We experienced a problem when attempting to move one of our codeigniter (CI) websites from one server to another.  We performed the transfer of the files, database setup, and necessary config file changes.  Then came time to test, and… Nothing.  FireFox and IE7 both rendered a blank page.

Debugging 

We tracked down the problem, by setting up test points within the php code.  Basically we’d put a ‘print “test” ‘ command in various places, and if it was successfully displayed, then the code was breaking after that point.

Starting with the index.php file, the breaking points were as follows:

<base_path>/index.php (approx. line 117)
require_once BASEPATH.’codeigniter/CodeIgniter’.EXT;

<base_path>/system/codeigniter/CodeIgniter.php (approx. line 80)
$EXT =& load_class(’Hooks’);

<base_path>/system/libraries/Hooks.php (approx. line 43)
log_message(’debug’, “Hooks Class Initialized”);

Okay, so the “log_message” was causing the problem.  After searching the CI user guide, we found the Error Handling page.  At the bottom, it states:

Note: In order for the log file to actually be written, the “logs” folder must be writable. In addition, you must set the “threshold” for logging. You might, for example, only want error messages to be logged, and not the other two types. If you set it to zero logging will be disabled.

So, possibly this was a permissions issue on the logs folder. 

The Solution 

To solve the problem, we navigated to our server, and changed the permissions to 777 (read/write/execute across the board) for the logs folder (<base_path>/system/logs).  

[localhost]$ chmod 777 system/logs

We did this via ssh, but you could also use some other file manager or possibly ftp on some servers. 

…And voila!  Our site threw us a database error. 

We had never been so happy about a database error before!  With the problem isolated, we quickly solved the issue, and got the website rolling.

1. Find the module on Drupal.org
2. Wait for the Module to Upload
3. Unzip the contents
4. Connect to your FTP server
5. Browse to the module directory
6. Wait for the module to upload

Using CVS installation, all you have to do is:

1. Enter one command into your ssh program. (The files are downloaded and installed directly from server to server in lightning-fast fashion)

Even more impressive, is the fact that if you install the module using CVS, you can also upgrade using a very short command in your ssh program.

Now that your excitement is palpable, let’s get into the how.  Here are the prerequisites:

• SSH/Shell access to your server.
• Some sort of SSH client.  (I use putty on windows)
• Hopefully some understanding of unix commands

Now that you have all of the necessary tools, let’s install a module! 

1. Use your SSH client to connect to your server
2. In your client, navigate to your modules directory
3. Browse to: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/modules/ (This is the CVS repository for modules)
4. Click on the link for your desired module (We’ll use the pathauto module for our example)
   
5. Go the the Sticky Tag Selection, and make note of the latest stable version of the module for your drupal release.  In this example, I’m running Drupal 6.x.  So, the latest release for pathauto at the time of this writing is “DRUPAL-6–1-1″.  Take note of this; we’ll call this {latest_stable_version}.  Also note how the module is listed in the directory structure at the top of this page (contributions/modules/pathauto), in this case, the name is listed as “pathauto”.  Take note of this; we’ll call this {module_name}.
6. Type the following command:
   

   cvs -z6 -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -r {latest_stable_version} -d {module_name} contributions/modules/{module_name}

   So, for our example, the code would look like this:

   cvs -z6 -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -r DRUPAL-6–1-1 -d pathauto contributions/modules/pathauto

7. Voila!  It’s installed.  All you have to do is enable it in your drupal admin section.

Stay tuned for a post on how to update via CVS…

Almost 7 out of 10 individuals surveyed clicked on a first-page search result.  Only 8% of respondents were willing to click results beyond the third page.  This continues a recent trend of search engine users refusing to dig into deeper search-result pages.

Instead of progressing into deeper search results, most users (over 9/10) simply altered their search terms or switched search engines.

eMarketer forecasts these dramatic trends to influence SEO spending in the next few years.  Companies are not only realizing the importance of quality search engine rankings, but also the relative cost efficiency of SEO investment.  By 2011, they forecast SEO spending to total 23% of search-marketing spending. 

