Tag Archives: open source

alphabetical order of fe_groups in the access dialog of TYPO3 pages

Posted on by
Reply

here’s some useful snippet to control the size and the order of the access groups of a page.

access user group list

standard size of the page access list

access user group listwhen working with larger TYPO3 sites, the access groups can become increasingly complex. the list view to select the groups from is about only five elements long by default, but that maybe a bit too short when it comes to more than 200 user groups out of i.e. an ldap structure.

this makes selecting the right group painful, especially when this list is not ordered by natural alphabetical order but by id or other fancy computer data.

// more space to select fe_groups
$TCA['pages']['columns']['fe_group']['config']['size'] = 12;
$TCA['pages']['columns']['fe_group']['config']['foreign_table_where'] = 'ORDER BY fe_groups.title';

$TCA['be_users']['columns']['usergroup']['config']['size'] = 12;
$TCA['be_users']['columns']['usergroup']['config']['foreign_table_where'] = 'ORDER BY be_groups.title';

Add this code to your extTables.php file and things get smoother again. The last two lines apply the same for the backend user dialog with the backend user selection.

piwik statistics and analytics

Posted on by
Reply

some of you may have noticed the Piwik link in my blog´s menu bar. well, I am using Piwik as open source website analysis tool for more projects now and it works just fine. this is why I just wanted to throw another blog post about it into the web. and here it is! Piwik is cool.

Other posts describe the pros and con of Piwik far better than I´d do in the next few minutes, that´s why I´ll tap it short:

  • MySQL & PHP – everybody should have that nowadays
  • easy installation – piece of cake if you can handle a ftp client
  • js based tracking – kind of customizable
  • excellent data export possibilities
  • it´s open source
  • you gonna own your own collected data

Speeding up things

For websites with some traffic, you´ll need quite more than the suggested minimum 128mb of memory for php. To have the Piwik interface sound and responding, you may want to precollect the tracking data with a cron job.

Generate a new user for Piwik ( piwik/index.php?module=UsersManager&action=index ) and copy the authorization token that you´ll get to paste it into the archive.sh file found under misc/cron/ in your Piwik folder.

crontab -u www-data -e

Append this line

5 0 * * * /path/to/piwik/misc/cron/archive.sh > /dev/null

Your box will respond way faster after having processed this. This is why I can check smoothly that it stais the way it used to be: my blog is being majorly visited with uptodate browsers and merely around 10% with IE or other funny stuff. Hoorray.

text char manipulation with inkscape

Posted on by
Reply

just found some useful key commands for inkscape I gonna crib from this tutorial. ;)

move selected characters inside a text

  • Alt + ► or  Alt + ◄ (horizontal)
  • Alt + ▲ or Alt + ▼ (vertical)

rotate selected characters inside a text

  • Alt + [ or Alt + ] (us key layout)
  • Alt + ü or Alt + + (de key layout)
  • unfortunately, my version of inkscape (0.46) did not rotate the characters at all…
    the mentioned tutortial is written for “Inkscape 0.46+devel, built Apr 9 2008″

updates for TYPO3 systems

Posted on by
1

this feels good. all systems i am responsible for are updated now. yesterday evening crucial updates for TYPO3 of the 4.* branch were released. the update for TYPO3 is quite easy, you upload the new sources and change the existing symlink target to the newly uploaded sources folder. if you have a server still running php4 you will need to edit a line in one file and you’re good to go. otherwise you will get fancy errors in your apache server log. i got some on one server looking like


[Wed Jan 21 12:22:31 2009] [error] [client 87.236.*.*] Symbolic link not allowed: /var/www/ ... /index.php

you know, smart people check back the TYPO3 package page before download, but somehow i went directly to sourceforge to grab the necessary bytes. it would have saved me thirty minutes if i read the issue for php4 on TYPO 4.0.10 and 4.1.8:

you just edit file /t3lib/class.t3lib_div.php on line 1381. the keywords public static must be removed, they only work in php5 environments. save and that´s it. i think my post as snippet is obsolete, the TYPO3 guys will deliver an updated package release, soon.

update: as i mentioned, the script edit is not necessary anymore for php4 servers. the new packages just work it. (versions 4.0.11 and 4.1.9)

twitter on pidgin

Posted on by
Reply

as some of you know, i´m fancy with the purple little chat client for all the platforms i use. you all should get yourself pidgin as replacement for closed source IM managers. yes, it has some little issues when it comes to multi-account management, but it´s still the best thing i know. if you´re using pidgin already, there is a good plugin that takes care of the encryption of text messages.

be aware that most of the messengers like icq send messages in plain text – unsafe and open for everybody in between to read. change this with off-the-record messenging  (otr). There is a otr plugin for pidgin ready to use. install and activate the otr, then you can chat secretly and if you go the extra mile to verify your chat partner(s), you can be safe that there is no man in the middle – let the dirty talk begin. Click the otr-button next to the input field to activate – both must have it activated for success. but it´s up to you. something different was on my mind.

today i reactivated my twitter account, not only to have it implemented into the blog. it also was annoying to have such a cool service in the web, but not using it regularly. It just feels odd to go to the twitter website and put stuff in it – that is not spontaneus. And there are many clients by now. I do not like more and more applications so i looked for pidgin plugins and there is! the best one (the one that hit the nail at first strike) is the microblog-purple plugin. just download it, install it and activate Twitgin in the plugins panel of your (hopefully restarted) pidgin.

then you can add a new account of the type TwitterIM and saveyour twitter contact data. the minute you save that, you get all your tweets down to the chat window and can write own as if you where chattin´ with twitter.com. Thanks for this application(s)! :)