Changing the username is an easy process however you can either do it via phpmyadmin (the easy way)

1. navigate to your database, click wp_users (if you use another prefix for example site1_ then it would be site1_users)
2. click browse
3. find the user, should be at the top
4. click the edit icon (pencil)
5. find the column ‘user_login’
6. you will see it has admin already in place, change this to your desired username
7. click save and you are done!

Otherwise you can issue an SQL statement like below:

UPDATE `wp_users` SET `user_login` = 'NEWNAMEHERE' WHERE `ID` =1 LIMIT 1 ;

replace ‘NEWNAMEHERE‘ with your desired username, done

A few plugins are also around to automate and make this process even easier, if you are asking why you would want to change it well here are my two main reasons:

• Makes finding a login harder for a cracker, not impossible (nothing is) but harder…
• If you use intergrations that check based on username, email and then sync across multiple platforms then you will 9/10 want them to be similar across all installs

You should always probably use a display name to hide your login anyway

Plans are in place to hopefully clean up the module and make it a touch more complex than it currently is, it works with both DOCman 1.4.x and DOCman 1.5.x. This release can be found within the download section of this site.

I do have some ideas for upgrades to all 3 of my currently releases addons just to tighten up what’s already in place, as yet I have received only only bug report which turned out to be a user errors so that’s a promising sign. Hopefully the new tiny features will be further appreciated by those that make use of them and I can get to adding even more micro addons for the mass of Joomla! components out on the JED.

I am currently in the midst of putting together a JomSocial plugin that’ll bring a new feature to that platform, if it turns out to be of interest to anyone is up for debate but it combines a few of the things i like to do on the net on a regular basis so i think it’ll be worthwhile

The likes of Ubuntu did make a dent in the Windows market, even OSX has put little chinks into the Windows domination however the dent is no more than a paint chip on your gleaming paint job of your car, enough to bug Microsoft but not enough for them to worry about it (but they do anyway)

Windows XP is by quite some mile the biggest used operating system in the world, Vista will soon fade away from the statistics, Windows 2000 I can see even outlasting that pile of crap but depending on if Microsoft extend XP support again will depend on how well 7 does, 7 is (sigh) not a totally bad operating system, It’s not fantastic and still exhibits some of the crappyness of Vista but the improvements over Vista make it a worthwhile daily usage operating system for personal computers .. like what XP is

Debian, Mint, Ubuntu and the likes well.. It’s just a case of plugging away for them, overall many everyday users that just install the software and do everything via the likes of Synaptic are simply bored of Linux, GNOME while no doubt under the hood is improving .. on the user end isnt doing much. KDE is pretty much take it or leave it, personal I prefer to leave it but i have many, many friends whom swear by it as the future, i beg to differ.

Other operating systems such as Googles Chronium OS and hobby operating systems with promise such as SkyOS simply are not ready for everyday usage and Chrome OS is unlikely to appeal to everyone (lets face it, Google know enough about my life to write a biography without my input by now) and SkyOS lacks progress, funding and any general drive.

Haiku does show promise even if it does look like something from the early 90s and ReactOS has been coming for seemingly forever, it was mentioned on IRC yesterday that perhaps we need an OS war like the browsers wars to just push development and innovation along quicker. Nobody will disagree that world war I and II we’re both tragic and saddening events for near every country around the world but at the same time anyone that has studied them both knows that innovation and technological advancements during those times were simply rapid (for example the first stealth fighter was developers by Nazi Germany in 1943-1945)

So while an OS war would no doubt bring along a bunch of mud slinging and drive the media nuts It could only be great for the likes of us users whom are bored with the same ole same

The recent move by the Joomla! team to enforce a GPL while retaining commercial applications makes perfect sense, depending if your one of those that doesnt mind paying the odd dollar or one of those that is from the breed that open-source means 100% freedom. Oddly enough open-source does not imply free it in it’s purest form simply means you can take the code, re-distribute it, modify it, alter it, do pretty much what you want with it under the provisions that you give credits to all authors – however this in itself varies depending on the license of choice.

