Author: Mark Billen

13th August 2009

20 comments

Build the BBC homepage

07 Conditional formatting

07 Conditional formatting

We want the second and third images to be displayed on mouseover. Click under the img tag and select XSLT> Conditional Region. Enter position() > 1 and click OK. Enter a display:none style attribute in place of Content goes here. Repeat to add a class of last-list to the third anchor element.

08 Text feeds

Build the BBC homepage

Create an XSLT fragment with the BBC Politics feed (http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/uk_politics/rss.xml). In Design view, via rss>channel>item, drag ‘link’ and ‘title’ to the canvas from the bindings pane. Define as an XSLT repeat region, repeating under item.

09 Formatting text feeds

Enter <ul>, <li> and <a> tags to format this data as a list of links. We want to limit this to the first ten results, so select XSLT>Conditional Region, and enter position()<=10 in the test field to generate the XML to filter the results. Save this file as ‘text_feeds.xml’.

10 XML variables

On the BBC site, users can show or hide items in the feed using plus and minus buttons. To allow us to do the same, we are going to add another conditional region, which, rather than having a fixed value, uses a variable that is parsed into the XML file.

<xsl:if test=”position() > $limit”>
<xsl:attribute name=”style”>
display:none
</xsl:attribute>
</xsl:if>

11 Automating with PHP

Build the BBC homepage

We want to use lots of feeds on our page and control which ones to display with cookies. For this, we’ll use PHP. The PHP files are included on the disc: feeds.php contains an array of feeds from the BBC website, and feeds_output.php uses the XML files we just created to output the HTML.

12 Include the PHP

Build the BBC homepage

To add a PHP Include in Dreamweaver, select Insert>PHP Objects>Include from the top menu bar. Open index.php and add includes>feeds.php at the very top of your page (outside of the DOCTYPE), and includes>feeds_output.php inside the div with an ID of content.

Pages: 1 2 3

Tags: Ajax, BBC, homepage, jQuery, site design

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20 Comments »

Desmond Liang said:

Very cool and useful tutorial. Thanks a lot.

# 7 October 2009 at 5:37 pm

Mtechnik said:

Did anyone come to success on getting this to work?

# 6 November 2009 at 9:47 am

ChicoOfSweden said:

Thanks for a challanging experiment idea. Lovely website.
Good that the original creator got the credit too. But without Mark Billen I would not have seen this.

Thanks a million.

# 17 November 2009 at 12:30 pm

DTP said:

Could not get this to work properly! populated with to many errors!
Notice: Undefined index: sport in C:\wamp\www\includes\feed_output.php on line 5

Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in C:\wamp\www\includes\MM_XSLTransform\MM_XSLTransform.class.php on line 172

Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in C:\wamp\www\includes\MM_XSLTransform\MM_XSLTransform.class.php on line 187

Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in C:\wamp\www\includes\MM_XSLTransform\MM_XSLTransform.class.php on line 208

Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in C:\wamp\www\includes\MM_XSLTransform\MM_XSLTransform.class.php on line 215

Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in C:\wamp\www\includes\MM_XSLTransform\MM_XSLTransform.class.php on line 298

Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in C:\wamp\www\includes\MM_XSLTransform\MM_XSLTransform.class.php on line 306

Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in C:\wamp\www\includes\MM_XSLTransform\MM_XSLTransform.class.php on line 298

Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in C:\wamp\www\includes\MM_XSLTransform\MM_XSLTransform.class.php on line 306

Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in C:\wamp\www\includes\MM_XSLTransform\MM_XSLTransform.class.php on line 388

Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in C:\wamp\www\includes\MM_XSLTransform\MM_XSLTransform.class.php on

# 4 February 2010 at 1:02 am

Misato Maekawa said:

NO DREAMWEAVER, NO LIFE.

# 16 February 2010 at 1:11 am

DTP said:

Got it working but without images. Any please help!!!!!

# 31 March 2010 at 1:43 pm

Tim Lomas said:

Interesting idea.

I’ve found that IE8 causes a few funnies unless you run in compatibility mode … so a slight rejig to use the latest versions of jQuery & jQuery UI is required.

… that said, the premise still works a treat and the rework is educational in itself

Excellent tutorial.

# 1 April 2010 at 3:15 pm

Website Design said:

Nice tutorial and BBC did a fantastic job with the redesign! Keep up the good work!

# 6 April 2010 at 12:27 am

richard said:

The download seems to be invalid – gives me message saying zip is empty:(

# 12 April 2010 at 10:03 pm

Chris said:

Very good work! Looks like a challenge for sure. I think I’ll give it a shot; looks like a lot can be learned from this!!

# 25 June 2010 at 3:29 am

Manchester web design said:

The BBC site is great and think the site will show the first leaps in adopting new ways in the future on web design, web technology and website useability.

# 25 June 2010 at 4:47 pm

Richard Griffin said:

http://www.courtesycouriers.co.uk/index.php

having an issue with the following:

MM_XSLTransform error.
Transformation Error.
variable ‘limit’ not found in file includes/text_feeds.xsl

<!DOCTYPE xsl:stylesheet [

Please help as i want to use your template.

# 21 July 2010 at 7:12 pm

Patrick Burgess said:

@Richard

The issue is within your text_feeds.xsl page.

There is an error in the code. Where it reads:

display:none

You need to remove the $ from the $limit variable. So it reads:

display:none

This fixed the error on mine. Good luck

# 23 July 2010 at 10:37 pm

Patrick Burgess said:

Great walkthrough, thanks guys.

# 23 July 2010 at 10:37 pm

Patrick Burgess said:

@ Richard
Hmmmm comments page doesnt seem to want to display code. Basically just remove the $ sign so that it just says “position() > limit”

# 23 July 2010 at 10:40 pm

Jon Moore said:

I too had everything working except the images… As I hadn’t used feeds or transformation it took quite a while to work out what was wrong…. In the end I found it….

image_feeds.xsl

Line 13

Add a ‘/’ after http://search.yahoo.com/mrss so the line reads…

Apparently it’s the reference to Yahoo that enables the media:thumbnail part of to work…

Hope this helps

# 31 July 2010 at 6:19 am

Jon Moore said:

Ooops! Where’s my code gone? Lets try again… The line should read…

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/">

# 31 July 2010 at 6:21 am

Alloy said:

please I need a template for this tutorial.I really want to customize it for my project

# 2 August 2010 at 11:07 am

H. McCreight said:

To get started with this , have a look at the JQuery site , at http://www.jquery.com. Then look for the Sortable plugin. This has a a whole set of pre-written components that you need to download, as well as core JQuery and the example. The key one is Widgets, and after you set up all the JQuery code and JQuery CSS links, then your skeleton HTML “portlet” file will
come alive as the “portlet” s are styled and drag/drop and sorting events
kick in. Then you can add more exotic content and even add in ASP.NET controls inside the content to extend it.

# 6 August 2010 at 1:47 pm

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