Archive for the 'web' Category

July 9th, 2010

Zen Cart, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, Apache

I’m currently working on some E-commerce stuff. I’ve been learning quite a bit about Zen Cart, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, Apache.

Spent a couple of hours today upgrading from MySQL 5.0 to MySQL 5.1

It went ok.

While trying to find some quick and easy ways to import data into Zen Cart I’ve ended up looking into phpMyAdmin.

Also MySQL 5.1 seems to support CSV as a storage engine. See this post: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/csv-storage-engine.html

All good stuff – I’m probably going to need to refer back to that sometime hence the post – time to sleep now.


By Matt in General, Systems, web  .::. (Add your comment)

November 2nd, 2009

PHPLayersMenu 3.2.0

PHPLayersMenu 3.2.0 – this script provides a nice clean hierarchical web menu for a website – it’s multip platform and browser and is very configurable.

It’s available here: http://phplayersmenu.sourceforge.net/

I’ve just been getting this well known php script to work under Windows with PHP running under IIS.

After following the docs and making sure I set $myDirPath = ‘D:\\Websites\\sitename.co.uk\\phplayersmenu-3.2.0\\’;
$myWwwPath = ‘/phplayersmenu-3.2.0/’;

I was nearly there except I was getting a template error.

After a little searching I found the solution in \lib\layersmenu.inc.php

There is some code in there that sets various default paths and it needed changing to take account of the windows notation for the physical file paths.

/*
 $this->dirroot = ‘./’;
 $this->libjsdir = ‘./libjs/’;
 $this->imgdir = ‘./menuimages/’;
 $this->imgwww = ‘menuimages/’;
 $this->icondir = ‘./menuicons/’;
 $this->iconwww = ‘menuicons/’;
 $this->tpldir = ‘./templates/’;
*/

/* BECAME THIS */

$winroot = ‘D:\\Websites\\manick.co.uk\\phplayersmenu-3.2.0\\’;
$winWwwPath = ‘/phplayersmenu-3.2.0/’;
 $this->dirroot = $winroot;
 $this->libjsdir = $winroot.’libjs\\’;
 $this->imgdir = $winroot.’menuimages\\’;
 $this->imgwww = $winWwwPath.’menuimages/’;
 $this->icondir = $winroot.’menuicons\\’;
 $this->iconwww = $winWwwPath.’menuicons/’;
 $this->tpldir = $winroot.’templates\\’;

After that I was good to go and the menu system now works in any folder on the webserver not just the folder I installed the script.


By Matt in web  .::. (Add your comment)

October 5th, 2009

DOCTYPE craziness with IE8

I use xhtml docs to store content for my site – it’s a custom built cms written in php.

So, my content files all use a template that looks like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.manick.co.uk/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd“>

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>

<head>
</head>

<body>
</body>

</html>

Anyway, I’ve noticed that IE8 fails to show these files, though FF has no issue. Very annoying. It would show an error like this:

The XML page cannot be displayed

Cannot view XML input using style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

System error: -2146697204. Error processing resource ‘http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd’.

 

 

Anyway I finally decided to research the problem and find out what is wrong…

I found a very relevant blog post about DTDs here:

http://www.w3.org/blog/systeam/2008/02/08/w3c_s_excessive_dtd_traffic

It seems that w3 suffer from excessive traffic when these DTD documents are repetitively called for over the Internet resulting in a kind of DOS attack.

There seems to be a great deal of ongoing debate regarding this issue – as I was looking for a quick fix I decided to host the relevant DTDs on my own server.

I was happy to do this as these XHTML files are not served directly to web browsers but are processed by PHP on my webserver.

The resulting document that is returned to the webrowser can continue to list the www.w3.org DTD document.

I’m guessing that IE8 shouldn’t be attempting to load these documents from w3.org when I try to view my xml files that contain the xhtml.

Also it appears that the w3.org have now gone so far as to block browsers requesting the DTD based on the User-Agent string of the HTTP request.

I gleaned this info from: http://www.outofcontrol.ca/2009/02/20/w3org-dtdxhtml1-strictdtd-blocks-windows-ie-users/

It seems odd to me that we are still struggling with this and it’s now nearly 2010.


By Matt in Systems, web  .::. (Add your comment)

September 18th, 2009

PHPExcel

Decided to find out if there were any free libraries that would allow you to create Excel files from scratch. Idea being that you can call this from PHP and create a spreadsheet from a website. Not a new idea but anyway. Found PHPExcel v1.7.0 and got it installed and running very quickly. Great piece of work. I will likely use it at some point in some project or other. Oh, it writes Excel 2007 format too.


By Matt in Systems, web  .::. (Add your comment)

April 8th, 2009

Internet Explorer 8 crashing with Adobe Flash Player

I had a machine today where IE8 would consistently crash if it attempted to install the Adobe Flash Browser by visiting http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. As soon as the yellow bar appeared to ask the user if they wanted to install the component then Windows would pop up a crash dialogue complaining about some memory issue.

I spent a long time trying to resolve this before I found a solution.

I tried following Adobe’s instructions for uninstalling the player and attempted to re-install it. I tried disabling various IE Add-Ons from the Tools | Manage Add-ons menu. No joy – same problem every time. I even tried the Reset button on the Tools | Internet Options -> Advanced tab (careful as this can wipe important settings, make sure you know what this does). All to no avail.

I searched for a long time to find a downloadable up to date offline installer from Adobe and couldn’t find one.

Then I eventually found my solution….there is one – an offline installer that is and it’s available if you visit http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and then click on ‘Different operating system or browser’ and follow the instructions.

It’s also available here.

As for why IE8 was crashing – I never got to the bottom of that. I did contact Microsoft but was told that they would not provide support for IE8 if the machine is connected to a domain. Not sure if that is the official line or not.


By Matt in web  .::. (Add your comment)

January 13th, 2009

Remote Desktop IT Support

I’ve just been researching the market for remote desktop support software. There’s so much out there now it’s difficult to know where to look. I like to go Open Source and found a useful list of free options here: http://www.wareprise.com/2008/11/28/list-of-free-remote-desktop-software-for-telecommuters/


By Matt in General, web  .::. (Add your comment)

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