New company, new logo

www.clsystems.co.uk

I am very sorry to lose Cleveratom – such a cool brand! I wish my former colleagues well in their new endeavours, and will look forward to carrying on doing some excellent learning based consultancy, learning space design and web application development with Matthew Eaves as a co-director.

Since we have no development team anymore, we will be looking for excellent individuals who have a lot of skills and want to work in a dynamic way. If you know of anyone, do send me their info (or send them mine!).

cleveratom website

The Cleveratom website has been given a new look and a new engine, too! For the last few months we have been relying on WordPress to drive things along, and whilst it has been OK, it has never been what we wanted. It was better than a static page, but never really did the job we needed. Fortunately, that has all changed today as we moved over to the rather brilliant ‘CMS Made Simple‘ content management system.

If you head over to www.cleveratom.co.uk you will see the new livery and be able to read all about the work that we are doing. There are many things still to add in relating to the projects we are doing, and you can always sign up to the newsletter in order to get more information on a (fairly) regular basis!

Getting a new site up and running is always traumatic in some way, and today we did battle with DNS servers, Nameservers and email records. Sheesh! No doubt we are all the better for the experience!

What is of interest is that we needed to provide a complete CMS system that would allow the lead members to update the information as and when needed and use some simple tools to aid them in the process. This could actually have been quite a tricky task given the scope of CMS tools available and the ease in which the systems can be managed.

It was whilst searching through the various tools available that we decided on using ‘CMS Made Simple’, which as the name suggests is a simple, but powerful CMS system.

Running on PHP and MySQL, the system is open source and works right out of the box. The simplicity of it is in the way that page templates can be created for a number of different styles. The plug in architecture aids the creation of new modules, but the system comes complete with quite a package – certainly enough to create a reasonably sophisticated web site.

User management tools are good, with different levels able to be set up and each given different privileges to allow for editing and authoring and so on. The one area which seems harder than it ought to be is the menu creation aspect – this is a tad convoluted but appropriately enough the extra steps needed to create a menu allow for some useful features to be included. For example, you can create a menu which acts as a ‘nugget’ and can be incorporated into other menus you make. This nesting ability allows the author to create a flexible and yet dynamic menu system with relative ease.

The system is relatively new to the market and consequently isn’t well documented, but there is enough there to get you going and to answer most general queries. Over time I expect this tool will mature into quite a useful but simple system, and I hope that above all else the developers keep a tight grip on the need for simplicity.

More information, updates and so on are available on the CMS Made Simple web site.

So what to do? Well, on the wordpress.org website there are several threads about it, including this one where I posted a response earlier today. It seems that the issue is at least ten months old, and various solutions have been speculated. Indeed, some of these solutions seem to work for some folk, but they sure as heck didn’t work for me. Largely, they involve editing one of the core wordpress files – ‘format.php’ and either adding in a new line, or taking some away. The new line is supposed to be inserted as line 67 and reads:

$pee = preg_replace( '|(</div[>]*>\s*)</p>|', "</p>$1", $pee );

This did nothing for me at all. Other solutions included commenting out lines 66 through to 68… still nothing. However, when I asked my colleague Alex Blanc to look at the code he very quickly spotted that there was a simple fix – in his words ‘a bit of a sledgehammer approach…’ but it seemed to work.

Add this as line 91:

$pee = preg_replace( '|</p></form>\s*</p></div>|', "</form></div>", $pee );

(one line only, folks, no carriage returns…)
The placing within the function in ‘format.php’ is important – put it at the bottom of the function!

Now, it may be that you don’t need this, or that it doesn’t actually work for you – it worked for me today though. The point is that this is a known issue in wordpress and has been around for nearly a whole year, and survived several updates of the software. It really ought to have been sorted out properly by now… but hey – this is open source, right?

Of all the encoding methods available to PHP programmers, possibly the best is from Zend. One of the most pointless is gencoder (although free). Luckily, it was gencoder that had been used on this occasion. The file looks like this:

Now, as you can see there is no easy way to get into the code and remove the advertising links. However, there are two possibilities.

Firstly, you can create a CSS rule in your stylesheet which sets the footer ‘a’ display to be none:

footer a {
display:none;
}

All this does is remove any clickable links in the footer, but leaves the remaining text. This is at best a workaround, but can get you out of a fix if you are in a hurry.

