CodePyro

vbulletin error after upgrading php "includes/init.php Line: 49"

2012-01-27T18:59:00.000-08:00

If you are getting the below errors with vBulletin after upgrading php.

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in E:\websites\dynamic\gtglass\a2hosting_forum\includes\init.php on line 383

Deprecated: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated in E:\websites\dynamic\gtglass\a2hosting_forum\includes\class_core.php on line 2529

Unable to add cookies, header already sent.
File: E:\websites\dynamic\gtglass\a2hosting_forum\includes\init.php
Line: 49

To fix
Try replacing

error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE);

with

error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~8192);

Then replace all occurances of '=&' with '='

Joomla Virtuemart Product search plugin not finding products

2012-01-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

The vmxsearch.plugin that comes with Virtuemart to integrate product search into the normal joomla website search works great once its configured. Some products may not show in the search results.

The main cause for this is if the product is out of stock. In my case I had a -2 in the stock amount for the products that were not showing.

Change this by going into the admin->virtuemart->product list-> edit product and change the stock on the Product Status Tab.

How to Add an image link to a Nivo Slider using Next Gen Gallery for Wordpress

2011-12-21T14:05:00.000-08:00

This setup is for when you need to use a custom field say a Link for your Next Gen Gallery images while viewing the images in a Nivo Slider. In particular I am using the Easy Nivo Slider.

First get your gallery setup with all of your images. Next go get the Next Gen Gallery Custom Fields . Once the plugin is installed add a new field called "link", now each of your images will have a link field in the gallery manager. Fill out a link for each.

Next in the Easy Nivo Slider get that plugged into an article or in one of your templates. Once that is done and the slideshow is running at the dimensions that you need. Your ready to add the custom fields to the output.

The Custom fields in the Next Gen gallery are not called in the Easy Nivo Slider so we will need to use some functions to get the particular field.

Open up the file plugins/easy-nivo-slider/nextgen/list-images.php

You should find the php code that displays the image tag around 185.

echo '<img src="'.$image->imageURL.'" '. $image_description.$size.' border="0" />';

Just before that code we are going to add the php to output our new custom link field.
We will use the function from the Next Gen Gallery Custom Fields functions.php file called nggcf_get_field. It takes 2 parameters ('PHOTO ID','CUSTOM FIELD NAME')

//get the field value from the Next Gen Gallery Custom Fields using the photo id
  $linkval= nggcf_get_field($result->pid,'link');
  if($linkval !='')
     echo "<a href=\"" . $linkval . "\">";

So thats it now you have outputted your custom field of link before the image is ouput. I would also reccomend closing the a tag after the image is displayed. Here is the full snippet.

//codepyro hack using the next gen gallery custom fields to get  the custom field of link for each photo
              $linkval= nggcf_get_field($result->pid,'link');
             if($linkval !='')
               echo "<a href=\"" . $linkval . "\">";

            // Output the image
            // Note that this outputs the original nextgen image, not the resized one.  need to figure out how
            // to get that one, if it exists

            echo '<img src="'.$image->imageURL.'" '. $image_description . $size .' border="0" />';

             if($linkval !='')
                 echo '</a>';

MSSQL subquery as a list.. i.e. return categories as a select item

2011-12-20T17:31:00.000-08:00

If you have ever wondered how to return a list of categories with a select statement heres the answer. It actually comes from StackOverflow.This is a repost so I can find it later as I am sure that I have needed to do this about 20 times in the past.

This is Really clever and full credit goes to this really Smart guy Niikola

Here is a simple-ish query, gets some user data along with the list of categories. The Category table is separate with a linking table called contact_category_xref which holds the category id and the contact id associated.

SELECT
c.id,
c.FirstName,
c.LastName,
c.email,
c.City,
c.State,

Stuff((select ','+cat.name from category cat left join 
        contact_category_xref x
        on cat.id = x.catid
        where x.contactid = c.id
        For XML PATH('')),1,1,'') as categoryList
FROM contacts c

Ill attempt some explanation, feel free to jump in and offer corrections please.

The first bit of Magic comes in the form of the "For XML Path('')" command in sql returns the query columns as XML which is incredibly handy.

