After a really really long time (8-9 years) of a PostNuke powered Mosabuam.com it’s time for us to say “Goodbye PostNuke – Hello WordPress”.

We had a lot of fun with our system and we are also looking forward to our new wordpress based site. It’s already running and we will do the switch in the next days.

So if you subscribed to our RSS feed – please come back in a few days and make a resubscription to mosabuam.com.

A big thanks again for the PostNuke team for the last years and we wish you the best with your new system Zikula

Manfred & Werner

After upgrading PostNuke recently and playing with the Google Maps API in a hard coded HTML for a bit I decided that maintaining the HTML file is just too painful. After all we are using PostNuke as a content management system on the site. And the HTML was not even within the site itself. So I migrated the HTML to a PHP file based on blank.php. Since that was still to painful I decided to hack a file together that takes links from the PostNuke web links core module and uses those on the map. And after a bit of hacking I am proud to release weblinksmap.php to you.

Download the release from here and read the weblinksmap_readme.txt for more instructions. An updated and maintained version of the instructions can be found in the following.

weblinksmap.php documentation

General

Description:

weblinksmap.php allows for the display of web links from Postnuke to be displayed in a Google Map in the PostNuke center frame.

Version:

weblinksmap20060424

Authors:

Manfred Moser

Examples:

can be found at http://www.mosabuam.com/weblinksmap.php and http://www.mosabuam.com/weblinksmap.php?catid=24
and http://www.mosabuam.com/weblinksmap.php?catid=24,26

Disclaimer

This is pretty much a hack. A proper solution would be to add two new field (latitude and longitude) to the web links related tables in PostNuke. Add input for those fields in the administration system and various outputs in the different web links displays. In addition various blocks could be developed to use the data. Feel free to take the code from this component to improve the core.

Initial setup

• obtain a google map key from http://www.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html
• insert the key into the variable definition for $googlekey at the top of weblinksmap.php
• insert the map width into the variable defintion for $mapheight at the top of weblinksmap.php e.g. $mapheight=’400′;
• insert the map width into the variable defintion for $mapwidth at the top of weblinksmap.php e.g. $mapwidth=’800′;
• insert the longitude of the initial center point of the map into $initiallongitude at the top of weblinksmap.php e.g. $initiallongitude=’30′;
• insert the latitude of the initial center point of the map into $initiallatitude at the top of weblinksmap.php e.g. $initiallatitude=’0′;
• insert the zoom level for the initial map display into $initialzoomlevel at the top of weblinksmap.php e.g. $initialzoomlevel=’16′;
• copy the modified weblinksmap.php into your PostNuke root folder
• create some map marker links (see below)
• check out the result at the url http://yourdomain/weblinksmap.php or http://yourdomain/weblinksmap.php?catid=x

Creating map marker links

In your PostNuke admin system go to the WebLinks section and use the Add new link feature.

Add a new link considering the following:

The link title will be used as the link title in the map marker pop up.

The link url will be used as the link url in the map marker pop up. If the supplied link is less than 7 characters (http://) the text will be the title rendered in the map marker pop up without being a link. This is necessary since the web links modules defaults to http:// in the input form and does not allow for empty links. When creating multiple links with invalid links you have to use unique strings (e.g. just use a number), otherwise the weblinks module will not allow you to create the link with an identical link url as another one.

The coordinates for the map marker will be established from the substring {ll=longitude,latitude} within the link description. The easiest way to obtain the coordinates for a specific location is to navigate to the location at http://maps.google.com, click “Link to this page” and copy the ll=x,y section from the browser url window. Insert this string into description and surround it with {}. See the links section at http://www.mosabuam.com/index.php?name=Web_Links&req=viewlink&cid=24 for examples.

By default all links that contain the string “{ll=” in the description will be evaluated to be put onto the map. It is also possible to create a map per web links category. To display only the markers in this category on the map use weblinksmap.php?catid=x with x being the id for your category (which you can find out by looking at the url when you navigate to your web links category).

