Blog

ImpressCMS: Creating a fully templated response to an AJAX call. A practical example.

May 20th, 2011

 Giving a response to an AJAX call is actually quite easy. The server receives a request, the server returns something. End.

Now, imagine you don't just want a response, you want to give a response that goes through all the ImpressCMS process, including the template engine. Permissions, Protector, Custom tags, Smarty, everything. A bit more difficult, but not too much.

ImpressCMS: How to theme just ONE block

May 11th, 2011

 It can happen to you. You need one block to be different from the others. And I mean “different”, you know what I mean? It needs a big fat lot of exclusive CSS just for itself.

You need a way to point your CSS just to this block.

How to add a warning message to your Drupal site the easy way

March 11th, 2011

 You know, you can close a Drupal site anytime for maintenance, don't you? You just go to "Administration -> Site configuration -> Site maintenance" and deactivate the site. From this moment on, no-one can see your website while you're working at it.

How to lose a customer in three easy steps: my experience with Archos

January 14th, 2011

This is my experience with an Archos product and most important, with its customer service here in Spain. The experience has convinced me not to buy, and recommend people not to buy, any Archos product.

Update: Three months later, still no response from Archos. I contacted the Spanish Consumer Agency and filled a claim.

Update: I contacted the European Consumer Agency, and at last I got my unit repaired. I just needed seven months and a complain to the European Union. Awesome.

ImpressCMS: How I hacked Content module so it could accept image uploading

December 23rd, 2010

Our little Content module is an essential in any CMS. It’s a simple, fool-proof way to publish static pages such as “about us”, “copyright information” or stuff like that. You put a title, you have a big box for text and you’re done.

Now imagine you want to spice some of your pages with an image. You can add them to the text, using the included image manager. You insert the image, place it where you want, resize them when needed. Repeat for every page.

10 things designers should know before designing for the web

October 22nd, 2010

Many designers are currently moving from print to web these days. Of those many, a big part decide to focus on design and pay someone to make the HTML+CSS coding part. While this sounds like a wise strategy that let designers focus on what they do best, if they don’t bother to learn the limits of the web, they’ll soon pay the price with interests. Without realising it, they boycott themselves too often, making things harder to code. That means more time, more problems and probably a higher price on the coding side.

Smarty ordinal suffix modifier plugin

September 27th, 2010

 This Smarty modifier plugin adds ordinal suffix to a number, so 1 becomes 1st, 15 becomes 15th and so on.

Specially useful for dates formatting in english.

You can use the fonts you want NOW. Use @font-face ruthlessly.

September 20th, 2010

 If you're into HTML and CSS, you know you'll be able to use whatever font you want for text as soon as CSS3 becomes a standard. No more Arial from hell. That is, when Internet Explorer 9 is released and all older versions dissapear from planet Earth, am I right? This gonna take a long, long time. Can't wait to get rid of Arial and start using other fonts?

OK, don't wait. You can use them NOW.

Now is when you say “c'mon, do you live in Neverland? IE versions below 9 don't understand CSS3”.

Two columns, same height using CSS and no Javascript. Yes, you can

September 18th, 2010

 When we abandoned tables for website design, we lost something. If there's something good in table cells, is that they all have same height. What about CSS? Two columns with same but variable height using just CSS, no Javascript and no tables. And it should work in all browsers. How the hell are we going to do that?

A vertical accordion menu in five lines of jQuery

September 5th, 2010

If you need to do a vertical accordion menu, your first shot will probably be checking jQuery UI or searching for a plugin. Although this will fix your problem, I think this is overkill in this case. An accordion is quite a simple task for that can be implemented in just a few lines of jQuery.