EE Insider Tips

disappearing entries that suddenly reappear! DST!

2010-07-06T17:39:00+00:00

OK, this drove me mad over the last two days.

Ever had entries which you update on your site disappear after your update them? (and reappear later)

I thought something was caching - so turn caching off and cleared current cache. No joy.

The culprit was Daylight Saving Time setting on EE.

My entry date was one hour ahead of my server time so did not publish for an hour.

So - how do you absolutley set DST consistently?

1: Turn off daylight time saving in CP
2: Turn off daylight time saving for all users who might be adding content
3: Don’t let users edit their own daylight saving
4: Ensure “Honor the Daylight Saving Time setting associated with each channel entry?” is set to No.
5: Adjust and re-save any previously saved entries

A nod in the general direction of dp_miller from the EE forums for this, thought it was a big enough ‘gotcha’ to warrant a post here.

http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/156835/

Add a {last_segment} global variable

2010-06-28T17:41:10+00:00

Sometimes it is quite handy to pull in the last segment of a URI. EE makes it easy to grab the first segment by using {segment_1} but there is no {last_segment}. With a little help from PHP and path.php we can change that. Add this to your path.php file at the global_vars array*.

// Get the last segment of the URL and make it a global var
$page_uri = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
// First we strip the last character of the URL if it is a trailing slash
if(substr($page_uri, -1, 1) == '/')
{
   $page_uri = rtrim($page_uri, '/');
}
// now we explode the URI into array segments, then reverse them
$segments = array_reverse(explode('/', $page_uri));
// that makes our new "first" segment our actual last segment (which we make a global var below)
$last_segment = $segments[0];

// Global variables for our site
$global_vars = array(
   "last_segment" => $last_segment
   );
?> 

Now you can use {last_segment} across your site as needed.

* Note that you may need to merge this $global_vars array with your current $global_vars if you’ve already added your own.

Config Overrides for EE 1 and 2

2010-06-17T17:07:08+00:00

I don’t think I’ve seen this one before, but the EE Wiki contains a full list of config.php overrides, which are easily found by doing the following in a EE 1.6.x template with PHP enabled:

    global $PREFS;
    print_r($PREFS);
?> 

The list in the wiki is only for 1.6.7, so some may have changed or been added.

To get this to work in EE 2 you need to do it a little differently (again in a EE template with PHP enabled). EE 2 does away with the global $PREFS, so you need to print out the available config settings:

    print_r($this->EE->config->config);
?> 

This will output a long list of config settings that you should be able to use in your config.php file to override values stored in the database. Here’s the list I came up with when checking against the beta.

The filetype you are attempting to upload has invalid content for its MIME type

2010-04-28T17:33:07+00:00

Well this one is different to the Freeform upload issue I added a week or so ago.

When a user uploads content EE attempts to filter that content against XSS - (Cross Site Scripting, a technique the bad guys use to compromise your site)

A logged in Super Admin automatically is trusted by EE and bypasses XSS filtering but your users get filtered. This lead to a situation where I could upload (as Super Admin) but other site members could not without seeing the error, ‘The filetype you are attempting to upload has invalid content for its MIME type’.

You can turn XSS filtering off completely…but that’s bad! you shouldn’t do that. The solutions is a Hidden Configuration Variable!

Get the ID’s of your trusted member groups you want to bypass XSS filtering and note them down.

Then open your config.php file and add the following:

$conf[‘xss_clean_member_group_exception’] = “7,6”;

The above is a comma separated list of XSS member group exceptions, just add your trusted groups (in my case 7,6) and away you go.

jfp.

Add a dynamic page_uri global variable

2010-04-14T19:50:35+00:00

For some strange and odd reason, there is no full page_uri global variable built in to EE (that I’ve found at least). You can access each segment with segment variables but there’s not a way to get everything after your domain. We can easily add one by opening our path.php file and adding a global variable there. If you haven’t already created any global variables in your path.php file then it probably has this


$global_vars = array(); // This array must be associative

We can add a variable like this:

$global_vars = array('current_uri'=>$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); // This array must be associative 

This enables us the use of {current_uri} in our templates. On this page, for example, it would return /tips/add-a-dynamic-page-uri-global-variable/.

One Note: This is using PHP, not EE so it will include anything after the domain. That means “index.php” would be part of it if you aren’t removing it from the URI in some fashion.

Dynamically display Year from entries not from this year

2010-04-14T19:06:44+00:00

I personally hate going to blog sites and not knowing when an article was published. I often see “June 2” but no year. Sometimes I’m actually interested in whether or not that means this June 2nd or last June second, or even an June from years ago.

Here is a simple way to automagically display the year once the entry is from “last year”. It’s just a simple conditional check against the date.

{entry_date format="%D %M %d"}{if {current_time format='%y'} != {entry_date format='%y'}}{entry_date format=', %Y'}{/if} 

The filetype you are attempting to upload is not allowed

2010-04-09T09:52:47+00:00

Having a problem uploading an certain filetype and seeing this error message?

I had this today with a Freeform file upload field when trying to upload a .tif file.

