Welcome to our newest screencast series on our CMS (Content Management System) of choice, Modx! We hope everyone gets some valuable information on what Modx CMS is, how to use it and its advantages with search engine optimization.

Modx CMS is an Open Source PHP Framework with a built-in Content Management System. Very user-friendly and, as mentioned, great for SEO.

If you have any suggestions or questions please feel free to leave us comments below! Enjoy this first installment of our Modx Monday Screencasts!

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This week, Google wowed the tech crowd by unleashing it’s newest of oh-so-many betas upon the world: Google Chrome Frame (original announcement). Google Chrome Frame is an Internet Explorer plugin (specifically a BHO, or Browser Helper Object, in IE land) that gives versions 6, 7 and 8 of Microsoft’s ever-so-beloved browser the ability to render pages with Google Chrome’s WebKit-based rendering engine instead of Internet Explorer’s Trident engine. Which brings up a few important questions:

Why add an alternate rendering engine to Internet Explorer?

Well, dear friend, Internet Explorer, especially pre-version 8, has notoriously disrespected web standards and has had a unique (read: wrong) interpretation of how HTML and CSS should be rendered on page. IE8 went a long way towards correcting Microsoft’s mistakes of the past, finally bringing its rendering engine up to par with the more modern Gecko (Firefox) and WebKit engines (Safari, Chrome). Nevertheless, IE8 still does not support native XHTML or CSS3, which is pathetic, and has no support for the emerging HTML 5 standard, which is tragic. No support for HTML 5 also means no support for companion technologies such as SVG/Canvas, Geolocation, Database and Application Cache or Web Workers. The combination of HTML 5, CSS3, and all of these companion technologies finally lays an open-source foundation for web development that can rival or even exceed the interactivity provided by plugins such as Flash or Silverlight, and IE users don’t have it. (more…)

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Pop Labs recently made the switch from XHTML Transitional to Strict for our client sites. With that came some interesting changes. Most notably is that when you use XHTML Strict, you can no longer use iframes due to them being deprecated.  Even more interesting is that you can now use the Object Tag in place of iframes and come out with a validated site. Then came Google Maps. While you can still use the object tag to display an embedded Google Map, IE 6 & 7 will not display the maps. Sadness.

To eliminate this problem,  Team Lead Chris Pratt wrote some awesome JavaScript to make it work.

The Code

<object id="map" type="text/html" data="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&
source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Parkwood+Cir+Dr,+Houston,+TX+77036&
sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=49.624204,114.169922&ie=UTF8&z=14&
iwloc=A&ll=29.700281,-95.550928&output=embed" style="width:450px;height:300px;">
</object>
<!--[if lte IE 7]><script type="text/javascript">(function(){var o=document.
getElementById('map');var i=document.createElement('iframe');i.setAttribute
('src',o.getAttribute('data'));i.style.width=o.style.width;i.style.height=o.style.
height;o.parentNode.replaceChild(i,o);})();</script><![endif]-->

What’s Happening?

As you can see from the code above, we’ve replace iframes with the object tag. When you go to Google Maps and get the embed link, you’re given code wrapped in an iframe. What you’ll need from that is the URL or SRC url. Take that code and place it in your object tag’s “data” source url. IE data=”[google's source url]“.

You’ll notice that the object also has an ID of “map”. This is used by the JavaScript. In addition you’ll see some inline styling as well. This is also necessary for the Javascript to read your width & height values. Simple replace the current values with the appropriate values for your site.

Finally you’ll need to place the IE conditional statement after the object tag.

Example

We hope this helps you!

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