No doubt someone will pop up with an idealistic approach and debate the concept of open-source, perhaps even my words, but before you do.. i think you should take into account that the likes of the GPL are sadly open to interpretation – it’s not rock solid despite common belief!

As an end user which is mostly the people i try to speak to with my posts, when seeking our a product the first thing you need to know is commercial or not what license is it under, does it truly suit you to have a closed source product, even an encrypted product – I recall once reading on a Redhat 8 install a quote along the lines of “you wouldn’t buy a car with the bonnet welded shut would you ?” the same applies to your additions to your site.. aim for a good license that suits your needs!

After the deciding if you want commercial or not, open source or not then you really before getting into the product should wander over the distributors site and review their support platform. Ticket systems often imply a small userbase or a small developer base. This is normally done to keep everything simple – the downside to this is clearly that a single developer working on both support and development cannot manage both in a prompt manner.

The other downside is also the lack of community discussion, most distributors use forums rather than ticket systems as the likes of the community can get involved, users can help one another with simple things and overall the process is a touch smoother and the developer can spend more time developing and less time supporting.

However if your looking over a commercial product that offers forums, check if they have moderators! Check the response rate, how many posts have big fat zeros in the response column ?

The main VirtueMart forum for example has 4 zero responded to support requests out of 80 in it’s main support forum, an impressive figure the two competing products Jomdoc for example has 23/80 zero responses, not an overly wonderful response rate while DOCman has 0/80 unresponded to posts a super impressive figure (this only takes the new 1.5 forums into account by the way) The Joomla! forums also support a very impressive support rate with almost 95% of all posts responded to and 80% of those with a valid response that fixes the users issue (1.5 forums only)

Like it or not all products will encounter issues, will need further work to function how you want and maintain a compatibility with the latest framework they run upon so support is as vital to us end users as the product itself…. paying for the addon or not

1. Check the requirements
2. Check the license
3. Check the support
4. Try the demo

and at all times remember that local wamps, mamps and lamps often have all the features you will ever need that you may not have on cheaper co-located servers, so .. check sometimes its worth the effort to run a test site on your remote server too!

Just a quick happy Xmas to one and all, i choose to call it x-mas to honor futurama’s take on Christmas – yes i enjoy the show . So i hope you all get lots of presents under your palm trees and enjoy this seasonal event.
Myself, well Xmas is all about goals, I have already outlines 124 goals i wish to complete by this time next year both in my professional and personal aspects of life, i may.. or may not publish some of these at a later date but for now.. enjoy your Xmas, be safe and remember to be in before sundown or else you will be killed by a murderous robotic Santa Claus

However it seems that a few users have adopted the projects and really like them, ok so in total it is only about a 1000 plus downloads, but for your first few public released projects, i dont think thats bad at all – more so when most of it was guess work.. so go me.

I have for some time kept the files hosted on Joomlacode for the simple purpose of making use of an SVN however I find the place just difficult to navigate and a little more than what i need. I’m still working on some form of feature/bug tracker not sure I’ll need one but in the event i do.. I’m sure I’ll have one ready by the time one is needed.

You can find all my little projects now under the Downloads section and I’m working to improve them with knowledge gained since the full year ago i put them up for download…hopefully it wont be too difficult on my old brain and something useful will come out of it.

Currently the 3 projects I have listed are:

• DOCman stats – a simple statistical module for DOCman
• Alphapoints/DOCman up – adds points for uploads
• Alphapoints/DOCman down – removes points for downloading.

If you find my little additional useful then perhaps drop a comment, if your wanting to donate tons of money then contact me (thats a joke but still I’m far from too proudful to accept the odd donation!)

In my previous post I introduced you to DOCman a Joomla! component which allows you to manage your files and deliver them to the public in both a professional, secure and sleek way. This post looks at the actual configuration and usage of DOCman as the title would suggest.

