I'm fairly new to using Aptana, but I'm wondering if it supports a feature that I used to use a lot in Dreamweaver, where you could create a page template, i.e. the header and footer of a page that would stay the same for each page on a website, leaving only the content to be coded.
I found this feature really useful as you only needed to change code once for it to propagate to all pages.
I've searched for this feature in Aptana, but I'm not sure on the exact terminology.
Not currently. There have been requests for it, but it has not yet been implemented:
https://aptana.lighthouseapp.com/projects/35272/tickets/2140-allow-for-dreamweaver-like-templates
Related
Divi is a wordpress theme https://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/divi/. It contains a video module https://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/divi/documentation/video/ that allows you to add the URL of your video and then view it on your website. Currently it supports Youtube, Vimeo, etc. however does not support Wistia. Without going into detail Wistia is the only option I can use, and therefore my aim is to create a plugin that adds this functionality. However I'm going into the unknown and want further direction. My first objective would be to look into the theme code and find out how the theme is adding this functionality for Youtube, Vimeo, etc. Exactly how would I find the code? And then why wouldn't this functionality have been added to begin with? Would they have just left it out, or would it be another reason that might be preventing me from adding the functionality?
Every single include/embed/attachment etc. that loads from an external source, into Your app is done trough the usage of an API which Your source provides.
You won't be able to find much in their code since this is probably being done trough some custom shortcodes or hooks. In both situations, this requires custom modifications from their developers in order for the Westia API to work with the DIVI builder.
In Your particular case, Westia do provide an API but if DIVI didn't include that yet, I presume that this is because of the fact that Westia is a Niche video hosting provider, not a public one like Youtube / Vimeo. Therefore, I think that You should contact their support for more information on that issue.
You can try to embed your desired wisita video trough a custom object of some kind.
So in this case, You can go trough this thread right here by Elegant themes, and after you get acquainted with the methods to do so, head over to WISTIA's embedding options page and find out what fits your site best.
In a typical WordPress project I guess there are 3 parties. Party 1 is the graphic designer providing psd/pdf or html that party 2 (the developer) will create a theme from with probably some custom posts so party 3 (the client and content editor) can update the site without messing up the design and with no knowledge about HTML, JavaScript, Gimp or PHP.
This would tie the main theme of the site or it's specific pages in the php page(s) and if some minor design changes need to be made it needs to be done through editing php files.
I was thinking the following for a theme design:
(assuming a content only site without having complicated sales statistics and such)
Instead of "programming" the page.php to fit the graphic design and bring in specific (custom) posts and other data I would have the page.php bring in sub content. This so the graphic designer can create the page without having to program.
When images need to be provided then wordpress can pre scale/crop for different screen sizes.
The entire page should be created from the editor by the designer NOT the editor/client and not in page.php:
<html {{lang}}>
<title>{{title}}</title>
...
{{main-slider}}
JS and css are added through custom fields so they can be merged to one file.
Main slider post looks like this:
<div id="main-slider">{{main-slider-content}}</div>
JS and css can be provided to overrule page css or js and will be merged to one file.
And the main-slider-content is content that the editor can provide through a custom post provided by the programmer that will hold the editor's hand all the way and makes sure everything goes right.
Some of these fields can be set with custom fields values of the page (reverting to defaults if missing) some will be overwritten by the post (like language or title).
The type of sites that will be produced by this theme are used by small business owners who would like some web presence.
I have a couple of doubts about the design and hope someone with more experience with wordpress can shed some light on this.
When the editor/client edits a custom post like some slider content they cannot preview the item because that content is basically used on every page. Even if I find a way to list pages where the slider is used and show that one it won't show the new content until it's published. Previewing pages seems a bit complicated to implement.
It takes longer to generate the pages because content and sub content needs to be fetched from the database after parsing the content. I've tried to do this with DOMDocument before and used <div data-custom-content="main-slider"></div> but that is too slow so I'll try with regexp.
