Creative Web Specialist - An online portfolio and resource site of Warren Buckley

Hello all,
This evening I have decided to create a nice quick package to help use Gravatar easily on your umbraco blog/site. There have been snippets on other blogs to help you achieve this, I have just created two XSLT Extensions to use in your XSLT and an example XSLT file to show how you can use the helpers.

If you haven't heard of Gravatar before, it is a service that allows you to upload an image so you can have a globally recgonised avatar on the web that is associated to your email address. The most useful scenario is on your Umbraco blog to display Gravatar images of visitors who have left comments, but you may think of some other creative scenarios you may want to use it in.

This is my Gravatar

Hello all this is my first package for 2008. I have created a quick XSLT package to allow you to display your latest twitter status’s on your website/blog.

For example here is my twitter page where you can see what upto or thinking.

This package installs the following files:

• bin/CWSHelperTwitter.dll
• xslt/CWS_twitterStatus.xslt
• /usercontrols/Installer/CWSTwitter/cwsTwitterInstaller.ascx

The installer usercontrol cwsTwitterInstaller.ascx is used to modify the /config/xsltExtensions.config
to setup my custom XSLT extension to allow us to modify the strange format of the twitter date format.

The actual package installs the following into umbraco:

• Macro: [XSLT] CWS:Display Twitter Status
• XSLT: CWS_twitterStatus.xslt

Hello with a few days to go until Christmas, I thought I would share with you a mashup tip using Umbraco to list my recently listened to tracks using the Last.FM service and then using jQuery I am able to do an AJAX call to get the album art image remotely.

Before I start I will show you the method that can achieve this result entirely using XSLT in Umbraco however this is a slow process and is alot quicker to use the jQuery method which I will show you afterwards.

XSLT solution
Below is the XSLT code for you to view how easy it is to create a mashup just using XSLT in Umbraco.

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Hello all,
Well this is a quick blog post to let you know I have made a minor path update to the Creative Website package, which creates the Assets folder in the “Data” folder located at the Root as opposed to having the “Assets” folder in the root because of people reporting permission issues with this and the JS folder has been moved to the NEW “Scripts” folder in V3 of umbraco.

Well once I am more settled I plan to look at the Umbraco forums and keep up with all the blog posts - but this will now be out of office hours because my current position does not use Umbraco at the new company where I work.

Hello all,
I have updated the package from Douglas Robar’s feedback with XSLT Search 2.0 not being configured correctly.

With this update I would like to annouce that this package is now live in the NEW v3 umbraco repository. So you can download this website package right inside umbraco.

Keep your eyes peeled - as plans are for a Website Package with a CSS Switcher and theme gallery.