Contao is an open-source web content management system with a constantly growing fan base. Recently toxA has published an extension for Contao to use LESS CSS, an extension to CSS language. In addition that extension enables control of variables defined in LESS to have customizable themes. Continue reading »
Jan 10
Make Your Contao Installation Least-Writable
General, Maintenance, Online, Software, Software Development
Comments Off
If you consider on file permissions in setting up Contao Content Management System you may ask what files and folders need to be writable to the webserver at least. Here is a quite short list I’m used to work with. It’s sufficient to enable managing CSS files as part of a theme as well as installing most (but not all) available extensions. Continue reading »
Dec 31
Stop Wasting Your Contao-Based Site’s Analytics
Announcements, General, Online, Software, Software Development
Comments Off
Google Analytics is the contemporary way of tracking your site’s visitors and analyzing where they come from, what they are interested in and what hard- and software they are using. However, while updating your site’s content and design you’ll probably go and check it in different browsers on several devices. It takes extra efforts to keep those visits out of your analytics results unless using static connection to internet enabling address-based filtering. For Contao CMS there is a new extension to the rescue simplifying use of customer variables in Analytics for segmented tracking. Continue reading »
Nov 11
Installing Contao
Announcements, General, Online
Comments Off
Contao is a powerful content management system taking little efforts to install on a server. This post is available to describe a way I’m frequently used to set it up on customer sites. It’s basically trying to prevent world-writability to any script, requiring special access to server. If you are trying to install Contao in a webspace provided by a major web hoster it might be as simple as uploading files to server and running install. But if you are running dedicated root server and know your webserver’s user and group it might be an option to try this guide for installing Contao in a more restrictive setup. Continue reading »
Oct 03
toxA published a new extension to Contao CMS these days providing new insert tag to embed a locally stored video in a web page for playback supporting either Adobe Flash-based playback through Interlake Media‘s player freely available for personal and commercial purposes or by HTML5 native video playback support. Thus it’s possible to provide videos for iPhone/iPod/iPad playback as well providing H264 MP4 videos in addition to the FLV/FV4 version. The extension is available for download from Contao’s Extension Catalog. The full manual is online here.
Oct 03
Galleries with Mixed Arrangements in Contao
General, Online, Software, Software Development
Comments Off
In Contao CMS it’s a snap to create an image gallery with several images supporting lightbox effect including forward/backward navigation through all available images of a gallery. Select an article on a page, add a content element of type gallery and select all images from file manager to be included in this gallery. Contao lets you select a common width and/or height to automatically compute thumbnails arrange in a matrix. for lightbox effect you need to check option “Full-size view/new windows” and integrate mootools template moo_slimbox.js in your page layout. That’s it – a well-sorted set of homogenic thumbnails to be clickable and browsable in lightbox. But what if you don’t like such homogenic grid for laying out thumbnails. This blog tries to provide a solution for this … Continue reading »
Jun 19
Contao, formerly known as Typolight, comes with a lot of extensions and plugins available through its Extension Repository. In there is a little extension called “hyphenation”, providing support for frontend integration of Google-hosted JavaScript-based hyphenator script. Its integrating well in Contao implying little change to existing system UI. But as of current release the plugin includes a bug heavily limiting its capabilities. Continue reading »
Dec 31
Why TYPOlight rocks …
Evaluation, General, Online, Software
Comments Off
It was more like an accident when I found TYPOlight on looking for a CMS to host our company’s website as well as customers’ sites. Recently the latter ones have been hosted using PHPWCMS preferred for its fast page retrieval and intuitive backend GUI. This is different from most larger CMS such as Typo3 and papayaCMS. This report bases on experiences made on testing current release 2.7.6 ..
Continue reading »
Oct 07
Embedding SWF in PHPWCMS
Online
Comments Off
Looking for an out-of-box solution for embedding SWF movie in PHPWCMS I didn’t succeed. Content Part “Multimedia” is doing something strange by embedding one object tag inside of another one and it’s including parameters not required for some vanilla embedding of SWF e.g. to have a small Flash animation for on-page navigation or advertisement. The other Flash-related content part “Flashplayer” is integrating a Flash-based player for several kinds of multimedia files and thus not providing clean and simple solution here as well.
