[geeklog-devel] {blockid}

[Dirk Haun]

Here's something I stumbled over while updating geeklog.info:

In block attributes, {blockid} is now available as a variable. It's used
to give blocks a unique ID, e.g.

  <div class="block-box" id="{blockid}">

in blockheader.thtml.

Apart from the slight misnomer (it's not the block's ID, bid, but
something derived from the block's title), here are some issues I ran into:

1) It doesn't take national special characters into account. So on
geeklog.info, I now have a block with id="Über_Geeklog2".

Not sure where the 2 comes from, but the actual problem is the umlaut -
it's not valid HTML.

Proposed solution: Instead of trying to clean up the block title using
strtr(), I'd suggest to run it through COM_sanitizeID(). That will give
slightly different results from before, but since this is new code
anyway, it shouldn't affect too many people.


2) Based on the {blockid}, there is some CSS in style.css that controls
how some lists are formatted:

#Admins_Only ul, #User_Functions ul, #Topics ul {
  list-style:none;
  padding:0px;
  margin:0px;
}

In the Professional theme, the Admins Only, User Functions, and Topics
block now all use proper <ul> lists. The above CSS rule makes them
appear like before, i.e. without the bullet points.

But that stops working when you rename the blocks. Like, say, because
you're running a site in German where "Topics" is "Kategorien" ...

Haven't really looked into a proper fix yet - it would probably involve
using more block template files instead of that CSS "hack".

Other ideas?

bye, Dirk

P.S. I actually recognized who wrote that blockid code without looking
it up in CVS ;-)


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