Ok, so I fought crowds the day after Thanksgiving from 4am until almost noon to get my Nintendo Wii. While eventually sitting on the floor inside a store playing Uno with other Wii hopefuls, I started thinking that it was not worth it. Boy was I wrong!

Wii is one of the coolest systems I’ve ever played. I strongly recommend it to anyone who is looking for a different kind of gaming experience. The player really gets involved in the games more than with other systems out there just due to the motion sensitive controllers.

Speaking of Wii, it’s time to go play now

Quick links is an interesting concept that can be very useful. It just so happens that Farcry is excellent at dynamically generating them.

First of all, the way I’m using quick links is I am putting a select box somewhere in the header. The user selects something from the dropdown and goes there

Let’s go over what we need to make this work…

First, you need a way to create quick links. I have a tutorial available for download about this. Basically, create a new Navigation node under Root called Quick Links (or whatever you want) and set the alias to “quicklinks.” The alias part is very important, what it’s named is not.

Within that Navigation node, create other navigation nodes but do NOT create HTML pages corresponding to them. If you right click on the Node inside the Site tree and select Navigation you will be fine. If you do this through Quick Site Builder you have to make sure to uncheck the part about creating HTML pages. Go into each of the navigation nodes and set the Symbolic Link to one of the pages/nodes you’ve already created. (If you do this in Quick Site Builder you have to go into each node separately. If you create them through the Site Tree you can do it right then.

Quicklinks FAQ

continue reading "Farcry Quick Links"

Here is a tutorial on how to enable Macros in Microsoft Excel.

Enable Macros in Excel

Here’s a quick script that I use in a lot of header files to detect the user’s browser. else represents Firefox in most cases.

<cfif Trim(ListGetAt(CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT, 2, ";")) EQ "MSIE 6.0">
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/main_IE6.css" media="screen" />
    <cfelseif Trim(ListGetAT(CGI.HTTP_USER_AGENT, 2, ";")) EQ "MSIE 7.0">
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/main_IE7.css" media="screen" />
    <cfelse>
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/main_FF.css" media="screen" />
    </cfif>

Sometimes I see a CSS related display issue on the farcry login page. This primarily only happens in FireFox for me. There are 2 ways to fix this:

1) add a height property to #login inside the main.css file
2) add
<h3>
<img src="images/powered_by_farcry_watermark.gif" />
Tell it to someone who cares
</h3>
right after the ending fieldset tag in the login.cfm page. (This is right around line 170 of that file if it is still the default)

I prefer the second method because it adds the farcry logo under the login form.

I truly thought this project would be the end of me. The project was to create a CSS menu that pops up instead of down. Simple enough. However, when the user clicked on a child item, that menu tree had to stay open. If you’re at all familiar with CSS menus you know that they basically revolve around an unordered list with several classes and they turn the display property in CSS on and off. Of course, this wouldn’t work because the use of :hover was out. So, here’s how I accomplished this (2 level menus only)…

1) Create a custom nav class based on the generic. mine neiNav.

2) Keep track of where you are in the navigation tree. In my case I was using 2 levels only. The first level was a child of Home and the 2nd level was a child of any particular item in the first level. Since the point is to keep the child menu open if the user selects something from it, we only need to keep track of the object ID in the 2nd level. I did this with the following:

<cfparam name="parentNavID" default="">
<cfif application.factory.otree.getparentID(request.navid).parentid NEQ application.navid.home>
	<cfset parentNavID = application.factory.oTree.getParentID(request.navid).parentId>
</cfset></cfif>
</cfparam>

This way we know that if the parentNavID has a value, then the value it contains represents a level 1 menu item. Thus, the tree directly following this item needs to stay open

continue reading "A CSS Menu in Farcry That Stays Open???"

I have a project in farcry that requires the site including the entire menu tree be available in English and French. I started looking at this and realized that I had no clue how to accomplish this. So, here’s what I did.

First, I created the site tree in English using Quick Site Builder. Then I created an identical site tree using Quick Site Builder for the French menus (after having first translated the menus to French). The site tree looks something like this:

Root – Home – English Menus
Root – French Home – French Menus

Second, I created a dynamic link in the page footer to toggle between English and French:

<cfif session.language eq "english">
<a href="index.cfm?objectid=#application.navid.french_home#&language=french">Français</a>
<cfelse>
<a href="index.cfm?objectid=#application.navid.home#&language=english">English</a>
</cfelse></cfif>

continue reading "Multiple langage sites in Farcry"