Basically the issue im having is I have a custom theme, and I need to use $scripts to call the analytics code at the top (the link tracking settings) however this also loads loads of other cr*p js files I dont need or want.
All I want is the analytics stuff the module places in $scripts.
So can I somehow either:
A) Load only the analytics code via $scripts (.info file?)
B) Create a new region in .info file (e.g. $analytics) and call that via the template. But then how do I get the analytics code to output to this new region instead of $scripts?
Any help would be most appreciated.
A.
I would be wary of not outputting $scripts. The files that are output are needed for your other modules to work properly. If you want to reduce the scripts which are output then turn off modules that you don't need.
I agree that disabling the $scripts variable (or cleaning it out) will have some "undesired results". I can think of about half a dozen modules that I use on every build that have required js files.
Maybe you should look into the Google Analytic Module which uses the $footer variable instead of the $scripts.
http://drupal.org/project/google_analytics
I also use this module on all my builds as it provides some very easy integration of Drupal into GA including downloads, user roles, etc. (out of the box)
p.s.
Remember Drupal has a pretty good Performance settings that allow for the cache as well as consolidation css/js.
My final builds have 1 line of markup that calls ALL of my css for that page and one line that does the same for my js. It's been shown that consolidating your asset files into one large file rather then many small ones is a huge performance saver, more so then the size of the end file itself.
Related
I'm looking for some advice for adding d3.js charts to Wordpress.
My client has commissioned a forceSimulation - still in progress. It is currently organised as follows:
index.html
main_javascript.js
main_css.css
global_properties.js
data_file.csv
I'm totally clueless as to whether it is possible to add the chart to her Wordpress blog and if so how to do it.... Any advice would be much appreciated.
Many thanks.
For reference, here are the WordPress docs on Using JavaScript.
Making it easy for them
From past experience (though not in WordPress), I'd try to simplify the steps your client has to take to get the visualisation working well, just in case the person doing them has little technical skill.
Hence, as far as possible, I'd combine your files into one force-viz.js:
CSS rules can be inlined by using d3.style in JS on the appropriate elements.
CSV can be inlined as a JavaScript string, parsed with d3.csvParse.
global_properties.js can just be in the same JS file.
index.html is unnecessary if you use d3.select(...).append(...) to construct the DOM tree you want, and instruct your client to write—
<div id="force-viz"></div>
—where they want the chart to appear, then d3.select that in your script.
This would mean all your client has to do is:
Place force-viz.js in a scripts/ directory.
Paste—
<div id="force-viz"></div>
<script src="scripts/force-viz.js"></script>
—into the text of any page, wherever they want the chart to appear.
Making it easy for you
If being forced to program into a single file is annoying, I recommend Browserify. It's a tool that can process a set of JavaScript files with require('whatever.js')-calls to each other, combining them appropriately into one file. With a plugin, it can even turn fs.readSync('data.csv') calls into strings containing that file's contents, which you could use with that CSV file.
That way, you could continue programming the thing as separate files, then run browserify to bundle them up for your client.
Or just do it manually, if this is a one-off project. Your call.
I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere that you can actually move the main plugin *.php file to somewhere else (I assume under your theme directory) to have it safe in case you made changes to it and your plugin updates. I tried Google but I can't find anything. Google page with good results will suffice.
I've just experienced a situation where my 2 plugins which had its layout changed and accommodated my needs and I want to make sure it doesn't happen again. Apart from having the main file in another location, is there a way to move along any CSS and JS files as well?
In Concrete5 CMS there is a nice way of doing this, by creating a new folder inside a block of an addon (may be regarded as a WP plugin), inside of which you can create copies of main file, any CSS and JS files and then you can simply edit them and choose that template for a page location you are using that block in.
I assume there is no such thing in Wordpress but how close can I get?
UPDATE: I found where I applied that advice on creating a new instance of the file then moving it to the theme directory.
The plugin in question was HL-Twitter. These are the plugin files:
admin.php
archive.php
functions.php
hl_twitter.php
hl_twitter_archive.php
hl_twitter_widget.php
import.php
widget.php
Now, this is the top contents (commented out) of the hl_twitter_widget.php:
Widget Theme for HL Twitter
To change this theme, copy hl_twitter_widget.php
to your current theme folder, do not edit this
file directly.
Available Properties:
$before_widget
$after_widget
$before_title
$after_title
$widget_title
$show_avatars
$show_powered_by
$num_tweets: how many tweets to show
$tweets: array of $tweet
$tweet: object representing a tweet
$tweet->twitter_tweet_id
$tweet->tweet
$tweet->lat
$tweet->lon
$tweet->created
$tweet->reply_tweet_id
$tweet->reply_screen_name
$tweet->source
$tweet->screen_name
$tweet->name
$tweet->avatar
$user: represents the Twitter user (ONLY SET IF SHOWING A SINGLE USERS TWEETS!)