  "pizza,pie"

Now to get rid of the xml portion concatenating the comma before the cat.name returns the list without XML. example ',pizza,pie,cookies,snickers'
I have no Idea how this works or why but it does. Please feel free to explain if you know.

So Whats left is the STUFF command which removes the first character for 1 character in length and replaces it with ''. Which means we are left with our nicely formatted list 'pizza,pie,cookies,snickers'.

Pretty COOL i must say.

Size Nivo slideshows for mobile using CSS

2011-12-13T19:57:00.000-08:00

Yep, you sure can scale and re-size the Nivo and many other jQuery or Mootools slideshows using CSS media queries.

To get started I am using
The easy-nivo-slider for Wordpress. This is in conjunction with Really Nice NextGen Wordpress Gallery Manager plugin.
(If you need to learn these just visit their respective pages.)

Now to the quick goodies. I am only showing the normal website width and a small mobile. I would reccomend setting another media query for around 768px wide, or go look up common mobile device screen sizes

//Normal width of a website
 .easy-nivo-slider-first
{ 
  width:700px;
}

//CSS media Query for screen sizes less than or equal too 320px wide
@media only screen and (max-width: 320px) {
 .easy-nivo-slider-first
{  
width:300px;
}

Export Lists from Outlook to csv

2011-12-02T10:15:00.000-08:00

Open up the contacts
Click to highlight a list
Choose File->Save As
Change the Save As Type to "Text Only .txt"

Save the file
Then open excel
Next goto File->Open Choose your file

You should get a popup "Text Import Wizard" asking you about delimited, just leave the default.
- Choose Next
- make sure Tab is checked
- Click Finish

Next choose File->Save As
Save your file as a csv

Adobe Wallaby - flash to html5 canvas conversion tool

2011-07-29T13:58:00.000-07:00

Just gave wallaby a try with a new flash project. Wallaby is a beta utility that converts flash fla to html5 svg. It has some problems but I am pretty impressed with it thus far. Although it doesn't produce anything of professional quality nor create anything that can be polished. Can't wait until its a fully functional product, its about time adobe figured out a way to support more devices!

Here are a list of release notes with supported features below.

Browsers tested and sorta working:
Safari 5.0.3 - had some loading issues but good results
iPod mobile safari v??? - partly worked, not all animation loaded
Chrome v12.0.742.122 - best results

Firefox 5 - dont work at all :(
IE9 - failure as well

The animation came across exactly as in the flash fla (CS4).
Sound did not get converted
Buttons - hover actions and links don't work

Convert project contains

jQuery 1.4.2
project_source_assets - folder for all the svg files
project.html - loads all svg resource in div containers with styles for the resource/tween/sprite.
project.js - file that starts animation for objects and children
project.css - styles and css based webkit animations, the styles have an underscore and a number which seems to inidicate the motion or tween setup in flash.

i.e.

.wlby_260
{
    -webkit-animation-duration: 0.28125s;
    display: none;
    position: absolute;
    -webkit-transform: matrix(1, 0, 0, 1, 182.55, 270.05);
}

Debugging Titanium xhr requests with php

2011-07-25T14:56:00.000-07:00

Authentication for xhr request for Appcelerator Titanium is difficult. During my latest bout with the cross platform mobile app platform I discovered that XHR request header variable names get renamed (aka case changes).

For the auth part of the app being worked on requires sending a Session Key for authorization for every request after the user is logged in. For a good tutorial on how a more basic authorization might work go check out Titanium User Authentication. In any case request headers sent from Titanium are re-cased i.e. "UserAuthKey" becomes "Userauthkey".

To discover this lil gem of a problem after hours of poking I chose to find and use a logging utility to see what was actually being sent.

Below is a quick php POST logging utility from CodeWord with headers added. This logging utility serializes the incoming Post request to a logs directory. It makes it easy to see the variables being passed in and headers.

To use, create a php file called xhrlog.php. Upload to your favorite testing server. Ensure you have a directory called "logs". Then submit your xhr POST requests to MYDOMAIN.com/xhrlog.php from php, html, android, titanium.. wherever and it'll log it for you!