Because content isn't going to change that much I thought maybe APC cache the page after a first request and serve it from there. Delete the cache only when something is updated. On VPS the cache could be (probably would be) trashed when the site is inactive for a long time (which would be quite often). This means that requests take a long time to process when people try to view the pages.
Anyone with experience or helpful tips in this
[UPDATE]
I see that particular design and the html template will still have strong dependencies on each other. I am thinking now of trying out Twig. The benefit will be that re usable components are classes that can be added to the project and full content is controlled in the wordpress editor in a way that someone with no programming experience can still manage the content.
When data needed in the page is going to change a programmer is going to be needed though.
This is kind of what the Advanced Custom Fields Flexible Content system does, and the way you've styled your examples looks very like Smarty, a templating system that used to be very popular, and which is still used by a few systems like Prestashop.
In my experience, this removing the middleman kind of idea doesn't work. You either need a very extensive - and therefore bloated - initial theming system to flex to different projects, or you need a basic one which a developer will customise later - in which case the best you can achieve is moving the developer's role to a different phase of the project.
Overall, I think the best scope for this type of idea is for designers to learn a bit more code.
I am working on a Facebook iFrame application, and have a question about styling.
I want the application content to look like the rest of facebook. So the most obvious approach I could think of was to use a stylesheet provided by Facebook for application development that includes such styles. However I cannot seem to find anything about this on developers.facebook.com or any other site for that matter.
I have created some FBML application earlier, and these was able to use Facebook styles directly since the application content was rendrered within the facebook pages. But iframes does not inherit the stylesheet from the parent content (nor should they), so I was wondering how (or possibly if) this can be done.
I have found some posts/blogs that simply tells you to create an application stylesheet that mimics the Facebook look. But I don't think this is a very good idea, as this CSS must be updated every time anything changes on Facebook. It also seems that all facebook wiki pages regarding CSS (which I have used before) has been removed.
The reason I do not want to use FBML Canvas is that Facebook is in the process of deprecating this approach. They recommend new applications to be created using iframes.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fbml/
I really hope anyone has any good ideas on this.
There is no official way. For some reason, FB shards their styles to a ridiculous degree. They also change the filename rather than appending a version parameter every time they make a change to prevent downstream caching. Here's an example of todays stylesheets:
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/y-/r/40PDtAkbl8D.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yE/r/u7RMVVYiOcY.css
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yT/r/P-HsvhlyVjJ.css
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yT/r/CFyyRO05F0N.css
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/y0/r/k00rCIzSCMA.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yv/r/BJI6bizfXHL.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yD/r/rmbhh_xQwEk.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yn/r/xlsrXFt9-vD.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yN/r/Uuokrl6Xv3c.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/y0/r/klTGALEjWM8.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yN/r/mlYhlJwnCdr.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yT/r/uFI2FW2LitH.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yh/r/5Bzj1255G1S.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yp/r/5UteuBI1b8_.css
You can automate this process fairly easily using either PHP or .NET using existing solutions Minify and Combiner respectively.
A simpler method would be to use the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox, go to Facebook and choose the Web Developer toolbar option to "view CSS" which will bunch all the CSS up for you. Copy and paste it into your own local stylesheet and you only have to update when Facebook makes a major change.
So while there is no simple way (that I am aware of), there are methods for you take care of it in a fairly speedy manner.
(I've posted this on the drupal forum too btw)
I'm converting the company websites to use Drupal, or at least trying to check that its going to be the best way forward. I have a background in PHP development, and I'm currently using the CakePHP framwork. I've built this site (not my design) and I can see how to replicate most of the functionality using Drupal, most likely using the CCK module.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/yk6u8mt
As you can see from the homepage:
A user chooses a country.
The country is passed using an ajax call to a script that decides which phone is best based on 'in country' network coverage.
A div is shown recommending the visitor the best phone for that country.
I'm wondering how to go about this in Drupal, I'm definitely not after a step by step guide, I just want to know if this kind of thing is possible with Drupal, and what approach to use.
If someone can help that would be superb. Thanks.