$user->twitter_user_id
$user->screen_name
$user->name
$user->num_friends
$user->num_followers
$user->num_tweets
$user->registered
$user->url
$user->description
$user->location
$user->avatar
So I was wrong about copying the main file (in this case hl_twitter.php), but still - this enabled me to edit the file outside the plugin directory and the system somehow checks for its existence and picks it up if exists.
If this behavior something that is natively supported by Wordpress or it has been integrated in the plugin itself?
With themes, Wordpress has a concept of "child themes" which allows exactly that: to keep changes separate from main theme, in case it changes.
I haven't yet found a way to do this with plugins.
I'm using a few tactics myself:
I bump plugin version to a very high number like 99.9. This way Wordpress won't ever update the plugin.
Store my plugins in version control (i use git, but it doesnt matter), this allows you to update the plugin, run the 'diff' tool and see what changes happend. If you don't like you just revert like it would be a bad code you've written. But this approach requires a bit of skill.
Are you talking about running parts of a modified 3rd party plugin, and an updated version, at the same time?
That's not going to be possible. There is no magical method of "preserve my changes and transfer them into the new version automatically". The way to go here is doing a diff between the edited version and the update, and integrating the changes in the actual source files.
The bottom line is, if you manually edit a third party plugin, you're in for manual review (and possibly rework) once an update takes place. That's why it's usually not a good idea to extensively modify third party plugins.
Well in fact, yes! There is some kind of way.
You have to remove the to be modificated plugin's original actions/filters and then add your altereted actions/filters.
If the desired plugin is even coded in OOP you can just inherit the whole class and rewrite the wanted functions (oh sorry: "methods". we're talking about OOP ;) ). Instantiate your inherited class and rest as above.
Maybe there are better ways! I already search for a method so that the original class won't even get loaded but our altered one instead but I'm no John Carmack.
So I'm writing a Django based website that allows users select a color scheme through an administration interface.
I already have middleware/context processors that links the current request (based on domain) to the account.
My question is how to dynamically serve the CSS with the account's custom color scheme.
I see two options:
Add a CSS block to the base template that overrides the styles w/variables passed in through a context processors.
Use a custom URL (e.g. "/static/dynamic/css/< website_id >/styles.css") that gets routed to a view that grabs all the necessary values and creates the css file.
I'm content with either option, but was wondering if anyone else out there has dealt with similar problems and could give some insight as to "Best Practices".
Update : I'm leaning towards option number 2, as I think this will allow for better caching down the road. So it's dynamic the first time, gets stored in memcache (or whatever), and invalidated when a user updates their settings in the admin site.
Update: Firstly, I'd like to thank everyone for their suggestions thus far. All the answers thus far have focused around generating static files. Though this would work great in production, it feels like a tremendous burden during development. If I wanted to add a new element to be styled, or tweak existing styles I'd have to go through and recreate each and every css file. Sure, this could be done with a management command, but I just don't feel it's worth it. Doing it dynamically would add 1 maybe 2 queries to each page load, which is something I'm not worried about at this stage. All I need to know is that at some point I will be able to cache it without rewriting the whole thing.
I've used option #2 with success. There are 2 decent ways of updating the generated static files that I know of:
Use a version querystring like /special_path.css?v=11452354234 where the v parameter is generated from a database field, key in memcached, or some other persistent file. Version gets updated by admin, or for development you would just make the generation not save if the parameter was something special like v=-1. You'll need a process to clean up the old generations after some time.
Don't use a version querystring, but have it look first for the generated file, if it can't find it, it generates it. You can create a cron job or WSGI app that looks for filesystem changes for development, and have a hook from your admin panel that deletes generations after an update. Here's an example of the monitoring, which you would have to convert to be specific to your generations and not to Django. http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/ReloadingSourceCode#Monitoring%5FFor%5FCode%5FChanges
Could generate the css and store it in a textfield in the same model as the user profile/settings. Could then have a view to recreate them if you change a style. Then do your option 1 above.
Nice question.
I would suggest to pre-generate css file after colors scheme is saved. This would have positive impact on caching and overall page loading time. You can store your css files in directory /media/css/custom/<id or stometing>/styles.css or /media/css/custom/<id or sth>.css and in template add <link rel="stylesheet" href="/media/css/custom/{{some_var_pointing _to_file_name}}" />
You can also do the trick with some random number or date in css file name that could be changed each time file is saved. Thanks to this browser will load the file immediately in case of changes.
UPDATE: example of using model to improve this example
To make managing of those file easy you can create simple model (one per user):
class UserCSS(models.Model):
bg_color = models.CharField(..)
...
...
Fields (like bg_color) can represent parts of your css file. You can ovveride save method to add logic that creates css file for user (by rendering some template).
