6/27/2008 12:45:00 AM

News Ticker View for Graffiti CMS

A project on which I've been working required some nifty trickery and I thought it was something worth sharing. I bet one could easily add some transition effects to make it more nice-looking but the idea's pretty simple; rotate the titles of the articles you want displayed in a handy-dandy little auto-rotator as links to the article content. The code for this view is below.

ASP.NET-Code: 
<style>
#newsBox
{
    width: 300px;
    vertical-align: bottom;
    border: dotted 1px #eee;
    padding: 2px;
}
</style>

<div id="newsBox"></div>

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">

var NewsArticle = Class.create({
    initialize: function(title, url)
    {
        this.Title = title;
        this.Url = url;
    }
});

var NewsArticleRotator = Class.create({
    initialize: function()
    {
        this.Articles = new Array();
        #foreach($post in $data.PostsByCategory("news",10))
        this.Articles.push(  new NewsArticle("$post.Title","$post.Url")  );
        #end
    },
    rotate: function()
    {
        var rnd = Math.floor(Math.random()*this.Articles.length);
        $('newsBox').innerHTML = '<a onmouseover=\'toggleNewsLink();\' onmouseout=\'toggleNewsLink()\' href=\'' + this.Articles[rnd].Url + '\'>' + this.Articles[rnd].Title + '</a>';
    }
});

var isNewsLinkHot = false;

function toggleNewsLink()
{
    isNewsLinkHot = !isNewsLinkHot;
    if(!isNewsLinkHot)
        rotateNews();
}

function rotateNews()
{
    if(isNewsLinkHot) return;
    
    var rttr = new NewsArticleRotator();
    rttr.rotate();
    window.setTimeout(rotateNews, 3000);
}

rotateNews();

</script>

Happy Coding!

Note - Syntax Highlighter is busted and I'm sleepy so it'll look better tomorrow.

Further update - I touched a few files and all seems well again. 

Kick it! | del.icio.us | Comments (0) | Permalink

2/21/2008 12:39:00 AM

Reconfiguring the Graffiti Data Provider with NAnt

I'm getting started with Graffiti CMS right now and so far feel pretty good about all of the excellent features they've thrown in. I prefer the SQL provider method to the default of VistaDB, so I had to go to the Graffiti support site to find information on how convert to the SQL provider. I figure if I need to do it, so will some other people. To make life easier I've written a NAnt script to perform this, and you'll find it right here.

Happy coding!

Kick it! | del.icio.us | Comments (2) | Permalink