I'm working on a project where I needed to display country flags for a type of content according to the country it was reffering to.

So I needed an icon pack. The best one I came across was this one:
http://365icon.com/icon-styles/ethnic/classic2/

Has the icons by ISO code and different sizes for all your needs.

Big thanks to the authors.

Google Chrome just become my main browser. It (almost) has everything I need: Google Translate on page (just click an icon and the page is translated), Measureit, Twitter extension, Color picker, Web developer toolbar to validate HTML and CSS.

What is the missing piece? Firebug or something similar. Chrome has Developer Tools, but it's not coming close to Firebug. This is the only thing that makes me open Firefox.

Firefox on the Mac is becoming extremely slow, especially when viewing Flash and having multiple tabs open. I know, Flash sucks on the Mac, but nonetheless... Chrome just runs smoother.

Mi-am cumparat Gazeta sporturilor pentru Goana dupa fericire, albumul lui Bitza. Eram curios de colaborarea cu B-Real, dar piesa mi se pare slabuta. In schimb restul sunt faine, imi place piesa 7, Timpul curge in pahare si piesa 9, Alta zi, dupa noapte cu Artan.

Super tari primele doua versuri din Alta zi, dupa noapte:

Am fost mult timp speriat de gandul ca o sa mor,
Ce de cacat sa ma sting ca un televizor

To divide an array and split it into smaller sub-arrays by size, you can use the PHP function array_chunk():

$sections = array_chunk(array('k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o'), 2);

Today I've uploaded to the typo3 TER my first contribution to the community, the implementation of Facebook Comments Box for tt_news plugin.

The extension allows you to display a comment box and a list of comments under your news and visitors can login with Facebook Connect and post comments. These comments show up on their profiles. It's a neat feature to spread the reach of your content.

The video below explains more about what the Comments widget is and how can you get one.

I will come back with a more detailed post and examples about the extension. As a short summary, you get three markers that get inserted in the templates and then in typoscript you set up the facebook api key and you enable the comments in displayList, displayLatest or displaySingle section. The text "1 comment", "xx comments" is also translatable via typoscript. More is explained in the manual inside the extension.

Until the extension shows up in the TER you can download it from the Download page.

UPDATE: http://typo3.org/extensions/repository/view/ttnews_facebookcomments/current/

I'm working on a project and I needed to use graphical headers for content elements and tt_news. Everything is ok, except I need to split some long headers into multiple lines as otherwise the long generated image would break the layout.

Here' s the code that does the magic:

#######################################################
# News headers
#######################################################
plugin.tt_news {
    displayList {
    title_stdWrap.cObject = TEXT
    #title_stdWrap.cObject.wrap = <div class="divheader">|</div>
    title_stdWrap.cObject.current = 1
    title_stdWrap.cObject.split {
      token.char = 32
      cObjNum = 1
       1{
        10 = IMAGE
        10.alttext.cObject = TEXT
        10.alttext.cObject.field= title
        10.file = GIFBUILDER
        10.file {
                XY = 500,[10.h]+[20.h]+[30.h]+40
                10 = TEXT
                10.text.field = title
                10.text.listNum.splitChar=|
                10.text.listNum=0
                #10.niceText = 1
                10.fontColor = #000000
                10.fontFile = path/to/ttf/font
                10.fontSize = 35
                10.offset = 0,35
                20 < .10
                20.text.listNum=1
                20.offset = 0,35+[10.h]+6
                30 < .10
                30.text.listNum=2
                30.offset=0,35+[10.h]+[20.h]+12
                format = png
                backColor = #ffffff
          }
       }
    }
   }
    }
  }

For the content elements:

#######################################################
# Graphical headers
#######################################################
lib.stdheader.10.1 >
lib.stdheader.10.1 = IMAGE
lib.stdheader.10.1 {
 altText.current = 1 
 file = GIFBUILDER
 wrap = <h1> | </h1> 
 file {
                XY = 500,[10.h]+[20.h]+[30.h]+40
                10 = TEXT
                10.text.field = title
                10.text.listNum.splitChar=|
                10.text.listNum=0
                #10.niceText = 1
                10.fontColor = #000000
                10.fontFile = path/to/ttf/font
                10.fontSize = 35
                10.offset = 0,35
                20 < .10
                20.text.listNum=1
                20.offset = 0,35+[10.h]+6
                30 < .10
                30.text.listNum=2
                30.offset=0,35+[10.h]+[20.h]+12
                format = png
                backColor = #ffffff


 }
}

Change lib.stdheader.10.1 to 10.2, 10.3 for the other entries in the Layout drop-down. To change the labels in the drop-downs add this to the TSConfig field of the main page in the tree (Right Click > Page Properties > Options):

TCEFORM.tt_content.header_layout.altLabels {
    1 = Black 35
    2 = Black 18
    3 = Gray 14
    4 = Gray 14 background
} 

rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`

Banat Sport, a romanian news website was launched this week. And it's built on Drupal. I've helped out a friend to build it and the end result is quite nice.

I'll name a few features here: News, Comments, Videos, Standings, Polls, Search, Twitter integration and Newsletter.

It will be a real pleasure to see him grow. It already started to climb in the search results on Google so maybe soon we will see it on the front-page ;)

I've checked Google Analytics for a www.modavastyl.ro, a website I've migrated to Drupal three weeks ago and they already see an increase in trafic of 290%.

:) Drupal SEO features are working nicely. The number of visits is not large, but it increases steadily and it's way more than what they had before. Now, I agree, optimizations could have been made to the old website as well, but that one was just static pages and they love Drupal and how easy is for them to edit the pages without giving me a call.

I've also started documenting about SEO tactics and optimizations. I wanna see if I can bring it to the frontpage in Google. I've been playing around and it's already on the 3 page if you search "vertical blinds" (in romanian :) ), they were on 8 before.

Maybe I'll post one day about what I've learned regarding this.