For more information on SEO, including how your company can benefit, please contact Soleer.

 Here is an example of what we’re looking to accomplish:

• Bullet-List Item 1
• Bullet-List Item 2
• Bullet-List Item 3
• Bullet-List Item 4
• Bullet-List Item 5

Note how the bullets are red and the list-item text is blue.  Now, let’s take a look at the code:

Standard code:

<ul id=”ex_list”>
      <li>Bullet-List Item 1</li>
      <li>Bullet-List Item 2</li>
      <li>Bullet-List Item 3</li>
      <li>Bullet-List Item 4</li>
      <li>Bullet-List Item 5</li>
</ul>

In order to style the bullets and text seperately, we must enclose the <li> text within <span> tags:

<ul id=”ex_list”>
      <li><span>Bullet-List Item 1</span></li>
      <li><span>Bullet-List Item 2</span></li>
      <li><span>Bullet-List Item 3</span></li>
      <li><span>Bullet-List Item 4</span></li>
      <li><span>Bullet-List Item 5</span></li>
</ul>

Now that we have the xhtml setup correctly, all we have to do is perform some minor CSS changes:

#ex_list li{
          color: blue;       /* The color you want the bullets to be */
}
#ex_list li span{
          color: red;      /* The color you want the bullets to be */
}

1. Pre-requisits: You’ll need an instance of CiviCRM running on Drupal, (we’re using Drupal 5.5 with CiviCRM 1.9) with CiviEvents Enabled.
2. Download & Install the following Drupal modules:
   1. Calendar: http://drupal.org/project/calendar
   2. Views (required by Calendar): http://drupal.org/project/views
   3. Date (required by Calendar): http://drupal.org/project/date
3. Go to your Module management screen ( Administer >> Site Building >> Modules )
   
   1. Enable Calendar View
   2. Enable Calendar iCal
   3. Enable all other modules required by these
4. Go to the “Administer Views” screen ( Administer >> Site Building >> Views)
   
   1. Set ‘calender’ view status to ‘enabled’
   2. Click on the ‘add’ link next to calendar

   

   3. On the “Add a View” Screen, under Access, select all the roles you want to be able to view this calendar.
   4. Go to the bottom of the page and click save
   5. You will now see ‘calendar’ listed under ‘existing views’
   6. Click on the ‘calendar’ link listed in that same row or go to the calendar url, which should be http://www.yoursite.com/calendar (if you have drupal installed in the base directory) or http://www.yoursite.com/drupal/calendar (if you have drupal in it’s own directory).
5. Go to your “Access Control” page. (Administer >> User Management >> Access Control)
   1. Under CiviCRM, make sure “register for events” is enabled for your anonymous role, and any other roles you are going to want to register for events.
6. From the Calendar page, you should see the following:
   
   1. Click on the “iCal” tab, and insert the following information:

   

   2. Under “Expire iCal cache:” I recommend setting this to ‘0 sec’ for debugging purposes, and then scale back based on your traffic and update timing requirements.
   3. Set the Name as anything, I went with “civi” to keep it simple.
   4. Set the Url to your civi iCal feed.  Should be something like:  http://www.yoursite.com/civicrm/event/ical?reset=1&page=1  or http://www.yoursite.com/drupal/civicrm/event/ical?reset=1&page=1 .
7. And that should be it!  Set up a test event, and make sure it shows up on your calendar page.

Yesterday (March 5th), at the MIX conference in Las Vegas, the IE team announced the availability of a developer beta of IE8 Beta 1 for Download. 

This normally would not be such a huge deal, but the folks at Microsoft are actually trying to implement standards compliance.  What are we going to do with all of the extra free time generated by not having to kick our code in the pants until it renders correctly despite all of IE’s quirks?

 Not only are they “attempting” standard compliance, as they have tried, and failed miserably in the past.  They’re actually testing the fact this time!

