Archive for the 'Web Development' Category

Launch Google Chrome Incognito from the terminal or a shortcut in OSX

Problem: Ok not really a problem, but I want to be able to launch Google Chrome straight to Incognito mode from a shortcut. This is useful when logging into multiple bank accounts, Google Apps accounts, or testing session based websites. etc etc etc. Fix: Thankfully the Google Chrome.app can be launched with the –incognito switch [...]

Convert eregi_replace to preg_replace in old class.phpmailer.php scripts

Problem: I have lots of legacy php code on old sites that uses eregi_replace to format up an HTML email body. As eregi_replace is now depreciated it can be replaced with preg_replace. This is tricky sometimes because the formatting is quite different. Fix: Here’s a common line from class.phpmailer.php scripts: $emailBody = eregi_replace("[\]",”,$emailBody); To convert that you’ll need to do this: [...]

WordPress replaces double and triple hyphens (– or —)

Problem: The other day I was trying to type two hypens (–) in a post, and when I saved/published the post, WordPress reformatted the hypens to display as an ‘en dash‘ (–). More Info: After some searching about, and some helpful info provided in the WordPress Codex, I found out about a WP function called ‘wptexturize’ which is applied each [...]

Add ‘Drafts’ sorting to Shopp Products list

Problem: There is no ‘drafts’ view filter in the Shopp (>1.1.9) Product Manager, i.e you can’t quickly list all the products that have ‘draft’ status in one go. Fix: I made this mod to answer a question in the Shopp Helpdesk forum, it’s not very tested, but seems to work perfectly! Open ‘wp-content/plugins/shopp/core/flow/Warehouse.php’ and replace [...]

Swap days and months in PHP – quick and dirty MM/DD/YY to DD/MM/YY

Problem I have a ton of date strings in the stupid US style dd/mm/yy format. i.e. 12/24/09 being 24th September 2009. I need to convert them to the UK style dd/mm/yy. Solution 1 As a string in PHP is really just an array of characters, the simplest fix was to address the individual number characters [...]

Cannot set alpha on dynamic text in Flash / ActionScript 2

Problem I’m doing some freelance Flash development, and it’s been a while. I have just created a dynamic text field that I wanted to fill via actionscript, then fade in via an alpha tween. This wasn’t working, even if I set _alpha = 0 on the movieclip containing the text field. Solution You can only [...]

Set space between list item and bullet (HTML, CSS)…

Problem I’ve just had to convert a Photoshop visual to a WordPress template. The designer wanted a bulleted list where the bullets themselves were very close to the list items, and were small dashes. Cross browser support for list item and bullet styling is ropey at best, and to make things perfect I’d have to [...]

Quick ‘Lorem Ipsum’ plugin / extension for IE

Problem: While doing web development, I frequently need to insert lorem ipsum into a text field or textarea. To do this – bearing in mind that I don’t really like or use bookmarks, too messy – I tend to google “lorem ipsum”, hit lipsum.com, select/copy the block of text, and then return to my form field and paste it. [...]

Moving VirtueMart: Link path problem in admin console

Problem: Just now, I needed to move a website running Joomla 1.5 and VirtueMart 1.1.2 from the development server, to the live web space. After I had moved the data, and the files, and updated the path in Joomla’s ‘configuration.php’ file, it seemed to work ok, but all the links in the VirtueMart Admin area still [...]

Select template by Section in Joomla 1.5

Problem: In Joomla 1.5, at present, there is no way to set the template applied to an article or category  based on the section that article is in. Templates can be set by menu item, but not by the overall section they reside in. This means that if multiple templates are being used, each time a [...]