The second thing to do is decode the file! Again, there are two ways to achieve this, but probably the simplest is to edit the ‘eval’ statement to read ‘print_r’ instead. If you then run the code in your browser you’ll see that it makes a bit of a mess visually, but you can still right click and ‘view source’. What you are looking for is at the bottom of the page:

if((isset($v) AND $v==0) OR (isset($t) AND $t==false)){die('This script is protected by <a style"color:cyan\" href="http://www.gencoder.sf.net\"><b><font color"#330099\">G-Encoder</font></b></a>');}echo "<div id"footer\">n";
echo " Powered by n";
echo " <a href="http://wordpress.org\">WordPress</a>n";
echo " and Design by Ivy's <a href="http://www.rubberstampguides.com/\">Rubber Stamp</a> n";
echo " Guiden";
echo " <p><a href="http://www.kirrhi.com/\">Pay Per Click Affiliate Program</a> | <a href="http://yeinjee.com/asianpop/tag/asian-entertainment/\">Asia Entertainment</a> | <a href="http://www.paradise-philippines.biz/\">Paradise Philippines</a></div>n";
echo "</div>n";
echo "n";
echo " <?php wp_footer(); ?>n";
echo "n";
echo "</body>n";
echo "</html>n";

Now you can see the code more clearly, and you can easily see what needs to happen. The last four lines are all you need… in fact, one of those can be deleted! What you really need is the call to the wordpress footer routines and to close the body tag and close the html. This is all that is necessary to complete the footer file in wordpress. Armed with this knowledge, go back and change the ‘print_r’ statement if you like, but better yet, just delete all of that guff. In it’s place simply add the following few lines of code. You can leave out the ‘div’ tags if they are not needed:

<div class="footer">
<?php wp_footer(); ?>
</div>
</body>
</html>

and that’s it. Save the file and you have got yourself an advert free footer space on your wordpress blog.

Thanks (as ever) to Alex Blanc for his timely and ultimately very simple solution to the problem, and no thanks whatsoever to the person who decided to a) put adverts in the footer, and b) encode them at all. I believe each person needs to have the right to choose whether to display adverts, and in this case I chose most strongly not to!

Hence the need for Fixex – a wonderful site for teams to use at a minimal cost. The fee is just £10 per season for the entire youth section in a club to make use of the service. For that you get unlimited access to the database of available fixtures, your own space to manage your fixtures and links to every other club in the exchange. It isn’t the only exchange in the country, but it is a good one.

Pete Conner died in 2005 and there was a real danger that the  exchange wouldn’t survive. The software was aging and needed updating, Liz was in a terrible state after her loss and I have to say I wasn’t much better! However, we persevered. I found out a bit about PHP coding and re-built the site, Liz found out about using email and took on the callers to the exchange. Between us we have managed to get by.

Each year all of the proceeds from running the system are donated to S.P.I.R.E (Support Paraplegics in Rugby Enterprise) – a charity that was established by the RFU. The donation is modest, usually around £250 to £300 pounds, but it is consistent. The presentation is made at Twickenham every January during the annual ‘extravaganza’ where clubs from all over the country are invited to meet up and sort fixtures for the coming season. Usually, this means clubs from the South East, mostly, although many come from much further afield. This year we donated another £300 and are pleased to have done so – a big ‘thank you’ is due to all of the clubs who subscribe and to Keith Norman who organises the event with the RFU. We are also hugely grateful to the RFU for hosting the event and providing food and drink for the evening… without the support of folk like Alan Black, this event could not take place in such prestigious surroundings.

And so the exchange continues. The web site is at http://www.fixex.com and a lot is happening over there. A new version of the software was released this weekend, and more development is underway. I couldn’t do any of it without the wonderful MX Kollection Dreamweaver plugins developed by Interakt (who have been bought by Adobe).

We are renaming the donation to be the ‘Peter Conner Award’ and are looking for other good causes to support as well as S.P.I.R.E – the intention is to find and help those who against all odds manage to find a way to achieve within rugby union. We will no doubt announce more about this as the year progresses.

The task was to be able to build a single category RSS feed that people can subscribe to if they so chose, rather than have to subscribe to all categories, or all comments. In the theme I am using the sidebar holds the category list and it was here that the code had to go.

