admin_allan

Solving a Joomla bug double whammy with Debug Mode

I love the Joomla content management system but a problem that all open source CMSs face is that security upgrades often introduce breaks in the system. I recently had to solve a bad one and thought I should document it in case anyone else finds this to be useful.

The client’s Joomla 2.5.9 website uses the Kunena forum component (version 3.0.1), and they informed me that a user was experiencing a 500 error. When I went to check the forum, the site was reporting a 403 error and Joomla was not providing any details on that. Unfortunately the client’s host does not make it easy to view error logs, so I made some database backups thinking I would have to restore to a previous version.

Fortunately on a hunch I decided to search the web for “403 error” and “Kunena” and turned up a suggestion to enable Kunena’s debug mode along with Joomla’s debug mode. I put the site offline, then enabled the debug modes. Now the site output all sorts of useful information, and the first error I discovered was that an outdated “j4age” statistics component was causing an error. I disabled that component and voila, now I could see the 500 error that the client reported: “Fatal Error: Class ‘CKunenaLink’ not found in components/com_kunena/template/customTemplate/html/topic/default_message_actions.php on line 61”

This was much easier to resolve. I used TextWrangler to compare my version of that file with the default one provided with Kunena 3.0.1. My template (originally created for the Kunena 2.0 version) was referencing the CKunenaLink class which apparently has been deprecated. I replaced that line with the updated version and that solved everything. I turned off the debug mode, put Joomla back online and away it went.

Lesson learned: use Joomla debug mode before anything else!

A New Saskatchewan Logo

We have had conservative leadership both in our province and our country for a few years now, with mixed results. I will try not to trumpet my own political views but I feel the need to speak up about a recent action by the Saskatchewan Party.

For you non-Saskies out there, you should know that we have a very nice logo that in recent years has fell out of usage, apparently because its strong agricultural imagery is no longer representative of our overall industry outlook:

When it was first proposed that we develop a new logo, the idea was met with a fair bit of resistance. So for a while, the province resorted to using our coat of arms:

I thought this was a fine compromise. However, in recent years the Saskatchewan Party leadership has quietly begun using the logo below (I found versions in a number of colour variations):

While I could comment on the low-key methods they used to introduce the logo, my main issues are with the design itself. I believe in constructive criticism, so instead of just slamming it point by point, let me show you how I would fix it.

1. Let’s clean up that type shall we? Put the “of” back to a subservient role where it belongs, and go back to good old Helvetica.

2. What are those swooshy things? People flying right over our province, that’s what. What we need here is to change the swooshes to come from within the province. That way we can be known as a fountain of sorts. We export all sorts of good things, so let’s show it.

3. I think we need more swooshes and more symbolism. Let’s put in some growy-looking shapes that are reminiscent of the old sheaf logo, and a sun rising.

4. Green and gold? Identical to the ruling party’s colours? Come on. We are the “Land of Living Skies” (if our license plate is to be believed) so why not use a palette which is reminiscent of a nice sunset:

There you have it: a properly designed, party-neutral logo that properly represents our thriving province. I am against spec work, by the way, so if you want to use this logo you will have to elect me as the leader of some rival party and then vote me into office based on my other merits. If elected I propose that we institute the new identity on April 1, 2015.

My Flash Navigation Experiments

I spent a lot of time experimenting before I finally published the current version of my website.

I was excited about using interactive 3D worlds as a basis of information discovery. I experimented with simple scenes in Papervision3D like below, where the user can drag objects around. As you can see, the performance was really bad even with low-res images. Since that time Flash 3D engines such as Away3D have started using Stage3D to their advantage, so I imagine they would perform better than this one.

[swfobject]120[/swfobject]

Another idea I had was using face tracking as a navigation method. Again, this didn’t perform as well as I wanted and the file size was too large to get a nicely detailed tree. Allow Flash to access your camera to see how it works.

[swfobject]116[/swfobject]

Here is the interface I almost used in the end, but then abandoned when I decided to retrofit the site to use my branded-wood-disc logo. I like that no actual buttons are used, but it maybe wasn’t 100% intuitive.

[swfobject]118[/swfobject]

These are already a few years old now (c. 2009) and I’m still not certain that HTML5 could do face tracking or shape tweening the same way I’ve done here, and have it useable in the majority of browsers. Some day it will, but kudos to Flash to giving this to us so early on.