If you have not already installed DOCman then go check out the previous post which walks you through it and tries to introduce you to the product a little bit as it goes. However this is a whole new post so here we go with this one and hopefully by the end of it you will be able to get around DOCman with little problems along the way.

the first thing we need to do is get into the DOCman control panel which we can do from the main navigational menu at the top of the ACP or as indicated on the image, Components -> DOCman is the one we want.

As you can see from the image the DOCman sub listings are quite complete with nearly every option listed. The one that isn’t is actually the clear data function for you enthusiast out there.

The control panel for DOCman is quite well put together but admitadly still does have that old Mambo feel about it using the older icons which of course is only a cosmetic thing and only really bugs those of you out there whom are inistent on the silly things becoming a major issue – that aside the control panel is neat, organized and does contain all the options.

It can be reached via components -> DOCman -> Home

As you can see from the screenshot the DOCman CP is as i said, clean and organized and has every option plus a few little extra.

One thing most people dont actually know about DOCman is that when you install it a new position for admin modules is created as well as a new plugin type. The new plugin type is named ‘docman’ and the new module position allows you to insert modules directly into DOCmans control panel. The default modules provided are:

• News – The latest news from the J!Tools blog
• Unapproved – Documents that have not yet been approved
• Latest Docs – The newest (according to date) documents
• Top Docs – The top downloaded documents DOCman currently has
• Latest Logs – if you have logging enabled gives you the latest entries a summary if you will

Now that we have that out the way and you have a little information about the DOCman control panel lets pop the hood and get to work. The best place to start with any components is of course its configuration options, DOCman thankfully (or not for the squeamish out there) has extensive options for you to configure it to your needs near perfectly.

DOCmans configuration options are broken into tabs to make things easier to find quickly so lets start with the first tab which is the ‘General‘ tab

The general tab as you can see by the screenshot provided is a simple one, it contains the version of DOCman your currently running and the path to your DOCman repository (aka the folder that holds your files) there is of course the Reset default button which resets the path DOCman looks for your files to the default one DOCman will use which is /dmdocuments – thats about all for this tab so onto the next one.

The front-end tab is the next in line and this one allows you to control (obviously) some frontend options. The options broken down and explained are:

Section is down – This option basically closes down your DOCman repository from public eyes which is handy when your upgrading or you tampering with DOCman. It should be noted that ’special’ users will always have access to DOCman regardless of what this is set too.

Extensions for viewing – This controls which file extensions can be ‘viewed’ you should enter the extensions using a | to separate the extensions for example:
gif|png|jpeg|pdf|doc

Number of documents per page – This one speaks for itself, how many documents should be listed on anyone page at a time, you wont want to set this too high otherwise your user will have endless scrolling to do and nobody likes scrolling now really do they.

Default listing order – again another simple option this defines how your documents will be sorted. You get the choice of 3 sorting options with 2 additional sorting options on the original 3:

• Sort by Document name
• Sort by Document hits
• Sort by Document date

and once you have selected one of the 3 above options you have two further options to select

• ascending
• descending

E-mail Group Users – email group users, I’m unsure if this option will remain or will possibly be removed or even ported into LETTERman according to the description of this feature it will place an email option on documents owned by a DOCman group allowing a user to email said group. However as mentioned the status of this feature is a little foggy.

Icon size – The icon size is a basic option will basically tells DOCman what image sizes to use either 16×16 or 32×32 (pixels)

Trim Whitespace – This one should be on in most every install of DOCman it in short it trims the white spaces from the theme and keeps everything nice and neat and tidy within the code and saves you that extra bandwidth. This is normally an option most of you will enable and would only disable in the event you we’re experiencing issues with it being on.

Days for new – How many days, based on the date YOU supply to DOCman should a download be thought of as new, the reason i say YOU supply to DOCman is when editing a Document you can specify a new date which is within the ‘days for new’ setting then it will be thought of as new.

Downloads to be hot – Again another simple option, i do like the simple ones, this one allows you define how many downloads a document must have prior to it being thought of as ‘hot’

Display Licenses – Should licenses be displayed prior to the user downloading the document, this can be overridden at document level anyway so if you use licenses for most your documents then its perhaps bst to set this to yes.

