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Tuesday, 03 November 2009 16:53 |
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I started playing with Drupal a while back because I wanted to see how one of the other Open Source CMS worked. I'd been thinking about building a site called blackberrybooks.org and decided to use Drupal for it.
I'd purchased a copy of Using Drupal  and noticed that it contained a chapter on building a product review site, so I knew I had exactly what I needed. I dug into the book and carefuly crafted the site I wanted and when it came to the section where I was building the views I'd need to display the book listsings, nothing worked. Every time I followed the steps in the book (step by step, I promise) I'd reach a point then start getting errors. Drupal has an automatic update notification feature, so the site sent me an email letting me know that there were updates available for the Amazon plug-in I was using so I installed the updates and tried again - no luck.
The problem with Drupal is that although there are a ton of plug-ins available - very few of them (or at least very few of the ones I was using) have any sort of documentation. It's too bad, but as you probably know geeks just don't like writing documentation.
I gave up and built the site using the Book Library module for Joomla. It took me about an hour to completely build the site in Joomla. I hope I get another chance to try Drupal again - it's an amazing CMS, much more flexible and tunable than Joomla. |
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Thursday, 29 October 2009 20:43 |
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I've been doing a lot of reading lately about Joomla! and I've been tweaking this site (and the BlackBerry Development Fundamentals site as well). I haven't been getting very good traction with the search engines, so I installed a Search Engine Friendly module tonight. Everything seems to be working OK, but I still need to learn some things about this system. The issue for you is that any links you've bookmarked into the site may no longer work (I'm not sure). You'll need to grab new ones (until I can firgure out how to setup aliases). |
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Monday, 26 October 2009 08:43 |
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One of the most interesting things I learned while I was writing the book was how to enable JavaScript programmatically within the BlackBerry browser. As RIM reviewed the chapters, several people commented on how, even if JavaScript was turned off in the browser, it could be enabled programmatically. I searched and searched for information about how to do this, but couldn't find anything until I finally begged someone from RIM to explain to me how to do it. Here's how it's done:
In the NoScript section of an HTML page, put in some JavaScript. It doesn't have to be script that does anything, it just has to be JavaScript. When the browser encounters the JavaScript, it sees that it's disabled and prompts the user to enable it.
Here's a sample web page that enables this:
<!DOCTYPE html public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>JavaScript Test</TITLE>
</HEAD>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<h1>JavaScript Test</h1>
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript">
document.write("JavaScript is enabled!")
</SCRIPT>
<NOSCRIPT>
JavaScript is disabled!<br />
Please <A href="javascript:void()">click here</A> to enable JavaScript.
</NOSCRIPT>
</BODY>
</HTML>What's interesting about how this works is that MDS will normally process the HTML page and remove any content not supported by the browser - it doesn't make any sense to send anything to the browser that the browser won't recognize. So, it the HTTP Accepts header indicates that JavaScript is not enabled, then MDS will remove all of the JavaScript code from the page. Since JavaScript isn't expected to be in the <NoScript> area of the page, MDS ignores it and delivers that script to the browser. When the link is clicked, the browser performs its check and prompts the user to enable JavaScript.
Pretty cool, right? |
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Thursday, 22 October 2009 07:11 |
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I came across this URL a while ago and thought I'd share it with all of you. So many times you're looking for documentation on RIM's web site and you have to hunt around to find what you're looking for. When looking for a particular server document (this is for the BES, not the development tools) I usually used search and drilled down from there. Well, there's a very useful URL every admin should have - it's www.blackberry.com/go/serverdocs.
At this URL is a very organized summary of all server documentation categories as shown below. The most useful part of this for me has always been to pick one of the BES platforms - that page that appears next shows the most recent versions of the BES docs for the selected platform and has a drop-down list containing all versions. You can then make a selection from the drop-down and see every doc related to the selected version. This is very useful when you have to support multiple BES versions (like I know my friends at Vox Mobile do every day) and want to find the right doc right away.
Enjoy the tip!
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Tuesday, 20 October 2009 20:29 |
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Have you ever wanted an easy way to see what HTTP Header and CGI variables were available to a Domino Wev Server? I know much of what's available is documented, but when I started learning about BlackBerry web development, I wanted a way to be able to see in real-time what the Domino server knew about the BlackBerry device connecting to it. To help me figure this out, I created a little sample Domino database that dumped a bunch of information the Domino Server knows about a User-Agent (the browser) back to the browser screen making the request.
Here's a sample screen shot from a BlackBerry device illustrating what the application looks like:
I just posted an article about the application and the Domino database to my BlackBerry Development Fundamentals site. Check it out when you get a chance (only if you're interested of course).
There's a piece of the application that shows what JavaScript information is available to the BlackBerry Browser - I noticed while I was working on the book that it isn't working on BlackBerry Device Software 4.6 and higher - sorry, but I haven't gotten around to fixing it yet. |
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