Adrian Mateljan

As suspected - less posts this week. My parents made it safely into the country from Australia on Tuesday night and we spent Wednesday traipsing around London. Lou found the Covent Garden market, we found the London Eye, the Tower Bridge and London Tower - though we will be heading back for a more indepth look when my parents return from travelling northwards in a couple of weeks.

Apart from that, it has been relatively quiet. Discovered a lovely little Italian restaurant in Wokingham called Ruchetta, which we will definately be returning to - and making sure this time we have more time!

Lou gets the low down from some of the locals in Spencers Wood.

Lou swaps contact details with a local of Spencers Wood.

Its been a reasonably productive week…

• Secured my next contract - another 6 months in London.
• Caught up with my movie reviews.
• Got some more of my RedDot posts out - also managed to wing an invite to blog on the Unofficial RedDot CMS blog.
• Where did “Yes Chef!” in Wokingham go? I know its been a while since we last visited, but we missed a sale and a chance to discover what happened. Lou and I both hope everything is okay.
• House hunting in Spencers Wood. Tooks some pictures of Lou getting the low down from some of the locals and swapping contact details (above)

My parents arrive from Australia this week, so potentially less posts this week.

Adrian’s Rating: 9

Ahhh… Pixar… can you do no wrong? Apparently not - yet, anyway… I think I would be hard pressed to rate a Pixar film less than an 8 - but I digress… As Pixar films go, this is one of my favourites. And by now you probably know why too. Superheroes - check. Distinctive style - check. Excellent and consistent animation - check. Humour (intelligent, non toilet) - check. Moral (non forced down throat) - check. Reasonable plot - check. No more to say - check

When considering converting or creating a RedDot CMS project to use Navigation Manager, one of the tradeoffs you will be forced to consider - if publication structure means anything to you - is how to create index pages.

Navigation Manager uses list elements to build your site structure - ie each page in the site structure contains a list element that contains the child pages. Publication packages are attached to list elements - which means all of the child pages are published into the same folder. The challenge? How do you get the parent page (which is most likely being published to a location dictated by the list element of its parent) to publish as the index page (ie index.html or equivalent) in the same folder as its child pages?

Previously, all of the solutions I had seen to this conundrum were hideously complex - to the extent that it was just easier to live without it. But a couple of weeks ago, Paul pointed me to an entry on the “Unofficial RedDot CMS Blog” - “Publishing page to subfolder” - which would seem to be both a simple *and* elegant solution. Basically, just modify the filename of the parent page to include the path!

Disclaimer: I currently do not have a Navigation Manager enabled project available to confirm this (Paul?) so both credit *and* responsibility remain with the original author, Michael

Adrian’s Rating: 9

Another day another great film (actually, I am still a movie behind - watch out for “The Incredibles” soon…) This film works for me on so many levels. The serious, staccato style (maintained consistently!) The dry, understated and intelligent humour (well, mostly). An intelligent plot with a lot of foreshadowing that takes more than one viewing to fully appreciate. And yet it is fun - definately not serious - a serious spoof across a number of genres if you will - action, comedy, horror. Not entirely sure why this doesn’t make a 10 for me - I guess I have to draw a line somewhere

If you play with language variants in RedDot CMS, sooner or later you will come across pages in SmartTree that display with the above title - “Page does not exist in language variant ENG.” Don’t worry - it just means that the page exists in one of the other language variants and not the one you are currently viewing.

Well, mostly. What if you can’t find the language variant it exists in? What if you aren’t even *using* language variants? In these cases, the message is, at best, misleading. But never fear - the reason, and the solution, are very simple.

The reason is that RedDot CMS cheats (in my oppinion) in the method that it determines whether a page exists in a given language variant (and remember, you are always using at least one language variant!) Simply put, it checks the page headline. If the page headline exists, it shows it. If it doesn’t, it shows the message above. Obviously if we create an English language variant page, and no one has translated it into our Dutch language variant, the Dutch language variant version has no title, and RedDot correctly shows the above message.

So what is the issue? Well, if we *remove* the headline of a page (edit via form, delete the contents of the page headline) - RedDot can not distinguish this from a page missing in a language variant, hence the above message. The solution? Make sure all pages have a headline! You can fix an existing issue by simply adding the headline back in via the page properties. If the page truly does not exist in the language variant, you will not be able to edit the filename (it will be greyed out.)

Now you may be wondering why anyone would remove the page headline in the first place. Well, I can name two scenarios:

1. A clever author (perhaps without delete or disconnect permission, perhaps unaware of how to) has realised that deleting the page headline removes the page (or component from the page.) (If RedDot CMS doesn’t think the page exists in this language variant, it will not display it.)
2. An author has decided that their page (or component of the page) would look better without its title, and removed it the only way they know how - by deleting the headline.

