Montego Musings

All you *nukers out there may appreciate this gripe of mine. In RavenNuke™, PHP-Nuke, and the other *nuke variants, there is the concept of a normal user and an admin user. There is even a special type of admin user called a “God Admin", with special privileges, such as creating new admins and assigning privileges. So far, not a bad approach, although it is debatable why one even has to have two separate classes of users, but, I digress.

The administration control panel, or ACP for short, within *nuke consists of two sections, the first called “Administration Menu” and the second called “Modules Administration". As many of you know, in order for an admin to see the Administration Menu applets, as I like to call them, one must be given SuperUser privileges. However, it is also possible to set up admins to only have access to the administration applets for specific modules.

The problem with SuperUser access, is that means an admin can do everything except “Edit Admins” - if you have NukeSentinel™ installed - and if you are like me, you may not like that too much. In fact, out of the Administration Menu applets, I often wished that I could just give an admin access to post system messages, so the Messages applet, or possibly to just manage Submissions. Unfortunately, you have to give them SuperUser access, which gives them everything else…

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Tired of the old *nuke news module? Me too. I would love someday to port this blog software, b2evolution, to a *nuke module. I never intended for Montego Musings to end up being a place where one comes for code hacks or other types of code for *nuke, but since I fully intend on porting this some day and having it replace my news module at Montego Scripts, I guess I’ll deviate some from my original intent.

Heck, if nothing else, it will get me to post more and maybe get this thing moving again. Then I’ll use Montego Musings for more personal type stuff, or just shut’er down.

Unfortunately I have not had time enough to make another post in quite some time. My desire is to post at least once per week. In my “spare time” (yeah, I know, what is that?), I have been reading a good book on search engine optimization (SEO). My plan is to post a whole series on the topic from the book as well as other related readings.

The book is titled Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie of SEO Egghead.com. I would also recommend folks subscribe to Aaron Wall’s RSS feed at SEO Book.com. There are a few more recommended readings as well, but I will save that for further posts.

I have not had the greatest luck - or am I really talking about “customer service” - you decide - on the Google front. They have pretty much taken over, in my mind, the “Evil Empire” status. I guess you get so big, start swallowing up companies and sites left-and-right, and next thing you are too far removed from those whom made you great in the first place.

Here I was, late last night, configuring away my new Blogger blog and posting a new post, with the intent of using their FTP publish feature to host the actual content from blog.montegoscripts.com. I had just helped a family member do the same about a month back and everything for her was working great, and I think still does.

I had gotten it to work, was publishing over just fine, and then tried to tweak a few things and re-publish and it kept timing out.

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I, too, have asked this question in years past, but back then it was HTML 4.01 Transitional and Strict compliance that I was “wrestling” with. Now it is XHTML 1.0 Transitional / Strict (and greater). First off, before I get too far, you will notice that this Blog is NOT XHTML 1.0 Strict even though if you view the source, its DOCTYPE sure seems to say it should be. I agree. Problem is, Google apparently does not, and this is their template. Hopefully some day, I will have the time to change that…

So, what is the big deal anyways? The answer first lies with the question of HTML compliance: web browsers (technically referred to as User Agents within the W3C specs), are supposed to be written to support these standards when it comes to recognizing the various HTML tags and how to render them to specs. (I always say “supposed to” because browser makers do not seem to “get it” when it comes to making their browsers truly standards compliant - yes, even FireFox has some “quirks", but it is better than others which will remain nameless.)

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