now all you have to do to embed something into a Post or Page is to simply paste the video’s URL on a separate line. WordPress will automatically properly embed the URL. It supports most of the popular formats.

Previously I’ve come up with some Custom Fields solutions to do something very similar to this, but building it right into WordPress should make the process even easier. Thanks WordPress, very cool.

Check out all the other WordPress 2.9 goodness.