Process Content Mambots – Should DOCman process content mambots ? well if you read my first article i mentioned that plugins come in categories which usually specify what there task is, legacy being system, rating being content etc etc

If you wish to see which plugins DOCman can process then you simply need to go into the plugin manager and select ‘content’ from the drop down list and those are the plugins that will be processed by DOCman. It should be noted that not every plugin will play nice with DOCman.

The next tab in the list of options in the configuration section is the permissions tab, how many people including myself have suffered headaches in this section is .. well a lot so try take your time when going through this bit.

As with before each option is broken down and a short explantion is provided, again if you are unsure the DOCman community forums are very responsive so feel free to ask there.

Guests – What can guests do you have 3 options here each of them with there own advantages and disadvantages which i will leave for you to decide about but the options are:

• No Access
• Browse Only
• Browse, Download & View

As a small hint if you want people to see your downloads but not be able to download them without logging in then browse only is the way to go!

Upload – Who can upload, you should always set this with caution there are always people out there whom are more than willing to upload naughty files to make you look a twit so be careful!

You can allow all registeard users to upload, you can remove access so nobody (via frontend) can upload, you can allow authors and above, publishers and above, editors and above or a specific DOCman group

Approve – Who can approve documents being uploaded ? well you have the same options as you had before with one additional one added to the mix which would be ‘Auto approve’ this bypasses the who and just automatically approves uploaded documents.

Publish – Same as above again and this time the additional option is there but the change being ‘Auto publish’ which is pretty much the same as the Approve option in that it bypasses the who. You should again use these options ( the auto ones ) with caution.

View – Who can view a document well again the groups are the same, the only new option in terms of permissions is ‘everybody’ is added which implies guests too! If you also recall the extensions you defines earlier are the ones that can be viewed.

Override View – If a document, at document level does not give say the maintainers of downloads or even the creator of downloads to manage there documents then you can define here if they can retain there access by using an override. The two override options are for:

• Creator
• Maintainers

Maintain – Who maintains documents on your repository, normally you would set this to No user access on small sites, the usual permissions from the above mentioned are continued in this option too but in terms of who can maintainw ell you wouldnt want anyone maintaining till you have moderators helping you out, trusted ones at that.

In short whatever you set here will have access to update the document, but possibly not the file (depending on permissions), links, images etc etc

Override Maintain – Much like the override view this works on the same guidelines but works on the basis of maintaining, it has the exact same options so no point on repeating myself.

Allow individual user permissions – First il make a point of saying if you have 1000 or > users then do not enable this option this is an option that allows you to set some options specifically to users, however it uses far too many resources when you have a large amount of users.

Creators can – This lets you set what a creator of a document can do there are three options:

• No Access – they don’t get access
• Download Only – they can download it
• Download & Edit – they can download and edit the file, somewhat like they maintain that specific file

So thats a brief summary of your permission options remember that most of these can be overridden at document level so set your globals and customize for your special files at document level.

The next tab in our list of options is the upload tab which has a fair few options and they pretty much dictate how your files will be stored in the DOCman folder (dmdocuments)

Upload methods – The first of the upload options happens to be one of the coolest features DOCman has to offer it basically lets you define what upload methods your users can make use of. Normally with most document systems you get link remove or link local DOCman goes that touch further with 3 options:

• Upload a file from your computers
• Link a file from another server to this server (remote linking)
• Transfer a file from another server to this server (remote importing)

In most cases you would use all 3 options as they allow both your slow ISP lot to add files to your repository without using htere own bandwidth – but it will use your servers bandwidth to import the file to your server.

Max. filesize allowed when uploading – The max size of a file that can be uploaded, note that this cannot be larger than the PHP value DOCman doesnt have such godly powers.. yet.

Overwrite files – When uploading if a filename already exists should it be overwritten or the new file rejected ?

• Yes – files will be overwritten
• No – New files with the same filename as an existing one will be rejected.