<?php

 
  /*function from http://blog.apokalyptik.com/2008/03/25/logging-post-data/comment-page-1/
Creates a log file of the POST request
*/ 
if ( isset($_POST) && is_array($_POST) && count($_POST) > 0 ) {
  $log_dir = dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/logs/';
  $log_name = "posts-" . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "-" . date("Y-m-d-H") . ".log";
  $log_entry = gmdate('r') . "\t" .serialize(parseRequestHeaders())."\n ". $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] . "\r\n" . serialize($_POST) . "\r\n\r\n";
  $fp=fopen( $log_dir . $log_name, 'a' );
  fputs($fp, $log_entry);
  fclose($fp); }
   
/*
function copied from stackoverflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/541430/how-do-i-read-any-request-header-in-php

Parses html request headers
*/
  function parseRequestHeaders() {
    $headers = array();
    foreach($_SERVER as $key => $value) {
        if (substr($key, 0, 5) <> 'HTTP_') {
            continue;
        }
        $header = str_replace(' ', '-', ucwords(str_replace('_', ' ', strtolower(substr($key, 5)))));
        $headers[$header] = $value;
    }
    return $headers;
}

?>

Wordpress RocketTheme and RokStories issues

2011-07-07T19:11:00.000-07:00

Using RocketThemes for Joomla has been a great Joy. This week I tried one of the wordpress themes, boy what a journey.

There seems to be some sort of caching issue and settings troubles. If you go to create your own preset, that is to say your own customized template use one of the pre-existing ones. I tried to create a separate preset and had NO-End of problems. The customized template preset would work fine and be cached for several hours then revert back to the last preset. Your best hope to get the template to work correctly is to completely over-write one of the presets.

Anyway, enough about the dang template issues and on to the RokStories.

In my customized template there was a "Showcase" for RokStories which by template defaults were loading 3 posts under category frontpage. The RokStories shows on every page by default. To make it show only on the homepage you need to 1st create a new override call it something useful.

Now that you have an override you can go to the widgets admin and remove all of the widgets un-needed for the Default Gantry Settings. When happy switch to your custom override for the homepage.

Now you would think with the override that the settings would just *work* for the homepage, BZZZZ WRONG. The settings still come from the default settings for RokStories. So to resolve my issue of RokStories for wordpress only showing 3 entries I had to manually edit the rokstories_artcount json variable in the wp_options db.

Also note that when manually editing this variable, YOU MAY not set it above 9, for some reason 2 digits break the site!

//to find the variable
SELECT *
FROM `wp_options`
WHERE option_value LIKE '%artcount%'

php Image Magik - how to force Text Wap without cropping

2011-06-02T00:23:00.000-07:00

After several hours of trying to find the best way to add 2 sets of text to an image using ImageMagik without overlapping. The image is split into two natural text blocks. I felt it was easier to add the two sections of text to the one image instead of combining two images.

The simplest way I could find is to figure out the font point size and approximate the dimensions by the number of characters in your string. Then use the php wordwrap function to add newline characters every 35 characters.

Note: I only needed to force word wrapping on message one because it shows on the left side of the image. ImageMagik will automatically wrap the annotation if it runs into the right edge of the image. Well it appears that way and its working so far, but I may change it later just cause :)

//force text wrapping every 35 characters
$message = wordwrap($message, 35, "\n", true);
$filepath = '/home/test.com/';
$newfile = $filepath.'uploads/files/'.$newfilename;
//image we want to write text on
$blankfile = $filepath.'images/blank_image.png';

$imageCMD = "convert  '$blankfile'    ".
                 " -fill '#000000' -pointsize 16   -annotate +40+80 '$message1'   ".  
                 " -fill '#000000' -pointsize 20   -annotate +340+150 '$message2' ".
                 " '$newfile'" ;
//calls the linux commandline to process the command    
$cr = system( $imageCMD  , $retval);

Customize the Joomla offline login redirect url

2011-05-17T18:20:00.000-07:00

First off to customize the offline login form for joomla change the "Site Offline" to yes in the Global Configuration-> site tab.

Once you make this change the website will require a login to view the site. To customize this page copy the offline.php file to templates/YOURTEMPLATE folder. Then feel free to add your graphics, tweak the css and heck even add some animation from jquery or perhaps a slideshow.

