Archive for October, 2006
Joomla - Enabling registered users do add content
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006Although Joomla is one of the most advance CMS available, there are some things that I really don’t like/agree with. One of these things is the complex Access Control List. There are too many different user types and registered users have no permission to add content to the site. They need to be upgraded from “Registered” to “Author”. Still, and Author can only create content, but not publish it. Only a Publisher can publish content. And between Author and Publisher there is still the Editor, that can create and edit content, but can’t publish. As you can see, there are too many different user types (and I forgot to mention the Manager and Administrator types also availabel for the frontend. On the backend, another long list exhists).
If this complex organization was not enough, you cannot specify a default user type, so everybody that registers becomes a “Registered User”, without permissions to add content. The Joomla solution is to go to the administration backend and switch the user to the group you think it fits (one of the listed above). However, if you want a user to be able to create, publish and edit it’s OWN content, it’s not possible rigth now. Registered users can only create content and Publishers can publish content from all users, so none of this types is good for our needs. After reading on foruns about the Joomla ACL (that was inherited just like it is now from Mambo) and about the no-will of Joomla developers to listen to community and change it, the only solution is to change the source code yourself. A very easy solution indeed. Just open the file includes/gacl.class.php and inside the funciton gacl add the lines:
$this->_mos_add_acl( 'action', 'add', 'users', 'registered', 'content', 'all' ); $this->_mos_add_acl( 'action', 'edit', 'users', 'registered', 'content', 'own' ); $this->_mos_add_acl( 'action', 'publish', 'users', 'registered', 'content', 'own' );
This will allow registered users to add any type of content, edit their own content and publish their own content. The same logic applies to other user types in case you want to change any of the permissions on the file.
Auto Publishing
Another sometimes useful feature not available in Joomla is the frontpage auto-publish of content (the Publisher is the one that decides to put the content in the frontpage or not when he publishes it). This can be achieved with a single change in the file components/com_content/content.php. Search for the line:
$row->frontpage = 0;
and replace it with:
$row->frontpage = 1;
This will enable frontpage auto-publishing of all your contents. Note: although this may be useful for publishing news in the frontpage, it may not be what you want for when you create articles that are not to display in the frontpage (In this case, you need to uncheck the frontpage publishing box). You should consider wich one is the most common case and decide on the best option for it.
Popularity: 100% [?]
10 years of Apple.com
Thursday, October 19th, 2006For the apple fans, here is an article with the evolution of Apple’s website over the last 10 years: Ten Years of Apple.com w/screenshots.
Via: digg.com
Popularity: 11% [?]
Live at CASCON 2006
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
After my yesterdays participation in the workshop DB2 XML - A True XML and Relational Database, the rest of the week will be spent at the CASCON Technology Showcase, with a poster and a some live demos aout DB2 9 pureXML™.
Yesterday’s workshop as a success! The room was completely full and we even had some people having lunch in the meeting room just to have more time to explore the project and ask us questions. My session was the first in the afternoon, entitled "XML Indexing in DB2", with a 30 minute presentation plus 40 minutes of lab exercises. As my first experience lecturing at a workshop, it was interesting to be on the other side and feel the responsability (and excitment) of having about 40 people staring at us and asking questions. Most of the public in our workshop were wither DB Appllication developers or students in the database field.
Note 1: for as much that you prepare a presentation, there will be always some question that you don’t expect, and that if have no idea what’s the correct answer.
Note 2: for as much that you prepare the lab exercises, there will always be a typo on it 
Nothing serious.. just a "$d" not escaped being consumed by the linux command line.
Note 3: the food at Hilton is great!
Popularity: 18% [?]
Coincidências
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006Já estou como o Paulo. Qual é a probabilidade de eu perder o meu blihete de identidade algures fora do edifício da IBM Canada e a primeira pessoa a dar com ele ser um portugues, que trabalha para a camara na limpeza de valetas? Vá lá que o senhor, emigrado há mais de 20 anos ainda se lembrava que aquilo era o "nosso" bilhete de identidade e da sua importancia, vindo a correr à recepçao do prédio mais próximo (a IBM) entrega-lo.
Que eles (nós) sao (somos) muitos, já eu sabia, mas desta é que eu nao estava à espera 
Popularity: 8% [?]
Happy BDay!
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006WTF???
Wednesday, October 4th, 2006What’s wrong with car insurance in Canada?!? Why do I have to pay almost $6000/year to insure a car that costs less than $4000? This is crazy!
How I miss California…
Popularity: 11% [?]
RTP streaming
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
RTP, the portuguese public television, puts online every day a stream with their two daily news services ("Jornal da Tarde" and "Telejornal"). Sometimes Every few days, I watch one episode just to keep in sync with the news. It happens that yesterday, when i was trying to watch the dinner time news service Telejornal, I got instead the live transmission of the soccer game Sporting - Leiria. Yes, one hour of pure soccer
This happened because the stream is recorded not from RTP1 (the channel that broadcasts the new in Portugal) but from RTP Internacional (the channel that broadcasts worldwide). Usually, RTPi broadcasts the news at the same time that RTP does. The only exceptions are when there is a soccer game broadcasted by the public television in Portugal. Then, RTPi broadcasts that game worldwide. It looks like the streaming system is automated (that’s good, in most cases) and started recording RTPi at 8PM and finished at 9PM, recording one hour of soccer instead of one hour of news.
I guess I’ll have to watch today’s news service to sync up.
The streamings are available at RTP multimedia resources.
Popularity: 14% [?]
