For e107Advent I started work on a Theming Guide for e107. This was going to help people with some knowledge in web design/development create themes for e107. So web designers can get an idea of how to code their designs. I decided to let the e107 community decide what topics I covered in the guide, this way I would hopefully fill in the gaps that aren’t currently filled in documentation.

Now while I carry on writing for the next version of the guide, I have had many requests to write guides for other areas of e107. This is something I have already started work on a while ago but focus turned onto other things. After I have gotten a few projects completed in the New Year this main guide will hopefully be released and updated throughout the year. Once again with content requested by e107 users, to fill in any gaps in the current documentation.

If you have any requests for e107 documentation then feel free to contact me.

The last few days I have been improving this blog, adding more interesting blogs, BlogRush widget as well as some changes in the code (i.e fixing the navigation rollover).

I have added some code to the posts that shows a ‘Digg This’ link on posts I have submitted to Digg and only these posts. This can be seen on the bottom of my EyeTV Hybird Review and this post. This uses 1 wordpress custom field and some PHP in the Wordpress theme files. You may or may not want to use this method of adding Digg links to your blog but this one works for me and I wanted to share.

This only allows people to digg posts you have submitted yourself, its not a way of allowing people to submit your posts to digg themselves. If you want to do this search Google or try this.

Open your Wordpress theme’s index.php file. Then find the section of code where you want to display the Digg link. Make sure its in The Loop. Then paste the following code within PHP tags and removing the spaces in the link.

$values = get_post_custom_values("Digg");
if ( $values != "" ) {
echo "< a href=' ".$values[0].” ‘>Digg This< /a>”;
}

As you can see it uses the get_post_custom_values() tag to get the value of a custom field named Digg.

Now navigate to your Blogs Wordpress Admin Area and find the post you want to add a Digg link too, once on this page navigate down to a section named ‘Custom Fields’. Now you want to fill in the form with Digg as your Key and the Digg URL as your Value like this. Once thats done then click the ‘Add Custom Field’ button and you should have a post with a Digg This link. Its then up to you how you want to style it, you can edit the PHP to make it display how you want.

Once your first post has been done next time you simply need to navigate down the the Custom Fields section and select Digg in the dropdown menu and add your Digg link to the value and then click the ‘Add Custom Field’ button and that post will have its Digg This Button. Of course you can only add the Digg custom field in after you have posted it to Digg.

Now why did I decide to do this instead of add Digg links to all posts?
Well some of my posts I don’t really want digging so I decided the ones I do want digging I will submit myself and use the above method to quickly add the Digg link to the particular post.

I will be editing this post to display the code better when I get the chance.

Any problems or comments feel free to submit them.

Well firstly I hope you all are having/had a very Merry Christmas. On Saturday I traveled down to the Isle Of Wight to spend Christmas with my Dad. This meant I had a Mini Christmas with my Mom and family in Birmingham on Friday. That was great, another great thing was that I could have my presents early.

One of them was an EyeTV Hybrid, which I actually brought a few weeks back and my Mom was kind enough to let me open and use it there and then. Thanks Mom! The EyeTV Hybrid is a TV tuner for Macs, it recieves both analog and Freeview. It comes packaged with an antenna, remote, break-out cable, USB cable, EyeTV Software.

Once I had gotten it home and the software installed on it was just a case of plugging the USB stick into my iMac and plugging in the ever so small Antenna and placing it onto a suitable magnetic surface (very important!). Once that was all set up I made EyeTV (The Software) search for channels. I of course scanned Freeview and to my amazement it found 80+ channels (including radio, interactive, and teletext channels).

The scanning stopped and I flicked through the channels looking for any of them that were dropping out. Each channel was perfect. This amazed me as the Antenna is tiny, and I had set up Freeview boxes before using bigger Antennas and had never received that amount of channels. Signal quality was 100%, while Signal strength was 78%.

The break-out cable allows you to attach other TV devices, such as game consoles. This break-out cable allows you to use S-Video, Composite Video and Stereo Audio. Just a note about consoles, EyeTV doesn’t support Pal 60, which is required by some games. There are ways round it which I am going to try soon myself.

The recording features in EyeTV are great too, set up what you want to record using the integrated tvtv program guide and once the program is finished and recording stopped you can play it back in great quality. While watching or recording a program you can pause it, and rewind and watch it again or just watch the last minute if you left the room. You can of course also fast forward so the TV is live again.

Overall the EyeTV Hybrid is just awesome, I recommend it to anyone with a Mac, or anyone who wants to just watch what you want to watch on TV instead of what others want to watch, or anyone who just wants to watch TV in piece without buying a new TV. I think I covered all possible reasons.

To read more, and see images of just how small the product is (especially the antenna). Click Here.