Solution:
edit your mimes.php file.

Find it in /system/lib/mimes.php and edit the $mimes array.

My $mimes array now finishes like this.

...snip

‘aac’ => ‘audio/aac’,
‘tiff’ => ‘image/tiff’,
‘tif’ => ‘image/tiff’
);

Note: if you cannot figure what to do once you view the file then you really shouldn’t be doing it.

Gotcha: remember to hide your memberlist

2010-04-05T12:47:46+00:00

Once you have set up your site you may find that your memberslist with screen_name is visible to all. To test this visit:
http://www.YOURDOMAIN.com/member/memberlist

Horrible isn’t it.

Anyway, to turn this off you have to do it per member group, in the back end go to:
CP Home› Admin› Members and Groups› Member Groups› Edit Member Group› Guests (or other member group)

Now click on “Member Account Privileges” and set “Can view public profiles” to “No”

Do this for all member groups you don’t want to see that page.

Another way is to change the trigger word:
CP Home› Admin› Members and Groups› Membership Preferences
then change the “Profile Triggering Word” to something random. The first method is best as this way only obfuscates the memberlist.

Personally I think this should be set to ‘No’ in a default install, but it’s not.

Quote your variable when using within an if condition

2010-03-09T16:24:22+00:00

This has just caught me out…

Basically if your using a variable within an if condition ensure you quote it.

{assign_variable:my_entry_id="{segment_3}"}
{assign_variable:sendit="{segment_4}"}

{if "{sendit }" == "true"} {!-- <= if {sendit} is not quoted it the logic fails --}

  This is true
{if:else}

  This is not
{/if} 

Better handling of comment list and comment form display

2010-02-13T18:29:04+00:00

First, I suggest making your comment form and comment list markup into distinct templates, which accept a single embedded variable (“weblog”). This allows you to reuse these templates wherever you allow comments on your site. Say these are located at embeds/comment_list and embeds/comment_form.

Then, use this code at the end of your entries, where you want comments to display:

{if comment_total > "0" || allow_comments}
    {embed="embeds/comment_list" weblog="blog"}
{/if}

{if allow_comments}
    {embed="embeds/comment_form" weblog="blog"}
{if:else}
    <p class="no-comments">Comments are now closed.p>
{/if} 

This technique circumvents the generic “Commenting is not available in this weblog entry” message that appears when comments are closed. Note that this must be placed within your weblog:entries loop.

Using EE’s XID in Ajax

2010-02-02T15:28:01+00:00

If you’re submitting data in the EE CP through Ajax you may run into some issues where you’re constantly 302 redirected back to the homepage. One reason for this is you’re not submitting an XID hash to ensure the security of your form.

To fix this simply add the following somewhere in the data to-be-submitted:

{...'XID': 'add_form_security_hash('{ XID_HASH }')?>'...}

[Note: Remove the spaces from around XID_HASH, keeping them in was breaking the display.]

That should ensure you get past the XID check.

Using view files in custom extensions

2009-11-11T14:10:02+00:00

With EE 1.6.8, we now have the ability to use view files in modules and that’s great news for add-on developers. Recently I wanted to use view files for an extension I was developing, but the EE docs do not list a way to do that. Specifically, I wanted to use view files for the extension settings form and for the contents of the publish tab for the extension. Here’s a snippet of how to use view files in a custom extension:

$DSP->body .= $DSP->view(PATH_EXT.'ext_widget/ext_settings.php', $vars, TRUE); 

I created a folder called ext_widget to hold my view files, keeping the view file separated from other extension files.

Make embedded params tag params.

2009-11-09T01:40:55+00:00

You can access embed params directly in your plugin code. This is super useful when you include a plugin / module inside an embedded template and need to pass through params.

 
// http://gist.github.com/204612

make_embed_params_tag_params()
{
    // the valid params for the tag
    $valid_params = array(
        'entry_id',
        'weblog_id',
        'url_title'
   );
 
    // for each of the embedded params
    foreach ($TMPL->embed_vars as $key => $value)
    {
        // parse the param key
        // embed: ... 
        $param_key = substr($key, 6);
        if(
            // is the tag param actually set?
            isset($TMPL->tagparams[$param_key]) === FALSE
            // is the embbed param in the valid params array?
            && in_array($param_key, $valid_params)
        )
        {
            // add the embed param to the tag param
            $TMPL->tagparams[$real_key] = $value;
        }
    }
} 

Cover Image with FF matrix gallery

2009-11-08T02:43:44+00:00

Making a gallery using FF Matrix and Ngen file field is a very popular way to make a gallery. I made a gallery like this but wanted to pull one image from each gallery into the sidebar and also using the same image as a post image in a news item.

Now the client can change the cover photo easily without having to reorder the matrix.

To ensure that the image pulled was the same one and chosen by the client I added a checkbox to the matrix. and then used the following code.

