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 by their positions within the sting, and rearrange them into the format I wanted:

$d = "12/24/09";
$d = $d[3].$d[4]."/".$d[0].$d[1]."/".$d[6].$d[7];
echo $d; // displays "24/12/19".

Solution 2

I posted my solution on twitter (@hutchings) and asked for comments and @londonhackspace organiser Jonty came back with the following elegant (and much cleverer) suggestion:

$d = "12/24/09";
$d = preg_replace('|(\d+)/(\d+)/(\d+)|', '$2/$1/$3', $d);
echo $d; // displays "24/12/19".

So provided you know that your original string is in US format, both these solutions can be used. In my testing I found solution 1 executed more quickly, but isn’t as pleasing to look at Cheers Jonty.

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 _alpha on a Dynamic Text field if the font has been embeded (with the embed button).

Works now! wohoo! Simple stuff that I’ve known in the past, but forgot.

When trying to add a Plugin, Component or Module in Joomla’s Extension Manager, you might get the following error:

JFolder::create: Could not create directory
Warning! Failed to move file.

Shown here:

This is likely – but not definitely – to be after the site has been moved from location to another, a change of directory, or server.

Solution

When a Component, Plugin or Module is added, the Joomla system attempts to copy the installable zip to a temporary directory, called ‘tmp‘. From there, PHP extracts the files and installs them. The error above usually occurs for one or more of the following reasons (in order of likelihood):

The path to the ‘tmp’ directory is wrong in the Joomla configuration file

In the Joomla installation root, find the file called ‘configuration.php’. In this file there should be a line with that says something like:

var $tmp_path = ‘C:\\path\\to\\your\\cms\\tmp’;

A masked live example is shown here:

Check that this path is correct, and that the ‘tmp’ directory truly does sit in that location. In this example, the directory would need to be here: d:\clients\sites\[my client]\tmp.

The temporary exists, but is not ‘writable’

If the ‘tmp’ directory has the wrong permissions, the web service won’t be able to copy the installer files to it. To check/correct this you will need  access to the server physically, or via a remote admin method like RDP (terminal services), VNC or similar.

Find the ‘tmp’ directory in the web root, and view the permissions. The IIS Guest account, called ‘IUSR_[machinename]‘, needs to be given ‘modify’ privileges. Example shown below:

The temporary directory doesn’t exist

To check this, navigate to your web root (often wwwroot) and check that a directory called ‘tmp‘ exists. This directory should have been created when the Joomla was installed, but it’s conceivable that it might have been deleted… maybe? If it doesn’t exist, create it, and make sure its ‘writable’ (see previous step).

If none of this works, or you spot a mistake,  post a comment.

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 resort to browser specific styles.

Solution

The solution I think I’ll be using for the rest of my ‘web’ career will be this. JUST FORGET THE BULLET ITEM, and use positioned background images instead.

In the stylesheet, add styles for both the ‘ul’ tag, and the ‘li’ tag like so (explanations inline):

ul {
margin-left:0px; /* Set the indenting back to far left. */
padding-left:0px; /* Set the indenting back to far left. */
}

ul li {
list-style-type:none; /* Switch the list bullet off altogether. */
background-image:url(dashbullet.gif); /* The replacement bullet image */
background-position:0px 4px; /* Place bullet 0px from left and 4px from top */
background-repeat:no-repeat; /* Stops bullet tiling, important */
padding-left:7px; /* separation from li txt and bullet */
}

Then just create the list as you usually would, with ‘ul’ and ‘li’ tags. Here’s what it looks like in use:

Example of image bullet in use

Here’s a bit more detail so you can get your head around the spacing. It’s incredibly simple, but still, nice to have a diagram or two sometimes.

Detail showing some dimensions and spacing

This style works perfectly (by my testing, but I’m not perfect) on:

• Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8+
• Firefox 2.*+
• Opera 9+ (not tested 8, but bet it works!
• Google Chrome (all versions)
• Safari (Mac and PC versions)

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.

I wanted a quicker solution, and as I find myself using IE more and more to develop in now (thanks to the excellent ‘Developer Tools’ extension – never thought I’d say that!) my lorem ipsum fix would have to be in the form of an IE toolbar button or menu item.

Solution

It turns out that adding a simple javascript based text field filler option to a context menu is really easy, so that’s what I did. Here are the steps:

Firstly: Create the javascript to access the currently focused field, and insert the lorem ipsum text. Create a new html file in a location of your choice –  I used C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\Plugins – and copy the following code into it:

<script language="JavaScript">
var parentwin = external.menuArguments;
var doc = parentwin.document;
var rng = doc.selection.createRange();
rng.text = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, \
sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. \
Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi \
ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit \
in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur \
sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt \
mollit anim id est laborum.";
</script>

Save the file as loremipsum.htm.

Secondly: Create the registry entry for the menu item:

1. Open/run ‘regedit’ (Start > run… > “regedit” > ‘Ok’)
2. Use the tree to navigate to:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt
   using the tree view on the left of the Registry Editor.
3. Create a new key (Right click, “New” > “Key”) and call it “Lorem Ipsum” or anything you like.
4. Inside the new key, open the ‘default’ string value that’s already there (double click on it), and enter the path to the script you created just now. i.e. C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\Plugins\loremipsum.htm
5. Now create a new DWORD value (Right click, “New” > “DWORD Value”) and rename it “Contexts”. Set the value to 0×04 (hex) or 4 (decimal). Here’s an explanation of the different values.

