munyah

Joomla Auto-Blogging with K2 & Feed Gator

munyah — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:19:41 +0000

Having been working on auto-blogging with WordPress for a few months now and I wondered aloud as to whether there was anything that could match some of the auto-blogging plugins available in Joomla.

I was quite chuffed to discover a tool called Feed Gator. Apparently its been around since Joomla 1.0 days; I didn’t know that, and neither did I know of auto-blogging then, so its cool.

As a matter of preference I ignore Joomla’s default content manager and rush to quickly install K2 just because its better and easier for most layman to understand. And so its a big plus that Feed Gator can feed into it; and you can separate each feed into categories, yey!

For the benefit of others, auto-blogging is the stealing art of content from other bloggers via RSS feeds. You take a bunch of feeds and create your own blog articles with them.

Happy auto-blogging!

Magento Extension | WDCA Enhanced Product Grid Extension

munyah — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 19:48:39 +0000

An excellent extension that allows you to view product thumbnails and customise the columns to what you need and what is relevant. Its a shame that its not compatible with the Enterprise Edition.

Extension key : magento-community/TBT_Enhancedgrid

Download: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/WDCA/extension/748/enhanced-product-grid

Magento Connect 404 Error – in Magento CE 1.4.x

munyah — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:52:22 +0000

If we were to count the number of annoying errors one encounters in Magento; we’d need an entire century. 1 of them comes after you upgrade Magento CE to 1.4.x. This happens when you try to access the Magento Connector. You get a 404 Error page no matter how you try to access the Connector.

Solution:

The fastest and easiest solution is to run Magentos clean-up. All it essentially does is to reset the file permissions and clear out all Magentos’ miscellaneous cache folders.

Get it here : http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/groups/227/resetting_file_permissions

The longer route is to do what the cleanup does; manually, and I know you are not going to try that.

Changing the currency symbol

munyah — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 05:11:38 +0000

I donno why things have to be so difficult to do in magento . Displaying a currency is simple enough, you go into the admin section and modify the currency as you want. However if you want to change the symbol, then its another typical magento nightmare.

Having chosen my site to use Zim Dollar for sells, the symbol is $Z. I wanted to change that to $ZWD. So you have to go to \lib\Zend\Locale\Data

Default symbols are in root.xml and if you’re using other translations the symbols are in one of many .xml files in there. e.g if the translation was shona, the file would be sn.xml

So assuming you’re using the default language, open root.xml and search for the symbol you want to modify and change it accordingly.

If you ask me, a backend symbol modifier would be cool.

Oh, my dear magento… we’re a simple folk…

Joomla – fetching ‘GET’ Variable the proper way

munyah — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:20:27 +0000

So apparently there’s a lot of security risks in using our traditional $_GET['item'] within our custom developed modules / extensions. I for one am guilty of using a lot of GETs simply because they’re easy and pretty straight forward. So in order to dispense the ‘risk’ and combat some known exploits we’re advised to use the JRequest-class.

And we use it like so:

WRONG:

$category = $_GET['category'];

RIGHT:

$category = JRequest::getInt('categoryid'); //integer

$category = JRequest::getVar('category'); //mixed variable
$category = JRequest::getString('categoryname'); //string variable

How simple is that?? That small change in your extensions and modules will save you headaches with vulnerable exploits in your custom developments.

Happy coding; the proper way this time!!

Comments on your Desktop with WP-Comments-Notifier

munyah — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:05:00 +0000

I love tools that make life easier and in some way efficient. This little desktop tool is perfect for high traffic; high comments blogs. Give it a try on your blogs and life will be that much more easier without having to login to the backend to approve/ delete user comments.

wp-comments-notifier is an open source application that simply alerts you when new comments are posted on your WordPress blog (works with WordPress MU too – awesome!). it just docks in your system tray nicely and neatly.

Enjoy!!

Magento – Proper use of the ‘GET’ Variable

munyah — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:40:39 +0000

Once you start doing some Magento coding, you may be faced with loads of errors if you try to use the $_GET['variable'] within functions or some views. So instead try using

$this->getRequest()->getParam('variable');

WPMU

munyah — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:33:14 +0000

WPMU [Wordpress Multi-User]: With WordPress we took blogging to the next level by creating powerful self-hosted software that anyone could install and have a blog within minutes.

Now with MU we’re making it as easy to create a thousand blogs as it was to create a single blog with WordPress 3 years ago. By building on the base of WordPress and syncing development, we get the benefit of the huge ecosystem in plugins and themes that has developed around the project.

Simply put : WPMU allows you to create thousands of WP sites/blogs using a single installation. Think of it as, install WP once and use it as many times as you want, with different content, plugins, templates, etc…

Fine you don’t get it, read up on it and maybe then you’ll get it…

WordPress

munyah — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:05:40 +0000

In their words: WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

In my words: WordPress is a free kick ass CMS for the layman…

Joomla

munyah — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:27:16 +0000

My first real love. In that time it was called Mambo. I must say that I wasn’t too happy with the split that eventually gave birth to Joomla. Mambo means ‘King’ in my native language (shona) and Joomla! means nothing…

According to the founders of Joomla! : Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone…. and other gibberish…. yes thats pretty much what it is!!

I don’t favor Joomla! at all, I just prefer it… most of the time!!