Sidebar Gallery

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="gallery" dynamic="off" limit="9 orderby="random" disable="trackback|member_data|comments"}
        {gallery}
            {if cover}
                {exp:imgsizer:size src="{photo}" width="73" height="73"}
                    {title_permalink=photos/gallery"}"><img src="{sized}" width="{width}" height="{height}" alt="{caption}" />a>
                {/exp:imgsizer:size}
            {/if}
        {/gallery} 
    {/exp:weblog:entries} 

and using related entry on the news page

{related_entries id="gallery_relationship"}
    {gallery}
        {if cover}
            {exp:imgsizer:size src="{photo}" width="550" height="300"}
                <img src="{sized}" width="{width}" height="{height}" alt="{caption}" class="newsBgThumb" />
            {/exp:imgsizer:size}
        {/if}
    {/gallery}  
{/related_entries} 

Managing comments

2009-10-30T14:12:31+00:00

Just learned this from a client(!). To view a list of all comments on your site, from the Edit screen, leave the keywords field blank, choose “Comments” from the “Search In” dropdown, and search. You can also use the Weblog filter to view comments from one specific weblog.

(This is actually in the docs, but who reads those anyway?)

You can then add a “Manage Comments” tab by adding the following URL in the Tab Manager.

http://yoursite.com/system/index.php?C=edit&M=view_entries&search_in=comments

Dynamic Monthly Date Parameters

2009-10-28T21:44:34+00:00

For a recent ‘events’ based site I needed to show current month events only but not when on a ‘dated’ URL i.e. ...events/2009/10

The documentation explains the option of year=, month= and day=, but hard codes the examples.

So,


year="{current_time format='%Y'}" month="{current_time format='%m'}"

slipped into the parameters will mean that your month is always the current one.

This could obviously be extended to years or days in a similar way.

Embed an Embed within Itself?

2009-10-17T16:34:55+00:00

I just wrote a blog article about this, but I figure it would be good to share here too.

We wanted to be able to show an entry that was tagged with a certain category, and if no entries were found, just show an entry with any or no category. I couldn’t think of a good way to do this, and I knew I couldn’t nest exp:weblog:entries tags.

The code we were working with was already in an embed file, so we just embedded the same embed within the embed without the category parameter. Even though the documentation (notes section) says you can’t do this, we knew that we would never be creating an infinite loop, so it worked.

Here is the code from our embed:

{assign_variable:channel_name="{embed:channel}"}
{assign_variable:category_id="{embed:category}"}
{assign_variable:show_expired="{embed:show_expired}"}

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{channel_name}" category="{category_id}" show_future_entries="yes" show_expired="{show_expired}" limit="1" disable=“category_fields|custom_fields|member_data|pagination|trackbacks”}

    <h2>{title}h2>
            <p class="rightSide"><a href="{url_title_path="{embed:template_path}"}"><img src="{events_feature_image}" alt="" />a>
                {events_summary}
    
    <a href="{url_title_path="{embed:template_path}"}" class="more">Read more »a>

    {if no_results}
        {embed=“site/.events” channel=“events” show_expired=“yes” template_path=“news-events/events”}  
    {/if}            
    {/exp:weblog:entries} 

And then you would include that embed file by doing this:

{embed=“site/.events” channel=“events” category=“7” show_expired=“no” template_path=“news-events/events”} 

Flexible weblog entry searching by passing URL segments.

2009-10-07T18:09:11+00:00

Inspired by Justin’s tip passing variables via the URL, something similar I’ve used is for an album review site to give additional search options:

a weblog for the album review may also include other info, eg label, artist, year, city, country whic you may then want to be links that take you to a page of all other albums by that artist, on the same label, from teh same city.

Artist: <a href="http://eeinsider.com/albums/search/artist/{artist/"}">{artist}
Label: http://eeinsider.com/albums/search/label/{label/"}">{label}
City: <a href="http://eeinsider.com/albums/search/city/{city/"}">{city} 

then on the next page, display results using a simple weblog entries and the search parameter:

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="albums" search:{segment_3}="{segment_4}" disable="pagination|trackbacks" orderby="title" sort="asc"} 

the downside of using the URLs to pass variables to pages, is the 404 issue - not sure how well you could manage those as you need the flexability to have URLs not relating to pages.

Installing EE 1.x above webroot

2009-09-28T19:08:00+00:00

Although it’s been long rumoured to be possible in the 1.x branch, the documentation isn’t entirely clear on this. It turns out that it’s quite easy:

1. Install EE as normal within a web-accessible directory

2. Manually move the entire system (or whatever you renamed it) to your preferred location

3. Edit the system_path variable in path.php to reflect the new location of your system folder

4. Now follow the EE docs instructions for Masking Access to the Control Panel

5. Er, there is no step 5!

Use Gypsy to migrate entries between weblogs

2009-09-18T16:42:42+00:00

Use Brandon Kelly’s brilliant Gypsy extension to migrate content between weblogs that are not in the same field group.

Set your destination fields as gypsy fields, and mark them to appear in your source weblog.

Edit each entry, and copy/paste the content to their new destination fields.
On the server, you may have to move some uploaded files around as your field upload directories may have changed.

When you’re done editing, disable gypsy, or unmark those specific fields. Your content should now be in your new destination weblog.

Note: This doesn’t work well with FF Matrix fields.