The new Key and values in RegEdit

That’s it! Now open IE, find a textarea or text field, right click, and you should see something like this:

Note the new highlighted option in the context menu

A coleague wanted to change the default ‘browse’ path that the JCE ‘Image Manager’ and ‘File Browser’ plugins use. By default when you use the plugins, the contents of the ‘Stories’ directory will be displayed. It seems that even if you go into the plugin settings ( under ‘Components > JCE Administration > Plugins > [plugin name]‘ ), and set the ‘File Directory Path’ setting, it still doesn’t change the default path!

Solution

Navigate to Components > JCE Administration > Groups as shown below:

Choose Groups from the main menu...

Then select the group you want to edit. If you haven’t set up any groups, just click on the ‘Default’ group to edit it’s properties. Once the settings are on display, from the right-hand side, under the ‘Editor Parameters’ heading, expand the ‘Plugin Options’ item, and enter your desired path in ‘File Directory Path’:

Note: this must not be set to the Joomla root

Note: The path you enter must be at least one level above the Joomla! root. i.e [root]/myimages/.

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 pointed to my development server.

Solution

After doing a ‘find in files’ for my development server’s name, I found two more paths that need changing in VirtueMart’s own configuration file. This is the file:

/administrator/components/com_virtuemart/virtuemart.cfg.php

The following two paths need editing to point to the new server location (URL):

define( 'URL', 'http://my.devserver.com/joomla/' );
define( 'SECUREURL', 'https://secure.devserver.com/joomla/' );

A simple fix, but probably worth posting.

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 new article is added, changes have to be made to the template setup too – very tedious. All I wanted was to be able to create an article or category, add it to a certain section, and know that it would be rendered/displayed using a particular template:

Solution

This took some searching and tweaking. I found a post in the Joomla developers forum about someone trying to do something similar, but their example code was broken. It was enough to get me started though.

What you need to do is: find and open application.php in the includes directory on the root of your Joomla 1.5 installation. Then find line 309 or thereabouts and look for this code:

309 // Allows for overriding the active template from the request
310 $template = JRequest::getCmd(‘template’, $template);
311 $template = JFilterInput::clean($template, ‘cmd’); // need to filter the default value as well

Insert AFTER the comment on line 309, but BEFORE line 310, add this code:

// Templates by Section hack – Begin

$eItemView = JRequest::getVar(‘view’);
$eItemId = JRequest::getVar(‘id’);

$sectionId = NULL;

$eItemId = (strpos($eItemId,”:”))? substr($eItemId,0,strpos($eItemId,”:”)) : $eItemId;

switch ($eItemView) {
case “article”:
$edb =& JFactory::getDBO();
$eQuery = ‘SELECT sectionid FROM #__content WHERE id LIKE ‘.$eItemId.”;
$edb->setQuery($eQuery, 0, 1);
$sectionId = $edb->loadResult();
break;
case “category”:
$edb =& JFactory::getDBO();
$eQuery = ‘SELECT section FROM #__categories WHERE id LIKE ‘.$eItemId.”;
$edb->setQuery($eQuery, 0, 1);
$sectionId = $edb->loadResult();
break;
case “section”:
$sectionId = $eItemId;
break;
}

// Edit the section id below, you can find it in the sections admin area.
if ($sectionId == “1″) {
$template = “rhuk_milkyway_red”; // Use the full template name.
}
// Add more if clauses if there are other templates.

// Templates by Section hack – End

Hopefully you can see what this does. It looks for the section id to use in 3 ways, depending on whether joomla is currently displaying a section root page, a category root page, or an article. It then looks to see whether that section id has had a specific template specified for it by name.

This hack works well for me, I only need to add the different template data once in application.php for a given site. Ideally someone needs to make an admin mod for this, so that sections and categories can be assigned different templates in the backend. Maybe one day I’ll make one, but not unless there’s demand

Any questions, corrections or thoughts, please comment below (no need to create an account or anything!)

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 time a post is rendered. The function – which can be found in ‘wp-includes/formatting.php’ – replaces quite a few things, like ™ to ™ etc.

Solution

You could stop this happening a number of ways i.e. editing the function to stop it doing the replace altogether, or install a plugin that does it (maybe this one, haven’t tried it!).
I decided to use WordPress’s remove_filter function to stop the reformatting taking place.

To do this, open the ‘functions.php’ file within your theme. If one does not exist, create it. In my installation the file was here:

/wp-content/themes/[my-theme-name]/functions.php

Add the following code to the bottom of the file, taking care not to end up with too many or too few <?php tags:

<?php
remove_filter(‘the_content’, ‘wptexturize’);
remove_filter(‘the_title’, ‘wptexturize’);
?>

Then save the file (or ‘update’ if you’re doing this via the theme editor in WP admin) and view your post. That should do it!

I’m using AcaJoom Plus as a newsletter component for Joomla, on behalf of a client. While testing the component I found that once the “Change your subscription” and “Unsubscribe” links were appended, it messed up my template and styling. The text is surrounded SPAN with a class called ‘subscriptionlink_nws’ applied to it, but there is only so much you can do with styles in the newsletter itself.

Solution

The ”Change your subscription” and “Unsubscribe” links can be found in the file ‘class.jmail.php’ which sits in: [site root]/administrator/components/com_acajoom/classes/.

Open this file and at around line 76 you should see:

$subscriptionstext = ‘<p>’. $subscriptionslink . ‘<br />’ . $unsubscribelink . ‘</p>’;

I found that simply removing the <p> tags made things instantly better, but you might want to add more custom html in there.

This works for the ‘News’, ‘Plus’ and presumably ‘Pro’ versions of AcaJoom.