Extensions allowed – What extensions can users upload, same as the previously mentioned view configuration you need to seperate multiple extensions with a | example:
tar|gz|rar|7z|bz2

User can upload all file types – In the event your feeling lazy or you just dont care what extentions your users upload you can always just allow anything to be uploaded very simple: no then extensions allowed is followed yes then its a upload at will within max upload size value.

Lowercase names – Should uploaded filenames be coverted to lowecase, good practice suggests you would use this option – but each to there own on this one.

Filenames with blanks – What oh what do we do with blanks (spaces) in filenames, we have a few options and everyone has there own personal opinion on the best option for this one:

• Allow Blanks – my filename.exe
• Reject – Reject the file
• Convert to underscores – my_filename.exe
• Convert to dash – my-filename.exe
• Remove Blanks – myfilename.exe

Reject filenames – what filenames do we reject, this is good as you dont wish to see your .htaccess or if you use index.html files on indexless folders then well you just dont want those listed as orphans now do you. If i recall by default it ads the following filename:
index.htm|index.html|index.php
which in most cases is perfectly fine.

For the record by the way i prefer the dash filenaming method, which if you review the screenshot filesnames you can clearly see. Now we will move onto the last tab.

The last tab is called ‘Security’ this tab in short offers you some functions to further help protect your DOCman install from possible leechers.

Anti-leech system - This prevents people from hotlinking and leeching your files, providing you set the next option correctly then you will have no problems with this option enabled.

Allowed hosts – Which hosts are allowed to hotlink to your files, by hitting the ‘Reset default’ which you should probably do on first install anyway it will apply your current websites url either mywebsite.com or www.mywebsite.com its suggested you add your site hosts like so:
mywebsite.com|www.mywebsite.com and all should be fine!

Log views – Should DOCman log views, this is not really a security option in my view, but i can see how it could be one.. statistical if you ask me anyway! Setting this option comes with its own warning, this will log a LOT of data about each dowload you receive such as:

• Document Downloaded
• Username Downloading
• IP Address user downloading
• OS of user download (mac/win/lin/unix)
• Date downloaded

You should set this with caution to yes, if you have a very busy site (in terms of downloads) then you should not turn this on. However if your site has moderate to small downloads by all means turn it on but do clear the data before it clutters up your database.

Hide remote links – Hide the remote links, in other words dont let the user know they are downloading from a remote site when the document is linked to a file outside of your host.

Well i never thought this section would grow as large as it did, so a third document will be created which will be called DOCman: Usage coming soon!

They seemed even more impressed by the quick and rapid response to bug reports they have been lodging, DOCman is of course not without its faults and the whole process so far has been pretty transparent with the guys behind Joomlatools answering virtually every comment on their blog posts be them good or bad.

The new release is really a bug fix release and tightens the bolts further but progression has as yet not slowed with a look already to fixing and addressing any and all issues that present themselves in DOCman 1.5.1. The great thing about the latest version of the new DOCman in my oh so humble opinion would be the new theme, a well though out and presented theme that as yet has produced very little in terms of errors.. sure you have the oddball users that want to use the old what I like to call brick theme .. i suppose that comes down to how well its served them in the past.

So the new release is looking solid and I’ll put together one of my over winded reviews in due time on the entire component and its extensions, for now however it’s nice to see DOCman moving forward with some speed. For the longest time all i heard was nooku, nooku and more nooku with a promise that when DOCmans time comes they will put every effort into ensuring that it’s as functional, stable and flexible as possible.. the guys have kept that promise with their lightning pace and overall given the none restrictive open license.. 11.97 isn’t the end of the world.

Disqus has some pretty cool features such as Twitter, Facebook, Friend Find, blogger and a whole heap of other services integration, my only concern is as far as i can see it does not as yet function with mollom an anti-spam service put together by the Drupal founder and some of the other Drupal developers, Akismet exists but a lot of friends and co-bloggers all have moved on from Akismet claiming its easy enough to bypass by anyone with more than a few hours spare..

Cannot of course verify that myself but we shall soon see how well disqus functions with spam.