For my project I needed to have a splash html page before the website login. This causes issues because the index.html page is loaded as the 'URL/' inestead of the index.php. Basically when someone logged in they would be redirected to the splash page. Well heck that ain't gonna work...

So to resolve the issue you need to find the line in the offline.php file that has the base64_encode(JURI::base()). Replace the JURI::base() with the url you need to redirect to i.e. base64_encode('http://YOURDOMAIN.com/about')

Joomla website offline login issue on IIS with sh404sef

2011-05-10T17:17:00.000-07:00

QUICK how to fix sh404sef on IIS - just in case
1. open up webroot\components\com_sh404sef\shPageRewrite.php
2. Find and replace every instance of #__sh404SEF so it matches your db table. The default is lower case #__sh404sef. OMG WTF! it works on Linux and Apache, why not windows????

Venting and Explanations
Horray! another 3 hours learning about sh404sef. This time a site needed to use the joomla website offline login form. This particular site is hosted on win IIS over at Outstanda hosting, they actually had really responsive tech support which was nice.

Support was needed to figure out how to modify folder permissions in their control panel. For reference you have to change it in the FTP manager from the control panel.

As soon as the website offline was enabled the website was throwing a "service temporarily unavailable" which is INCREDIBLY annoying to figure out, esp because this server would not output error messages. I manually stepped through the files tracing it to the shPageRewrite.php file to the first line for the db call.

Sidebar Generator plugin for Wordpress 3.1 issues resolved

2011-04-12T23:03:00.000-07:00

Hello all of you out there frustrated with the Zero response to the issues with the Sidebar Generator. I had a word press site that used this plugin and after upgrading it no longer worked or appeared to.

After playing with the plugin and testing it after the 3.1 upgrade is related to the saving the post. It turns out that the database table wp_postmeta was getting populated with a JSON string of php output

SELECT * FROM `wp_postmeta` where meta_value like '%<?=$i?>%'

<select name="sidebar_generator[<?=$i?>]">

Just replace the lines with this one

<select name="sidebar_generator_replacement[<?php echo $i; ?>]">

Link to updated plugin working on Wordpress 3.1.0

Speed up websites with the new Google Tool

2011-04-05T21:07:00.000-07:00

I love the new google Page Speed tool. It not only identifies ways to speed up a website but actually gives you useful suggestions.

Things like Optimizing Images and Browser caching for example
Losslessly compressing http://codepyro.com/assets/lay/footer.jpg could save 20.4KiB (33% reduction).

Its nice that they actually include the % saved

check it out

Enable HTML in joomla k2 extra fields

2011-03-28T00:23:00.000-07:00

K2 is a wonderful CCK and content replacement for the standard joomla content. In fact I am using it with k2mart to create some awesome shopping cart goodnes. Of course the shopping cart I am converting from is a Custom CMS/E-commerce system that has tons of custom html pieces in the product buy now pages.

Specifically I needed the ability to choose several custom messages that have little html to open new windows, highlight messages etc.

There are community links for an older version of k2 here

These don't work in the latest so here is an updated working html hax for K2 v2.4.1!

Open up Administrator/components/com_k2/models/extrafield.php

//line 32 
if (!$row->bind(JRequest::get('post')))
 

//around line 53 look for 
$objects = array ();
$values = JRequest::getVar('option_value');
$names = JRequest::getVar('option_name');

Replace with the following (if you have questions see documentation)

 //line 32 - replaced
if (!$row->bind(JRequest::get('post',JREQUEST_ALLOWHTML)))


//around line 53 - replaced
$objects = array ();
$values = JRequest::getVar('option_value','','post','string',JREQUEST_ALLOWRAW);
$names = JRequest::getVar('option_name','','post','string',JREQUEST_ALLOWRAW);

Remove modules from Virtuemart Checkout

2011-03-15T18:30:00.000-07:00

In creating a new e-commerce site with K2 the Virtuemart checkout was showing all the homepage modules.

After reading a lot of different overly complex solutions on the forums I created this.

//add this code at the top of your template
global $option;
 
//disable modules for virtuemart checkout
 $vmpage= 0;
 if($option == 'com_virtuemart')
 {
  $vmpage= 1;
     $mainWidth = "twoL";
 }

//Then for every module position you need to turn off just add && !$vmpage
//example
if($this->countModules('right')  &&  !$vmpage ){}

k2mart Creating a module Product Grid

2011-03-13T16:56:00.000-07:00

To create your product grid you will need to first setup k2mart custom listing overrides.

