1guywebdesign rambles on about open source technologies like joomla and wordpress.

Or, how to save the world one website at a time…

Last week while jotting down notes, talking with a client about redeveloping his photography site I lose conversational focus for a minute and look out my office window. It’s an atypical, bright blue Florida spring morning outside while inside, I’m still on the phone, trying to explain in understandable lo-tech terms why we/I felt obligated to burn down his pre-web2.0 website and build a beautiful thing in its place for free and then… I catch myself drifting off, again…Driving a cab would be fun, there’s the tips and travel and new faces… Umph!, sorry…

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While scanning the 1guy logs last night I noticed a significant increase in folks visiting the site using the full url http://www.1guywebdesign.com versus the quickie approach of just typing the url sans the www, e.g. http://1guywebdesign.com.

Same site, same content, same IP but… to certain search engines who shall remain nameless it appears to be two distinct blips on the radar.

Duality’s a bad thing.

Well, we can’t have folks doin a search for joomla templates or tutorials and getting duplicit results now can we? And, much as I’d like to pick up the phone and call Serge Brin and ask him to kindly email the google pigeons downstairs about resolving my duplicate content results well, I don’t think It’ll happen before my current batch-O-projects move out of sandbox.

PRoblems?

So I decided to take a minute or three and tune up my .htaccess file so that it tells anyone and everyone that visits that I’VE got a WWW in front of my 1guy.

Consistency rocks…

.htaccess, your domain doorman

My domain’s doorman file sits in the root folder/directory on my server somewhere in a large, non-nondescript building in eastern New Jersey. I don’t see him much because he’s usually hidden (invisible) by the .(dot) prefix, but… when I turn on “show invisible files” within my FTP app (Transmit/OSX) he appears.

301=Permanent Redirect

This morning I ftp over to my server, find my .htaccess file sitting there and quietly inform him there’s a few changes to be made and that he’s about to come to terms with his inconsistency and consolidate his domain mapping issues.

Simple, little more than 4 bitsy lines of code and we’ll make sure that from now on, anything or anybody coming in past .htaccess gets pointed -only- to either http://1guyweb or http://www.1guyweb but not both.


Options +FollowSymLinksRewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_Host} ^1guywebdesign\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.1guywebdesign.com/$1 [L,R=301]


Line one tells the world we’re going be using symbolic links.
Line two toggles my host parameters allowing it to dynamically change/rewrite urls BEFORE they get passed back to folks (and search engines).
Line three says “look at every incoming http request” and IF it doesn’t have a WWW prefix goto the next line.
Line four says “take all http requests which don’t have a www prefix and make sure they get the pretty www prefix” and then return a HTTPD saying “hey, look, this request has been permanently redirected”.

Easy, peasy… Now we’ll see if google will ever grant me back my pagerank…

OpenID.. One ID to rule them all

OpenID is a framework for user authentication. As I’m in the process of implementing OpenID libraries into joommunity so our members will have verifiable member tools and features I thought I’d post a short article on what OpenID is, what it does and how to get your own, unique ID.

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity or, in less geeky terms… Imagine a single login for all your sites, blogs and favorite webplaces. With an openID you create (and verify) a unique online ID that’s yours and only yours.

To qoute the folks at OpenID: “OpenID starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity.”

So, Claim your name…

The first thing to do is create your profile. There’s a growing number of online communities supporting OpenID (Technorati , Live Journal, Ma.gnolia and AOL) but the easiest way is to create your profile/account first at : claimID, register your main website and follow the simple process of adding verification to your site domain. Once you’ve gotten your email confirmation you’re good to go.

Claim your Domain…

An added benefit to having a unique, global id is that you can use it to “authenticate” a website you’ve developed or own… as your intellectual property. I’ve recently added joommunity.com along with 1guy and my photoblog.

OpenID-Dead easy…

For us Joomla and Wordpress users there’s a couple of plugins available which make adding your OpenID account and websites pretty much a no-brainer.

OpenID for Joomla

There’s a great little plugin developed by longtime component guru Absalom Media. Currently, it’s available on the older file repository on sourceforge.org so expect an occasional delay or timeout on downloading. Once you get abs_openin.zip

1. Unpack and install the plugin through your administration control panel under “installers/mambots”.
2. Go to your mambots options under “mambots/Site Mambots”.
3. Open the mambot and select OpenID provider (OpenID)
4. Add your OpenID name.
5. Tick the “published” box and click “save”.

OpenID for WordPress

For WP folks a WP widget plugin is available from the ClaimID group and can be found on their blog.To install the ClaimID widget:

1. Download the ClaimID Wordpress Widget (zip file).
2. Unpack the widget in your Wordpress widgets directory, generally wp-content/plugins/widgets.
3. Activate the widget in the Plugins screen, available from your Wordpress dashboard.
4. Drag, drop and configure the widget in Presentation — Sidebar Widgets, available from your Wordpress dashboard.
5. You’re done! Your recent ClaimID links will appear on your blog.

While searching for a solution on migrating older jd-wp/wordpress posts to joomla I ran across a plugin for WordPress that displays frontpage joomla posts as excerpts in a blog sidebar widget.

The author (Philipp Heinze) released this plugin-in GPLv2 and is available on his website for download. It’s a bit dated (actually, April 2nd, 2006) and, I’ve not had a chance to install or play with it other than browsing the code and reading his extensive “options” and configuration details but… It looks promising.

Update 04-03-07After replying to a bunch of folks yesterday who’ve mentioned problems with accessing philippe’s website I’ve added a temporary link to his plugin below; Phillippe’s site is now functional, follow the link above to download his wordpress sidebar widget.

The option to relate a Joomla template to a particular menu item has been around for quite awhile but I’ve never found myself either using or needing this feature until recently when I needed to display a client’s blog in a style different than their current joomla design.

As part of my ongoing Joomla CMS “learning curve” I’ve been working on getting tighter integration between certain 3rd party components and the Joomla core. In particular, Marko’s port of the popular Blog tool WordPress (com_jd-wp) and getting jd-wp to correctly append the blog post “title” to the webpage title much along the same vein as the core does with all “com_content” posts.

Until I’m happy with the results, I needed a way for my client’s blog titles to display (for search engine results, ease in bookmarking posts/pages, etc.,) correctly.

A somewhat novel work-around to achieve these goals was to replace the <head> meta from the existing joomla index.php with the wordpress specific meta and variables required to get post id and info from the client’s database and insert it in the proper areas.

Joomla uses a core function called addCustomHeadTag as a container to receive pageload information prior to page display. Additional joomla functions setPageTitle, addMetaTag, appendMetaTag are used to retrieve and add this respective data from db queries, eventually added to the addCustomHeadTag and stuffed into the appropriate placeholders found in the head section of the default template index.php.

Wordpress uses similar functions but, short of writing a mambot (a plugin for joomla) to sniff for the presence of jd-wp, cull and parse the relevant jd-wp meta and replacing existing joomla head meta with jd-wp post title, post meta, etc., I opted for a less elegant approach.

Two identical templates with the exception of the head meta. One template-default joomla, the other replaces joomla meta placeholders with the equivalent wordpress (jd-wp) meta placeholders.

So, by assigning a “wordpress enhanced” joomla template to all references to the jd-wp component menuID I’m able to display the correct jd-wp post title and post meta for all blog instances yet switch back to joomla meta when viewing other parts/sections of the client’s joomla website.