So, I did this maybe a week or two weeks ago, but it was a great victory for science and metagenomics, and I figured I’d post it here. I finally got dropdown menus working in Joomla, guys! Yayyyyyyy. If you go to phantome.org and mouse over the tools menu bar, you’ll get the condensed effort of my AWESOME work. Really, all it boils down to was I needed to click a single button.

Building dropdown menus, or “submenus” in Joomla is not terribly advanced. You make an item in whatever menu you’re working on, in this case the main menu. But instead of its parent being “Top” you make the parent an already existing item in the menu, in this case “Tools”.

However, unless you use my SECRET TRICK, the menu will only ever appear if you’re on the “Tools” page already. Which is dumb. People don’t want a menu for what they’re already looking at. So after a few hours of googling, downloading extensions and modules I didn’t need, and then a lot of clicking, I found the answer!

Edit the module for your menu, in my specific case I go to Extensions->Module Manager-> Main Menu in the administrator backend. Then you click the simple little box labeled “Always Show Sub-menu Items”, and save your changes. Voila! Success, and awesome. You now have infinite dropdown power. You can have dropdown menus, you can have dropdown menus inside those dropdown menus. Those menus can then shack up and raise little menus of their own. You can have nothing but menus, if you wanted. Infinite menus, dropping down.

Joomla is pretty cool, provided you step into a ring and box with it for like, nine hours.

As a few of you probably noticed, pipeline1, also known as seed.sdsu.edu, has been down at least since wednesday or thursday of last week. One of the drives was having “problems”, we’ll say, that were forcing pipe1 to be unable to boot. The actual boot drive wasn’t the issue. The second drive was the issue. It was formatted with an lvm2 filesystem. Also known as “logical partitions”. I guess it’s one way to get multiple partitions onto one drive. The catch is that it makes it really difficult to fsck it if there’s problems. After spending quite a while on it, here’s what I’ve done to get it fixed.

1: Boot off of an ubuntu install disc. It gives me graphical windows, a terminal, and easy root access. Tools used: Applications->Accessories->Terminal

2: I had to install lvdisplay, part of the lvm2 package, to get a look at our logical partitions, but I’ll tell you what they are so you don’t have to do that. Our two logical partitions are /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 and /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01.

3: Here is the SECRET TRICK. If you try to fsck either of those, it’ll give you an error. First it will tell you that no such file exists, and second it will tell you that it tried anyways, and there’s a bad super block. The second statement is misleading, concentrate on the first. So what I did was go to /dev/VolGroup00, and take a look at the two partitions. Both of them were symlinks! *gasp*

4: Those links pointed to the REAL partitions. /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 and /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01.

5: I ran fsck on the problem volume (volume 00) and lo and behold, success! All the orphaned inodes and corrupt linked lists are finding their parents and…being trimmed? I don’t know. Suffice to say fsck is currently running and hopefully pipe1 will be back up soon.