In case your file format change you can make changes in your's model definition (with some default values for new fields), make little changes in template and run save method for each exisintg instance of class. This would renew your css files.
That should work nicely.
I would create an md5 key with the theme elements, store this key in the user profile and create a ccs file named after this md5 key : you gain static file access and automatic theme change detection.
We've created a custom module for organizing and publishing our newsletter content.
The issue I'm running into now -- and I'm new to theming and Drupal module development, so it could just be a knowledge issue as opposed to a Drupal issue -- is how to get each newsletter themed.
At this point the URL structure of our newsletter will be:
/newsletters/{newsletter-name}/{edition-name}/{issue-date} which means that we can create template files in our theme using filenames like page-newsletters-{newsletter-name}-{edition-name}.tpl.php, which is great. The one issue I'm running into is that all of the content comes through in the $content variable of the theme. I'd like to have it come through as different variables (so that I can, inside the theme, place certain content in certain areas.)
Is there a proper way for doing this?
Edit: To answer some questions: The issue is a node (there are issue, edition and newsletter nodes) and the path is being set using hook_menu with wildcards and a router.
The best answer I could find was to add a check inside of phptemplate_preprocess_page to send the vars back to the module and have them be updated.
Like so:
function phptemplate_preprocess_page(&$vars) {
if (module_exists('test_module')) {
_test_module_injector($vars);
}
}
then in my test_module.module file I created this function:
function _test_module_injector(&$vars) {
$vars[] = call_to_other_functions_to_load_vars();
}
It seemed to work. I wish there was a way to do this without having to touch the theme's template.php file, but otherwise this works well.
If there were better documentation for template preprocess functions, Drupal would be a lot more accessible - as it is, you need to piece together the information from a lot of different explanations. One place to start is here:
http://drupal.org/node/223430
but if you take the time to work through the tutorial below, you'll find you can do most things:
http://11heavens.com/theming-the-contact-form-in-Drupal-6
This is an old post, and the OP's issues seems to have been solved.
However, just for others finding this through Google (or otherwise):
Install the 'Devel' module: http://drupal.org/project/devel
Also the 'Devel Themer' module: http://drupal.org/project/devel_themer
Use Devel Themer to go through the $content variable and find what you need to pull out.
There are a bunch of Devel/Themer docs/tuts out there, but its usage is pretty straightforward. Note, though, that some stuff in there will need to be sanitized before printing in the theme.
The suggestion to show the node as a View and then modifying the view templates sounds pretty crazy, though it'll work.
I know that I need to add the tracking code snippet at the bottom of all my pages, but is there a central location to do this?
Or do I need to add this tracking code to all of my templates?
I guess that I could wrap the snippet in a user control, or external .js file, and reference it on each page, but is there a global footer somewhere? The site I'm working on has about 30-40 layouts, and adding it to each one would be a pain!
Thanks in advance!
Actually, the role of a Sitecore layout is exactly this; to act as a global file that all individual page templates "derive" from.
Normally you'd stick the analytics code into the master layout, and use Sitecore sublayout/placeholder techniques to construct the various page templates you need. You would not normally need more than perhaps one or two layouts for any device you are serving content to. And I guess for most sites, the only device in use is regular web content delivery.
That being said, what you could do, is have all the layouts inherit their codebase from a common base class (inheriting from Page), and inject the google code centrally from here. Would still require you to go through all layout files however.
I have not tried the module, I think that is codebehind version. I have made this in XSLT, its pretty fast and easy to make. I have footer.xslt where I put the code that simply checks if page you are standing on uses template that I want to index and does not belong to page names that I want to exclude. Then I have an item with a custom template for Google Analytics with following memo fields.
IncludeTemplates -field contains list of templates that I want to include for analytics :
ExcludeItemsNames -field for excluding pages by item name
contains($includeTemplates, concat('|',./#template,'|')) and not(contains($excludeItemNames, concat('|',./#template,'|')))
Remember #key and #template is always in small letters
If you run many domains don't forget to add pageTracker._setDomainName("www.example.com"); in analytics script so you can separate sub-domains etc. if they use same footer.xslt
Normally we consider the actual Google code as content. Within Sitecore we normally have a settings folder, something like /sitecore/content/settings. This exists outside the root of the site. Beneath this have a settings item with a plain multi-line text field, I think the field type is memo or something similar.
Afterwards create an XSLT that renders out the content of this settings item. Something like (assuming the field is called value in the setting item):
<xsl:value-of select="sc:fld('Value','/sitecore/content/settings/footerJavaScript')" />
You may or may not need to set the disable-output-escaping attribute.
Then on the aspx page that your pages use as the template add a control that looks at the xslt rendering:
<sc:XslFile runat="server" Path="/xsl/footerJavaScript" />
The reason that we normally keep the javascript as content is this allows the client to change the analytics code without having to contact us.