We’ve contributed over 700 test cases to the W3C CSS working group because we think a comprehensive certification test suite for CSS is important for true interoperability and we support the W3C’s effort to deliver such a suite. The CSS spec is good, but contains many ambiguities, and a test suite will help resolve them and benefit web developers and designers.

Also, it sounds like IE8 is going to deliver full standards-compliant CSS 2.1 support by default, instead of requiring specialized mark-up to kick it into action.  This was a reversal in stance by the IE team, after a substantial outcry by the design/development community.  I can only imagine the possibilities if they actually make a habit of listening to their customers…

Read much more about the IE8B1 release at the IEBlog.

According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp, the latest browser utilization rates are as follows:

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x (IE6) - 36.9%
2. Fire Fox (FF) - 34.5%
3. Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.x (IE7) - 20.1%
4. Opera (O) - 1.9%
5. Safari (S) - 1.5%
6. Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x (IE5) - 1.5%
7. Mozilla (Moz) - 1.4%

I do all of my Design and testing from within a 64-bit Windows Vista Operating system. So to simplify the debug process I need to be able to test as many of these browsers as possible from within windows. This is my setup:

IE7 Testing

IE7 is my base browser, so using it for testing and debugging is not a problem. Because of its recent release and standard Microsoft “special rendering,” I see numerous layout and rendering problems when I’m browsing the internet. This is obviously a significant problem, with over 20% of people currently using IE7. This is especially important, when you consider the adoption rate, since IE7 was released last year. Its market share is only going to grow.

IE6 Testing

IE6 Testing is much more difficult. Microsoft does not support the running of IE6 and IE7 on the same machine. There are some workarounds such as Tech-Recipe’s: Run ie6 or ie7 in standalone mode (which didn’t work for me). Or Jon Galloway’s Registry Hack (might work, but I don’t like jacking with the registry if it can be avoided.).

Originally, I setup a Remote Desktop connection to my older desktop running Windows XP and IE6, so I wouldn’t have to leave my design workstation to view webpages. All I would have to do was open a remote desktop connection and interact with the other computer. This solution was a bit slow, but actually functioned pretty well, and gave me the authenticity of running the browser in another operating environment. Unfortunately, not everyone has a spare computer to use for browser testing.

Due to the constant whining that the collective web development industry can be quite good at, Microsoft realized this was an obvious problem for a huge industry and created a (somewhat clunky) solution.

Microsoft’s solution involves downloading and installing a free version of their virtualization platform: Virtual PC 2007, so you can emulate a second computer running windows XP and your desired internet browser.

• You can download the free version of Virtual PC 2007 here: (Download)

Once installed, you then download a disk image (provided by microsoft) which contains Windows XP and the IE6 internet browser. The image they provide expires in a few months, but because of the need for a testing platform, they will always offer a new image with a later expiration date, as they have in the past.

• You can download the free disk image containing Windows XP and ie6 or ie7 here: (Download)

Once installed, and setup as directed, everything worked pretty well, with one exception. I couldn’t view any webpages! I opened up the command console, and pinged a few webpages, and had no problem. The problem was obviously in IE6. After snooping around for a while, I realized that IE6 was pre-configured to use a proxy, which wasn’t functioning correctly. All I had to do was disable the use of a proxy and everything worked brilliantly.

A word of caution: Emulating another modern computer can be pretty hardware intensive. I’m currently running a quad-core machine with over 4GBs of memory, a state-of-the-art video card, and over a Tera-Byte of storage (which I’m sure will look ancient in another couple months, but is a pretty solid machine right now). With that setup I have no problems, but before I put in an extra 2 Gigs of memory, running VPC could slow down the system pretty well.

Firefox Testing

Firefox is extremely easy to run in tandem with any version of Internet Explorer and pretty much any other browser. It is a great standards-compliant browser, and very well put-together.

• Firefox can be downloaded here: (Download)

Safari Testing

Apple recently released a version of its Safari internet browser for Windows. It is currently in a Beta stage, but the beta is extremely stable, and I haven’t had any problems with it. I also love the rendering performed by Safari. As with most things Apple does, it is significantly more aesthetically pleasing than anything else out there. Whenever I need to use browser screenshots, I almost always take them from Safari.