The first scenario requires user training (or the removal of headline editing permission - but that may be overkill.) The second usually points to a deficiency in your template - consider adding an option placeholder to allow your authors to choose whether the headline is visible or not. Unfortunately, the headline placeholder does not allow you to make it mandatory - so it is still possible for it to be removed - so user training may still be required.

Adrian’s Rating: 8

If you enjoy well done (not toilet humour) spoofs, science fiction and particularly sci-fi tv series in the tradition of Star Trek - then, like me, you should enjoy GalaxyQuest. What I find special about this movie is that it remains faithful to its premise, a premise that doesn’t require substantial plot, big name actors or flawless special effects - in fact, I imagine any or all of these would only detract from the film. Instead, it can concentrate on being fun and entertaining - and who can argue with that?

Aside: Writing these reviews is slowly but surely helping me to better articulate what characteristics I enjoy (or not) about the films I watch. So far, I think a distinctive style or combination of styles and consistency in maintaining that style or styles play a large part in my enjoyment, regardless of the genre or plot. An interesting, intelligent and/or fun plot will improve on this. Slapstick or toilet humour will detract from it.

As much as some people would like you to believe that preview is the same as publish, its not. Some of the differences are technical (for example, published URLs follow your publication struture, whilst preview URLs resemble SmarEdit URLs) and some of the differences are practical (there is hardly any need to connect to Google Analytics from your preview - and if there is, you probably want to use a different account number anyway…)

Now, RedDot CMS provides block marks for choosing to output code in SmartEdit mode or not in SmartEdit mode - which basically means preview *and* publish. So, how do we output code in publish mode only? Well, we have two options (that I am aware of) - pre-execute code or Navigation Manager.

Using pre-execute code, we need to be able to test against something that exists in preview or publish - but not both. Thankfully, the session object fulfills this requirement nicely. Below, the inf_loginGuid placeholder is an info element that outputs the login guid of the current user’s session.

<!IoRangePreExecute><?php if ('<%inf_loginGuid%>' == '') { ?>
Publish only content
<?php } ?><!/IoRangePreExecute>

My preference is to functionalise this, put it somewhere accessible to all templates, and then call the function - but thats just me:

<!IoRangePreExecute><?php
function isPublish() { return ('<%inf_loginGuid%>' == ''); }
?><!/IoRangePreExecute>

<!IoRangePreExecute><?php if (isPublish()) { ?>
Publish only content
<?php } ?><!/IoRangePreExecute>

Navigation Manager has a specific tag - Context:CurrentRenderMode - which will output the mode: 0 = preview, 1 = SmartEdit and 2 = publish. You can use this within regular Navigation Manager If statements (not covered here), or similiar to the examples above, ie:

<!IoRangePreExecute><?php if ('<%!! Context:CurrentRenderMode !!%>' == '2') { ?>
Publish only content
<?php } ?><!/IoRangePreExecute>

<!IoRangePreExecute><?php
function isPublish() { return ('<%!! Context:CurrentRenderMode !!%>' == '2'); }
?><!/IoRangePreExecute>

So, what’s the catch? Well, you need Navigation Manager activated in order for the Navigation Manager solution to work - and I wouldn’t recommend that unless you are actually using Navigation Manager (for one, it requires a server config file change). But the placeholder method works fine. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out how to output code in preview only using the placeholder method

Adrian’s Rating: 10

If you have noticed the number of movie reviews and ratings going up recently, its because a) Lou likes to see what I think and b) my influence in the choices has improved - who said there was no benefit to blogging? Though it does mean I am struggling to get the reviews up, and it is starting to make the blog seem more movie orientated… oh well.

“Down With Love” is one of my favourite movies. I do enjoy Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor - and this is obviously no exception, but the supporting cast is also exceptional. I think it comes down to a number of things - the over the top 60s style (or was it actually like that?) - including bright colours and strong stereotypes. The consistency of the style throughout the film and the characters. The fun that all involved were obviously having. The sharp dialogue and the deceptive plot. Whatever it is, I love it.

Its been a busy week this week:

• Updated my CV as my role at Friends of the Earth is coming to an end.
• Distributed my CV to CWJobs, PlanetRecruit and Jobserve.
• Spent two and a half days fielding calls from recruiters.
• Getting to grips with my iPhone - pending a full review, I love it - despite its numerous quirks…
• Made a serious effort to try to knock out some of the mountain of posts I have been meaning to write…
• Getting Lou to grips with her iPhone - and off of mine!