Once that is done create a new mod_k2_content module item and add it to your template. My grid is fairly large so it goes in the "bottom" position under the content.

Change module settings

Change the "Select sub-template" to your new custom override directory.
Select the categories or specific items, I chose categories to make it simple
Configure all of the things you would like to show, I turned off everything but the image; all of the items prices and names come from the k2mart plugin so we dont need any of the k2 items properties

!important: Before saving your module, make sure to enable k2 plugins under advanced in the module. Or k2mart will not load.

Now that your module is all setup we can make grid changes. Open up Template/html/mod_k2_content/CUSTOM_OVERRIDE/default.php file to alter the default list behavior. In this file you will find that the k2 items are setup in an HTML list.

Add a class of "productGrid" to the UL and "boxItem" to the LI.

//around line 20
<ul class="productGrid">
    <?php foreach ($items as $key=>$item):  
//around line 26 
<li class="<?php echo ($key%2) ? "odd" : "even"; if(count($items)==$key+1) echo ' lastItem'; ?> boxItem">

Now go adjust your template style sheets to get the list items to behave as a grid. I wanted all of my k2 items in a box format to fit 4 items per row. To do this I made each list item a block with a width and padding to ensure they would fit in 980px.

.productGrid li.boxItem
{  
    color:#D76024;     
    display:block; 
    float:left; 
    font-weight:bold;
    font-size:14px !important;
    padding:5px 20px 5px 20px;
    width:200px;
}

Now we have a grid of our products but the k2 mart product boxes are ugly. Lets go fix that too.

Open up the custom override TEMPLATE/html/k2mart/module.php
Change the module.php k2mart class from class="itemVmFields" to class="itemGrid".

To get my desired look of Product Name, then Image, then Price, I copied over the image display from the mod_k2_content file. As you can see I removed the LI item for the product name and put it into an h4 tag before the image.

//K2mart STARTS HERE
<div class="itemGrid"> 

//moved product name into h4
 <?php if($this->params->get('moduleProductName') && !empty($product->name)): ?>
         <h4 >
            <span class="itemLabel"><?php echo JText::_('Name'); ?>:</span>
            <span class="itemValue"><?php echo $product->name; ?></span>
         </h4>
<?php endif; ?>

//Image code pulled from mod_k2_content/default.php        
 <?php if(isset($item)):?>
     <div class="moduleItemIntrotext">
            <a class="moduleItemImage" href="<?php echo $item->link; ?>" title="<?php echo JText::_('Continue reading'); ?> &quot;<?php echo K2HelperUtilities::cleanHtml($item->title); ?>&quot;">
              <img src="<?php echo $item->image; ?>" alt="<?php echo $item->title; ?>"/>
          </a>
       </div>
 <?php endif;?> 
    <ul>

Now lets play with our style sheets for the k2mart items in our grid

.itemGrid ul { margin:0px; padding:0px;}
.itemGrid ul li{ margin:0px; padding:0px; height:auto; list-style:none;}
.itemGrid h4{ color:#AAA;}

Of course then I played with buttons and text styles, but hey its a start.

Final Results:

K2 override k2mart templates

2011-03-13T12:50:00.000-07:00

In Joomla and K2 with K2 mart for virtuemart it was difficult for me to find/discover how best to customize the plugin templates. It turns out to be really simple though.

Create a folder called k2mart in your templates html overrides folder. TEMPLATE/html/k2mart

Then copy the 4 files from plugins/k2/k2mart/tmpl folder into your new overrides.

Specifically I needed to change the listing plugin to build a product grid. The listing template is actually calling the module.php file.

CSVI virtuemart google base export Tax's changes

2011-03-02T16:09:00.000-08:00

Google base import has changed their tax format for product import, to implement these changes in Virtuemart CSVI export you need to make some code changes.