• Safari can be downloaded here: (Download)

Summary

Using those 4 browsers, I can guarantee that the pages I design are accessible to 95% of the browsers being used. When including browsers that render similar to those tested, your design should be functional in nearly 100% of modern browsers.

In our case, we’ll use phpMyAdmin, but you can use whatever utility you prefer for database manipulation.  So, here is what you do:

1. Login to your Drupal Database
2. Access the ’system’ table.  If you added a table prefix: <prefix>, the table will be listed as ‘<prefix>system’
3. Browse the table entries, and find the entry for the target module
4. Edit the table entry, and change the status from ‘1′ to ‘0′
5. The module is now disabled!

Hopefully that did the trick, and you can now use your website.

Some are perturbed by the possible privacy issues, but I absolutely love the concept. I loathe inefficiencies, and the fact that every time I go to a dentist, doctor, etc. I need to fill out 5 pages of the same exact information I’ve filled out numerous times before, has never sat well with me. Streamlining patient forms is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to possible benefits of this new platform.

The system will be a boon to patients, saving them time filling out redundant paperwork. It will also enable advanced capabilities, such as universal update. If something changes, such as you are diagnosed with diabetes, you can simply logon to the website and update the information, or authorize your doctor to do it for you, and instantly all of your healthcare providers that you choose to alert will have their information updated as well.

HealthVault will also streamline healthcare providers’ operations. There will be no more need to store hard copies of the patient forms and/or manually insert the information into the office’s electronic records. This will also eliminate errors created by the transfer of this information.

Beyond these obvious and immediate impacts, HealthVault will enable revolutionary automated capabilities. Here is an example of the type of functionality we may soon see if the market accepts HealthVault as it should.

A young lady named Sue notices an unsightly rash, and schedules an appointment with a new dermatologist. Upon scheduling the appointment Sue authorizes the transfer of her health information to the doctor’s office. Instantly, drug history, interactions, etc. are securely transferred. Sue’s medical history is run through algorithms at the doctor’s office to immediately assess her predisposition to certain disorders. A report is generated showing the probability of certain complications, as well as recommended preventative procedures, etc. The doctor sees Sue, makes a diagnosis, and writes a prescription. The prescription is then updated in the HealthVault and checked against all of her existing medications for possible interactions. An issue with her blood-pressure medication is returned by the system and an alternative prescription is recommended and approved.

That is the direction that I can envision Microsoft’s HealthVault heading. The ability to automate a lot of the processes that are notorious originators of error in the medical industry is an absolutely necessary step in improving the healthcare system.

Especially encouraging, is the fact that Microsoft is making available a free development kit for the immediate development of 3rd party applications. The entrepreneur in me sees vast opportunities for development in this area. I’m currently in the process of signing up for an account, and downloading the SDK. I’m absolutely looking forward to seeing what the market does with this!

I was displaying the following list:

• Item 1
• Item 2
• Item 3
• Item 4
  • Sub-Item 1
  • Sub-Item 2
• Item 5
• Item 6

After a little research, I discovered that my markup was as following:

<ul>
     <li>Item 1</li>
     <li>Item 2</li>
     <li>Item 3</li>
     <li>Item 4</li>
     <ul>
          <li>Sub-Item 1</li>
          <li>Sub-Item 2</li>
     </ul>
     <li>Item 5</li>
     <li>Item 6</li>
</ul>

When in fact, it should actually be:

<ul>
     <li>Item 1</li>
     <li>Item 2</li>
     <li>Item 3</li>
     <li>Item 4
          <ul>
               <li>Sub-Item 1</li>
               <li>Sub-Item 2</li>
          </ul>
     </li>
     <li>Item 5</li>
     <li>Item 6</li>
</ul>

Note how the <ul> tags are enclosed in the parent <li> item in the Valid XHTML example. Pretty simple stuff, but I’m sure there are others out there making the same mistake. Let’s all get our stuff together, and become compliant.