The issue was to find the category ID and the category name and only show the link to the RSS *if* the user had opted to view all posts in a single category.

It turns out that WordPress has done most of the hard work for us, in that the functions to get the ID and name are already created. All that had to happen was to find those arguments, wrap them in an ‘If’ tag and post them to the sidebar. Once again, some gentle reading of the Woprdpress documentation got me half way there and able to manually write the code for each category… but it needed automating. And once more, Alex Blanc stepped up to the plate…

To cut a very long story short, here’s the code, entered as a list item in the sidebar.php file for the theme:

<?php if (get_query_var('cat')) { ?>
<li>
<a xhref="/wp-rss2.php?cat=<?php echo get_query_var('cat'); ?>"><?php echo single_cat_title(); ?> (RSS)</a>
</li>
<?php } ?>

This then writes the title of the category in the sidebar as an RSS link, and ensures that only that category’s posts are included in that particular feed. You can see from the code that the link is using RSS2, so you can probably amend this to be any other flavour of feed that you wish.

A while ago now I was working on the designmyschool.net website and one of the functions we had to build was the ability for a user to upload accounts in bulk – typically the data would come form a school management system, which meant it would be best to use CSV file formats.

At the time I researched into what tools were available to help with this task, and found only one suitable for a novice PHP coder such as myself – Interakt’s ‘CSV Import/Export extension for Dreamweaver.

The trouble was that I didn’t fully understand it all back then and in truth probably still don’t. However, I have now had a chance to use the other Interakt extensions and really like the way they make complex tasks much, much easier.
Just my luck then… the CSV extension has been pulled! Adobe’s acquisition of Interakt bodes well in so many ways, but sadly it means I couldn’t purchase the extension to test it out. Instead of the wide range of extensions, Interakt are now bundling just one set into a single product – MXKollection. The other extensions may well appear in a future version of Dreamweaver, but there are no guarantees.
So I happened upon an Italian website called Felixone. A quick read through and a short email later I had requested a new extension gets built!
And here it is:
http://www.felixone.it/extensions/prod/mxiecsven.asp

I don’t yet know how this works, but it looks very, very good to me. For €28 it has to be worth a chance! I think I can now confidently complete that part of the admin tools for designmyschool… we do have the csv uploading working well, but we could use a csv download of the results. Sigh… it never ends…

All has been well until the host company said they were no longer going to host .ASP and that I should get this converted to PHP.

Now, I am no web coder but for a few years I have been working with some very skilled people. Sadly they haven’t had the time to help build this for me, but have offered loads of suggestions and ideas. I really needed to get this done myself.

So I went to freelancers.com and looked for anyone who could do the conversion. As it turns out there are lots of folk there who thought it would be easy, but I needed to work fast!

I have for some time been using Dreamweaver as my HTML editor, along with BBEdit on a Mac. There are a number of in-built tools to help code PHP, but you need to know what you are doing before you understand when and how to use them. I have also bought a copy of Interakt’s ‘MX Kollection’ This is basically a framework that writes the PHP code from a library of functions. All you need to know is what function you are doing.

The online help system for this is pretty good, and there are dozens of tutorials to help. It handles just about everything you need for a fairly complex site, including registration, sessions, listing information, amending records and so on.

Have a look at http://www.fixex.com to see the site I built (if you are a youth rugby team, sign up!!), and check out http://www.interaktonline.com for the dreamweaver extensions. I notice the company has now been bought by Adobe (who also now own Macromedia) so perhaps even better things are around the corner. All I know is I couldn’t have built this from nothing to a fully working site in less than a week without this set of extensions, so many thanks to Interakt!

Well, it isn’t really about having time is it? It’s all about purpose and whether or not the need is there which drives the desire to learn. In my case it is, since I am part of a team working on a project with the Design Council and the site makes use of PHP (and Flash – but that’s a whole other story for later).

I’m still trying to make sense of it, but thanks to yet another colleague I am beginning to understand it a little bit more. Unlike any other formal learning, where a chunk at a time is taken, tried, repeated, applied, etc, I am having to dive into the deep end and see the entire thing holistically. It’s like reading a book but only knowing a fraction of the words, yet trying to understand the story… tough call.

So, many thanks to Alex for his tireless explanations, loan of books and the like – and big apologies to all who are having to suffer my expletive driven learning style!