Change the Default fields in the google base export
1. Change the custom field g:tax_region to g:tax and give it your required values semi-colon separated in the format of (Country:Region:Rate) i.e. "US:Colorado:5.00"
Remove the custom field g:tax_percent

around line 113 in csvi_class_xml_froogle.php in the file
administrator/com_csviimproved/helpers/xml
add the following case to the function ContentText

case 'g:tax':
                        list($country, $service, $rate) = split(":", $content);
                        $this->contents = '
                        <g:country>'.$country.'</g:country>
                        <g:region>'.$service.'</g:region>
                        <g:rate>'.$rate.'</g:rate>
                        <g:tax_ship>n</g:tax_ship>
                        ';
                    break;

Virtuemart Google base export with Child Products

2011-01-26T22:54:00.000-08:00

The default Google Base export in CSVI for joomla and virutmart is set as a "Product export" which does not include any child products. To include Child products you need to first change the type to "Multiple prices export".

Unfortunately though the multi prices export doesn't have all the fields for the google base export.

So I modified some files in the model to get the export working as needed. Download the files and put them in the administrator\components\com_csvimproved\model folder.

CSVIMultiPricesMods.zip

virtuemart: Enable Billing information in Order Review page

2010-12-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

Quick script to paste into the virtuemart checkout confirmation page to show the billing information under the shipping info.

Step 1:
Search for "if(NO_SHIPTO=='')" in your components/com_virutemart/themes/YOURTHEME/templates/checkout/get_final_confirmation.tpl.php

Step 2:
and find the last line that reads

echo "</td></tr>";

Step 3:
Just after that last line paste the below contents.

$db->query("SELECT * FROM #__{vm}_user_info WHERE user_id=".strip_tags($db->f("user_id"))." and address_type='BT'");
    $db->next_record();
 
    
    echo '<tr><td valign="top"><strong>'.$VM_LANG->_('PHPSHOP_ORDER_PRINT_CUST_BILLING_LBL') . ":</strong></td>";
    echo '<td>';
    echo vmFormatAddress( array('name' => $db->f("first_name")." ".$db->f("last_name"),
                                        'address_1' => $db->f("address_1"),
                                        'address_2' => $db->f("address_2"),
                                        'state' => $db->f("state"),
                                        'zip' => $db->f("zip"),
                                        'city' => $db->f("city"),
                                        'country' => $db->f('country')
                                    ), true );
    
    echo "</td></tr>";

lots of issues with reCaptcha in Joomla K2

2010-11-02T20:57:00.000-07:00

If you are getting the error "reCAPTCHA said: incorrect-captcha-sol" or the home page is duplicating when you submit a reCaptcha in k2.

All you need to do is turn off the JEZ reCAPTCHA Integrator plugin.

admin->plugin manager -> sort by system ->JEZ reCAPTCHA Integrator

pyrocms windows sql installation issues

2010-10-15T17:25:00.000-07:00

hey everyone having problems installing pyrocms in windows with v0.9.9.x i fixed the sql errors installing on windows.

just replace the installer/sql files with the ones in the zip

http://labs.codepyro.com/pyrocms/pyrocms_sql_fixed0.9.9.7.zip

JUser::_load: Unable to load user with id

2010-10-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

In joomla or k2 you may receive this error "JUser::_load: Unable to load user with id". Guess what, a user with that id was deleted and the error shows because some piece of content is trying to load that user account. In my case it was being thrown from k2 comments because the user had commented on the blog post had been deleted.

To resolve this create an empty user in the admin of joomla and change its ID to the missing one in phpmyadmin.

OR

You can just delete the users stuff.. i.e. comments photo etc from k2 or joomla.

jquery "Failed to load source for:" ajax, post error

2010-09-16T00:08:00.000-07:00

All afternoon I have been setting up the very awesome jquery Star Widget from http://orkans-tmp.22web.net/star_rating/index.html.

Just restart firefox.. erf... or read the procedure of suffering below.

I have been setting it up in a testimonials/ratings system for an older website. The jquery post calls a cfc which was returning values while fixing minor issues with the code. Then all of a sudden it started to throw the error in firebug "Failed to load source for: http://domain.com/ratings.cfc". This was strange because I could call the CFC directly.

So, after restarting Coldfusion and reloading the fusebox app probably a million times with no results. I thought hrm, just for kicks ill restart firefox v3.6.8 and BAM! it started working again.

Time to go look for the newest version of firefox, dang what a waste of time.