Joomla 1.5: Using my own favicon via template?!?

Saturday, 19th Apr 2008 at 15:08 (webdesign)
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Well, there am I trying to convince joomla 1.5 to use my template’s favicon instead of the default jommla flower Original favicon of Joomla a.k.a. The Flower. But no matter what it wouldn’t let me replace it by my own. What I’ve done so far:

  • create the .ico file with Gimp, 32×32 (tried 16×16 also), 4 bpp 16-slot palette
  • placed it in ../templates/my_template/favicon.ico
  • reloaded page in browser

But still no favicon is shown in neither Opera nor Firefox under Windows.

Update: It seams I somehow used wrong colour palette, layer or whatever optioins. After I uploaded a png file to FavIcon and used the result it at least shows in Firefox. Opera seams to chuck up on the HTML header created by Joomla:


<head>
  [...]
 <title>Welcome to the Frontpage</title>

  [...]
  <link href="/joomla/templates/div_template/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" />
  [... repeated multiple times somehow ...]
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://localhost/joomla/templates/div_template/css/template_css.css" type="text/css"/>
  <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://localhost/joomla/images/favicon.ico" />
  <link href="/joomla/css/template.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>

As far as my understanding goes Opera doesn’t mistaken as to overwrite the earlier favicon.ico link with the later and hence (as Opera does) show the correct, i.e. intended favicon for a glimpse of a second and than show none as the /joomla/images/ one is not there. If I place a copy in that directory on the server Opera also shows the icon — I asume the wrong one though!

Well, anyway, now I know where the rub is…

Update 2008/05/08: I should have digged into templating a bit further and not just take it “as is”. Now in the html header of .../templates/my_template/index.php I just leave out the line where it points to the joomla template but rather only have one “shortcut icon” href as below:

<head>
	<jdoc:include type="head" />

	<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/system/css/system.css" type="text/css" />
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/system/css/general.css" type="text/css" />

	<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/<?php echo $this->template ?>/css/layout.css" type="text/css" />
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/<?php echo $this->template ?>/css/typography.css" type="text/css" />
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/<?php echo $this->template ?>/css/browserhacks.css" type="text/css" />
	<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php echo $this->baseurl ?>/templates/<?php echo $this->template ?>/icon/favicon.ico" />
</head>

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Making Apache server use SSL only

Tuesday, 8th Apr 2008 at 14:02 (administration, linux, open source)
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Here is a forum post on how to make all incoming connections to your apache web server redirect to https, i.e. take encripted connections via ssl by using apache’s rewrite module.

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Learning CMS — Finding the Right System for Small Business Needs

Saturday, 21st Apr 2007 at 10:16 (technical stuff, webdesign)
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For a small business pharmacy shop looking to presenting themselves with a small website I’m aiming at a web CM system that integrates the following:

  • Content should be edited via a highly configurable, yet minimal rich text editor so there is no difference to writing text in Word with even less function offered (only predefined CSS-Styles for title, paragraph, etc.). No need of code view.
  • Possibility to save as draft or direct publishing and therefore some sort of (email) notification system.
  • Get access to that editor via the website’s “frontend” (FE), i.e. in-line editing — showing a pen marker at the position that could be edited right in place by the logged-in user, similar to the wiki stuff — so there is no backend for the ordinary user.
  • For the administrator (web designer, … someone more technically minded) there should be some sort of backend for user management, reviewing drafts to be published, configuring the rich text editor (could be done “externally” on the system file level).
  • News handling: Basically able to set date to publish and expire per entry/article. So writing of news articles ahead of time becomes possible. Something like tt_news (see also manual) from typo3, could be far less complex.
  • Define roles per user, or more accurately define per document who can do what with it.
  • Separate content from formatting. Use e.g. CSS for formatting and store pure content in database with “meta” formats like header of css class xy.
  • Multi language support per document.
  • Versioning of articles.
  • Easy to use with public hosting services (I don’t want to have some old, noisy fan sitting in my living room; and buying a new hardware just for 2.0 MB of website? No way)

So this would be something in between of typo3 and a simple blogging system like wordpress or serendipity, I guess.

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Installing TYPO3 Version 4 on Debian

Friday, 20th Apr 2007 at 20:53 (administration, linux)
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Just a quick walk through the steps necessary to get typo3 up and running. I had serendipity running for some time on apache2.2 with php5. So that worked prior to installing typo3. Than do

  1. sudo aptitude install typo3 php5-curl unrtf (php5-curl and unrft are only suggestions I splashed out on)
  2. zless /usr/share/doc/typo3/README.Debian.gz which lists what else to do
  3. sudo ln -s /etc/typo3-dummy/apache.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/typo3 to make the typo3 directory (and underlying php stuff) available to apache2
  4. sudo rm -f /etc/apache2/conf.d/typo3-dummy.conf which is placed here by the debian package (maybe it is better placed here because it’s not really a site but some basic server config… I’ll delete it anyway)
  5. sudo a2ensite typo3 to enable the “site”. Bear in mind that this config grants access from anywhere (Order allow,deny \ Allow from all)
  6. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload or alternatively do apache2ctl restart which, as the command suggests, restarts the whole server.
  7. Since PHP save mode is used the file and directory permissions on file system level have to be set to WWWUSER/WWWGROUP (www-data/www-data) for /var/lib/typo3-dummy. It’s done by the package allready.
  8. Log in to phpmyadmin and create a table (search for “Create new database”) named “typo3-dummy” (don’t use “typo3-dummy” unless you can enter the escape sequence "\`" for characters like “-“). An alternative method is to use the command line mysqladmin -u root -p create typo3dummy (see the typo3 wiki and mysql manual)
  9. Use the command line mysql -u root -p typo3dummy to log in to the new database (note the command is not mysqladmin) and grant permissions with mysql> GRANT ALL ON typo3dummy.* TO '<username>'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '<password>';
     where everything in <> has to be individually replaced (without the <>).
  10. Now the hot stuff begins: Point the browser at http://servername/typo3/ which will start the 1-2-3 install tool. Login with your root user and password for mysql server and follow the steps. That’s it, folks! Enjoy.

Looking for a quick starter, some test page to try out typo3 on? Have a look at a german tutorial by Dawn or go directly to the suggested url to download the .t3d and instructions. Another place to go and grab some it the YAML for typo3 page. One might need to increase the memory size available to php via the apache config file /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and search for memory_limit. Don’t forget to reload the apache2 configs afterwards.

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