Okay, so you've got a path you're defining in hook_menu, which is where your form is being presented - or else you've got it set up as a webform in a node, that could work too.
Either way, in your form you're going to be using AHAH - check out http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/developer--topics--forms_api_reference.html/6#ahah and http://drupal.org/node/348475 .
Basically, you're going to define another path in hook_menu that's of type MENU_CALLBACK, and which will receive the country as input, and then will return the div that you'll display on the screen.
One core example of AHAH that may be useful to you is where you're entering a password and it lets you know if the password is secure enough - check that out.
Edit: There's also some good examples at http://drupal.org/project/examples.
I would look into using CCK and views. you can set up filters for the views. If filters don't work, you have the ability to include php code. I have also successfully added jquery code in the header of a view through which I was then able to have my view filtered by what is typed in a text box.
Coming from CakePHP using Drupal is a pain in the a** - even more for developers.
It's application structure might be designed to ease extensibility but this only means you have a system to enable your own plugins and themes.
While modules are basically the M+C-part the themes are the V-part of an MVC-application. The problem is that this seperation is not very strict in Drupal - in fact you have to break it sometimes in order to make things work (e.g. you have to include a theme_mymodule_myfunction() into your module as default output which you then can override with your theme using mytheme_mymodule_myfunction() ) And don't even bother looking for classes ( see http://drupal.org/node/547518 ).
Also there is no real link from a module to a theme. On many occations this is a good thing as you can switch modules and themes seperatly without creating a problem. For application builders coming from CakePHP (or any other framework) you often feel a lack of "wholesomeness" - you create parts for a base software and have to live with it's drawbacks.
IMHO I wouldn't recommend this step. Drupal is fine if you have to manage a website and might add a few modules to add neccessary value (image gallery etc.) but I definetly don't recommend it as a base for a customized web-app.
I downloaded GraffitiCMS the other day(now open source and free), and like a lot of what I see, but what I really want to use it for, is to add CMS capabilities to an existing asp.net database/application.
Without getting bogged down with all the details of my app, can someone give me the basic 'approach' that should be taken to add custom content to Graffiti; content that won't be a 'post'?
I've seen for example, how to add custom-widgets to Graffiti - basically inherit from the widget class, compile your dll and plop it into the correct directory and it becomes part of the system. Is there a way to do something similar for the main content areas?
For simplicity sake, pretend I have a non-graffiti database with gig's of data that I want to display on the website using standard asp.net grid's and forms. I realize I could just go in and hack apart the source code to integrate my existing app, but that is likely not the correct approach.
Not looking for a complete solution her, just a pointer and what areas to investigate...thanks.
If you check out the latest source of Graffiti (or the 1.3 branch that was recently created), support was added to put widgets anywhere you want on any page. There is a new chalk function - $macros.Widget - that provides you with this ability. Dan Hounshell wrote a blog post on how you can use this new functionality:
http://danhounshell.com/blog/graffiti-cms-1-3-add-a-widget-anywhere-in-a-view-with-new-widget-macro/
If you're looking for something different than that, just let me know - we're working to make Graffiti even better for situations just like you are currently in.
What we have done to be able to integrate Graffiti CMS with our current ASP.NET projects is to create a post in Graffiti called "hidden" and then with our standard .ASPX pages we call a class in our Render Override that pulls the "hidden" post (ie: site.com/hidden/) and uses the header and footer to wrap the Graffiti theme around our custom .ASPX page. We use some HTML comments in the "hidden" post to be able to parse the header and the footer. It is kind of a hack, but has worked out really well for us.
I think you're trying to put the cart before the horse - depending on the size and amount of functionality, I would be looking to rebuild it after learning the development platform of my CMS system of choice.
I'm pretty much in the same boat right now. I have avoided Graffiti because I have to learn "Chalk" (whatever that is) and Umbraco (using XSLT for layouts is retarded). So far, this leaves me with Sitefinity at the top of my list and Telerik have just pulled the free version!
I may end up grabbing a very basic CMS which is easier to customize. I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but it may give you some food for thought :-)