Spenser Jones

Click here for Part 1.

At this point, you should have a basic LEMP install, and should be able to start hosting websites without much effort, however the default configuration files leave a few things to be desired. I'm a big fan of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), and have developed a few includable configuration files to increase security, while decreasing the complexity of your sites-available configurations.

Log into your server, and create a new user

We never want to log in as root, regardless of how secure your server is, as it doesn't give us an accurate point of entry if you are hacked.

I recently went through the process of upgrading a Moodle 1.9 block for Panopto, to support Moodle 2.0, which came out in January. As Moodle 2.0 is a huge rewrite, and is still fairly fresh, there is very little documentation on what changes need to be made, or even what functions are deprecated and need replacing. In order to upgrade the plugin at Ambrose University College, I read through multiple core classes, and compared functions in 1.9 to 2.0. In order to make things easier for myself in the future, and for anyone else upgrading a block, I have documented my changes.

Blackbaud NetCommunity 6.15 has a bug in the login form, where tabbing onto the "Remember Me" field and pressing enter (normal functionality to submit a form) will take you back to the login form, with your username filled in, but no password or error. This is due to the fact that javascript is being (poorly) added directly to the HTML tags, instead of writing a simple, unobtrusive javascript function, that targets all fields on the form.

To remedy this, add a JS file to any layout that may contain a login field, and add this code:

Version 6.15 of Blackbaud NetCommunity consisted of many large changes to how BBNC works, one of which was the editor. In this update, Blackbaud moved from BBCuteEditor to TinyMCE (a great decision IMO, as TinyMCE is one of the most popular WYSIWYG editors). Sadly, patch 70 and below do not support iFrames, even if you have the iFrame set as a "Safe HTML Tag" in the settings. Blackbaud is working on a patch for this (patch 71 to be exact), however they do not have an ETA for it yet.

I've recently been given the task of creating some custom plugins for NetCommunity, so we can do things like unify the design of our Faculty Biography pages at Ambrose. I have prior experience with C#, so I figured it would be a fairly simple process, once I figured out how their API works, however there is minimal documentation, and all of the tutorials online are either outdated or incomplete.

As such, I am going to write up a concise walkthrough for creating a NetCommunity plugin (for 6.15) using C#, from scratch, up until you have a functional part.

I recently came across clock.lookatjack.com, which displays a 24h clock, and changes the background colour to a hex code based off of that time. I showed it to a few friends, as it seemed like a neat little page, and one of them mentioned that he'd love it as a home page, if only it wasn't built in flash.

At Ambrose University College, we run Blackbaud NetCommunity as our CMS, and I've encountered a few... issues... with permissions for content authors, and how the editor itself works... Over the past few weeks, in an attempt to improve the experience of both our visitors, and our content authors, I have added a few lines to our website's javascript file (hosted in a document part).

Over the past six months, I've been charged with redeveloping the Ambrose University College website, using BlackBaud NetCommunity. I worked together with the creative department (mainly focused on print media) for a new design (old one is here), and with many other departments for training in content management and functionality. I've learned quite a bit through the process, and grown immensely in my skills (primarily CSS and C#.Net).

As a warning, Adium Plugins use internal Adium APIs, which sometimes change. If you build a plugin, it may break with future versions of Adium, so be prepared for some upkeep down the road, unless you want to be rude and build a great program, and then abandon it and all of its users. This guide assumes that you understand the basics of Objective-C, XCode, and programming in general. If you don't meet one of these prerequisites, please go research the basics and then come back