Recently I’ve been asked to build a site that requires a the ability to relate other pages to the one an editor is currently editing.

The plugin can be downloaded here.  Once installed in the plugins directory and enabled in the admininistration screen, the following tab is now available when editing pages:

See the documention screen for sample frontend code which lists the related pages.

Please be aware that I really did knock this together rather quickly, but it works for me.  If anyone finds any bugs, please let me know.

I fixed the obvious within the web.config.  For example, the following is needed to force the application to render XHTML:

<configuration>
	...
	<system.web>
		...
		<xhtmlConformance mode="Strict" />
		...
	</system.web>
	...
</configuration>

If I painfully cut and pasted the HTML into the Validator’s form field, it passed.  The problem is, is that the service is not recognised by the Web server, and so a helper file in the application is required.

I generally have a number of repetitive tasks that are extremely tedious to accomplish using the browser based GUI.  So I constructed a simple command line tool that allows me to script tasks using a SOAP interface known as the Tridion Business Connector.

The client takes the following arguments:

bcclient.exe /h [hostname] /u [user] /p [password] /d [domain] /x "[request XML]"
 

Why did I build this?  Very useful when called via scripting tools.  In my case, Perl.

Now that I’ve got the time, I’m going to start writing again.  I start work again in the new year, and I’m looking forward to it.  As things never stand still in development, it’ll be time to pick up a few books, and gain some new skills.

More Content Management integration coming up for me next year (Tridion, possibly Immediacy), and more ASP.Net work.  Also going to brush up on my jQuery, and CodeIgniter knowledge.  Really would like to do more Open Source based project work, as I’ve been mainly using proprietary applications during the pass few months.  With the economy lower than a fat kids self esteem, I can’t be choosy, just glad to be working.

Have a great Christmas, and I’ll see you a few pounds heavier in the new year.

The problem I had is that both search ‘forms’ existed on one Web Form, and I was using Validation controls to check each.  So when using either submit button, both search groups were validated together.  Not useful when I wanted to submit each set of controls independently of each other.  So there I was, coding to disable either set of validation controls when a submit button is clicked.

“Validation groups!” I hear you cry.  Yes, I know that now.

I never finished the article, so I’ll explain here how I implemented this using CodeIgniter.  I’ll also detail how I built the ‘quick results’ tool (click in the search box).

In an attempt to challenge my OS of choice, but still keeping within my Ubuntu comfort zone, I installed Linux Mint last week.  Once slated as just a friendly, sexier version of Ubuntu, it now seems to be gaining in popularity.

I’m very impressed.  I installed the OS, development IDE (Eclipse based Aptana), Apache, PHP, MySQL, and had the development version of this site up and running within a couple of hours.  No messing around getting Flash, RealPlayer, and various audio/video codecs running.  Anything I did need to install was a simple apt-get away in the Ubuntu repositories.

I build many .net applications that require date entry, so I implement the Date Picker control often.  Unfortunately, there is a problem when it is used on a field that is validated using a .Net validation control.  Upon clicking on a date, I get the following error:

length is null or not an object

inst.input.trigger('change')

if (!$.browser.msie){inst.input.trigger('change')}

This prevents the change event firing in IE.

I wouldn’t normally advocate changing source code in this manner, as it makes future upgrades tedious.  Hopefully it will be addressed in a future release.

<asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="Content" Runat="Server">
	<asp:TextBox Id="Firstname" Runat="Server" />
</asp:Content>

<input name="ctl00$Content$FirstName" type="text" id="ctl00_Content_FirstName" />

In the example above, the disparity in the rendered id attribute occurs because the TextBox control has been placed within a Content control, as the Page object inherits a MasterPage.

So how can you robustly reference the control using client-side JavaScript, regardless where the control resides?  Using jQuery it’s fairly trivial:

var $firstname = $("[id$=FirstName]");

This little snippet makes use of the jQuery attributeEndsWith selector, as documented here.  Bare in mind that an array is returned, as any control with an id that ends in FirstName will be selected.

I’ve looked at a few, for example: Swish-e, and Sphider.  Nothing really float my boat, until I had a look at the Zend Framework.  It’s another MVC based PHP framework, though it looks a little heavier than CodeIgniter.  The documentation is not as good either, but it did have a Lucene library.

A quick google led me to this article by Dan Webb.  Looks like a common technique.  Very useful article, though I needed to be able to pass parameters to the functions.  There may be a better to way to do this, but this is how I achieved it.

Whilst looking for a way to use jQuery instead of the stock Microsoft client library, I came across this excellent article.

There doesn’t seem to be too much on Web about this subject.  Maybe most .Net developers stick to Microsoft tools, but I like using jQuery for all my client scripting, and would rather not use more than one library.  So as it look me a while to get example code working, I’ve included my efforts.

So today I took a look at jQuery, a JavaScript framework.  I have to admit, I’m pretty impressed.  It did not take me long to come up with some example code, that degrades well when JavaScript is disabled in the browser.

The main point of this site has been completed.  I’ve stumbled upon one of the best lightweight frameworks I have ever used, and decided to build an application.

The framework is CodeIgniter.  It uses the MVC design pattern methodology.