Questions

For questions visit http://www.mosabuam.com or contact

Changelog

20060424 – Manfred Moser

release on Postnuke.com revealed that IE is not working, introduced a fix by moving the script to the bottom of the page, new release packaged

20060421 – Manfred Moser

fixed problem with description field from categories table, cleaned up and released new version – thanks again to Frank Schummertz

20060401 – Manfred Moser

implemented use of pnAPI for url parameter usage to improve security after suggestion from Frank Schummertz, released again, also includes feature to use multiple link categories and displays category titles and descriptions

20060316 – Manfred Moser

posted about the release in the Third Party Modules & Blocks forum on the postnuke site

20060316 – Manfred Moser

posted about the release in the Feedback & Suggestions forum on the postnuke site

20060316 – Manfred Moser

release on http://www.mosabuam.com

20060316 – Manfred Moser

implemented feature to render title as normal text if there is no url after suggestion from Werner

20060315 – Manfred Moser

full working first version and documentation from scratch

]]> http://www.mosabuam.com/2006/03/weblinksmap-google-maps-in-postnuke/feed 2 http://www.mosabuam.com/2006/03/mosabuamcom-update-step-1 http://www.mosabuam.com/2006/03/mosabuamcom-update-step-1#comments Fri, 03 Mar 2006 18:12:59 +0000 Manfred http://www.mosabuam.com/2006/03/mosabuamcom-update-step-1 You might have noticed that the site has been changing a bit here and there. Get an inside look on what happened and what new features are now available to you ;-)

To be honest – we have been a bit slack with updates to the software that runs our site. Things worked fine for us and so we kept plodding along. After all there is so many other things to do beside fuzzing around with PHP and HTML.

However recently we have been haunted by some stupid comment spammers. We ended up turning anonymous comments off. That didn’t help. We still got comment spammed with lots of stupid links in the comments. We knew there have been security issues with PostNuke too. The pain just got too big. We decided to update to the latest and greatest in the spur of a moment. Well – Werner did after much pushing from myself.

Mosabuam.com uses PostNuke and Gallery. So we updated to the latest PostNuke version .762. Since we missed quite a few update steps we ended up having to rewrite our theme. Werner did all that! Good work. After the update we had some problems getting the Gallery to work again. So another spur of a moment and Manfred updated the whole gallery system to the latest release. So all was working again and just needed some tweaking here and there.

That is enough of a background. Now to what you actually get out of it.

• No comment spam on the site anymore ;-)
• New separate Topics menu
• New separate About menu
• Less clutter in the Navigation menu
• RSS feed per topic via the RSS menu (custom written by Manfred and released as patch to PostNuke)
• Updated look and feel including better HTML standard compliance
• Great new list page off all image galleries
• Feature to download galleries as archive files for offline viewing

That’s all I can think of at the moment. There might be more. Anyway. We are still planning to migrate the theme to a proper Xanthia theme, which will bring even better page rendering and standards compliance. We will again release the them once it is done. Until then ..

Enjoy and come back again

]]> http://www.mosabuam.com/2006/03/mosabuamcom-update-step-1/feed 0 http://www.mosabuam.com/2003/07/phprojekt-public-calendar-system-v20030724-released http://www.mosabuam.com/2003/07/phprojekt-public-calendar-system-v20030724-released#comments Thu, 24 Jul 2003 16:04:51 +0000 Manfred http://www.mosabuam.com/2003/07/phprojekt-public-calendar-system-v20030724-released It has been in use in production for more than a year now and I finally found the time to properly package
the PHProjekt Public Calendar System for others to enjoy. PHProjekt is a mature, powerful web based groupware solution facilitating a PHP environment. It has an
active development and user community. The whole groupware requires access via login for any users. Within the calendar component of the groupware public events can be created. And this is where the PPCS comes in handy…

The PHProjekt Public Calendar System allows you to display a calendar with a monthly view including navigation and customisable look and feel on your public web site. Check out a demonstration on our site (no longer available) or see the
full production use at the eVolition site (no longer available).

As you can see you will get an overview of the full month together with navigation arrows. Each events will be displayed with the title in the monthly view and as a summary underneath. For a live example check out August 2002 on the eVolition site (no longer available). In addition you can also integrate the calendar system into a Postnuke site as I have done on our site as a demo here(no longer available).

You can get the whole package here. The release includes documented source explaining how to adapt the code to your environment, install instructions and instructions for your users on how to publish events to the system.

Please let us know of any problems or other feedback you got here on the site or in an email and we will try to help
you. Enjoy.

manfred

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