Truth be told, I don’t have much time for traditional paper based Christmas cards.  I appreciate the sentiment, but lets be honest with ourselves, cards are expensive, as is the postage and come the New Year all the cards go into the recycling bin at best.

As someone that offers web development services, it only seemed fitting that I send a digital e-card to my clients.  Not one of those dancing elf monstrosities, or a cobbled-together-in-5-minutes-because-we-forgot-to-get-cards-in-the-post type affair, but a bona-fide bespoke Christmas card.  Then for good measure and a warm feeling inside, a hand-picked charity donation to a cause I’ve supported for a few years – Cats Protection

Last year I got in touch with local designer Liz Elcoate from Capriccio Design who produced a great art-deco “chat noir” style design.

This year I gave Liz the brief of something 50′s inspired, Christmassey and with the obligatory cat (in case you wondered, my company is called Gattonero – Italian for “black cat”).  Here’s the finished design which I’m really pleased with:

This year’s Gattonero Christmas e-card sent out to clients:

I wish I could take credit for the design, but I opted to use someone far better skilled at the artsy stuff that myself – Liz Elcoate from Sketchy Design Capriccio Design

Instead of sending paper based greetings cards, I sent this card by email and made a donation to Cats Protection – www.cats.org.uk

So, you want to include (also include_once, require or require_once) another PHP file in one of your WordPress files?  Fine, but if your PHP file is in a different folder/directory to your WordPress installation you might run into problems.

After spending too long trawling the WordPress Codex trying to find a solution, I luckily found this post by Andy Fletcher – How to use a PHP include with WordPress

ABSPATH is your friend and the answer to your prayers.   For example, assume your PHP files are in a folder off your web root called “thefolder”, you would include them using:

<?php include(ABSPATH . '/thefolder/thefile.php'); ?>

Simple when you know how.

CMS Made Simple is a great content management system.  It’s free, easy to get to grips with, quite powerful and the forums are fairly helpful when you need help.

There are obviously quirks with it (as there is with all off the shelf software) such as tables inserted within the WYSIWYG editor lacking any outlines, making placement quite problematic (think “invisible table”).

Thankfully there is an answer with at least the current versions of CMS Made Simple (1.4.1 at the time of writing this) having an option to turn table outline borders on and off.

Method

From within the CMS Made Simple admin control panel, go to: Extensions > TinyMCE WYSIWYG > Advanced (tab)

There you should see a checkbox for the option “Include only screen CSS”.  Tick that, update the settings and give the WYSIWYG editor a whirl.

If all has gone well, you should now see the outline borders when editing page contents.

If you’re scratching your head on how to get an HTTP redirect with CMS Made Simple, then save your scalp and scratch no longer!

All you need to do is create a User Defined Tag (UDT) within your CMS MS admin (Extensions > User Defined Tags), call the tag “redirect” and paste the following code:

if( isset( $params['to'] ) )
  {
    global $gCms;
    $manager =& $gCms->GetHierarchyManager();
    $node =& $manager->sureGetNodeByAlias($params['to']);
    $content =& $node->GetContent();
    if (isset($content) && is_object($content))
       {
         if ($content->GetURL() != '')
         {
            redirect($content->GetURL());
         }
       }
    else return '<!-- redirect udt - page not found: '.$params['to'].' -->';
  }

To use, add {redirect to=”page_alias”} into one of your pages, or somewhere intelligently placed in your template.  If it’s going into a template then you should have an if statement around this, or you’ll get some nasty redirection loops!

Credit to calguy1000 for writing the function.

Further reading:

• http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/Share_your_tags_here#A_Redirect_UDT
• http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/topic,14440.0.html

Update

I don’t know if they have always been there but I’ve since noticed the CMS Made Simple tags redirect_url and redirect_page

To use, insert into your page or template:

{redirect_page page="some-page-alias"}

or

{redirect_url to="www.cmsmadesimple.org"}

According to a recent poll by CSS-Tricks, 40% of those in the survey said WordPress their favourite content management system.

Now I’m no expert when it comes to CMS platforms, but I’ve developed with a few, tested out a few others (before uninstalling and running away) and even use one (WordPress to be exact) for this blog, and I’m quite happy to put my neck firmly on the line and say WordPress isn’t a proper CMS by my standards.

That’s not to say WordPress doesn’t do a fantastic job at what it does best and that in my opinion is to be a blogging platform.  Yes it can behave in a similar fashion to a more familiar CMS layout but I can’t help but feel it’s being forced into it.  I’ve even seen WordPress used for eCommerce solutions and again, it can work for some but it’s not really going to compete with an Amazon clone.

My preference for a CMS would follow along a similar vein to CMS Made Simple, Joomla or MODx where everything just feels better designed with a tagging system that can integrate quickly into most designs and when you need to get into the code to do some hacking, they are a lot more forgiving.  As I write this, I’m actually trying to come up with an example of how my idea of a CMS differs to what WordPress is offering me right now as I type…

I suppose it probably comes down to not giving WordPress a chance outside of the blog remit but for 40% of people to say it’s their favourite CMS does make me wonder what their reason behind the choice would be.

Cubecart 4 includes the option to rewrite the standard URL structure into “search engine friendly” URLs.

This means that instead of a product in your shop having the pretty awful address of

http://www.domain.co.uk/index.php?_a=viewProd&productId=1

you can have it rewritten into something like

http://www.domain.co.uk/test-category/test-product2/prod_1.html

Much easier for humans I’m sure you’ll agree and hopefully search engines will love your keyword-packed URLs too.

Activating the  search engine friendly URL’s is nice and easy if you have Unix/Linux hosting as it all works out of the box with Cubecart, but if (like me) you’re using a Windows server you need a different solution… and Helicon’s ISAPI_Rewrite is just that solution.

Installed onto your Windows server (if you’re on shared hosting, speak to your hosts about making it available), ISAPI_Rewrite uses a single file (httpd.ini) in the root folder of your domain to process whatever rewriting rule you need.

Within the Cubecart admin system, you are given a few lines of code to paste into your (Unix/Linux) .htaccess file:

## Activate the mod_rewrite Engine
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.*)$
RewriteRule cat_([0-9]+)(\.[a-z]{3,4})?(.*)$ index.php?_a=viewCat&catId=$1&%1 [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.*)$
RewriteRule prod_([0-9]+)(\.[a-z]{3,4})?$ index.php?_a=viewProd&productId=$1&%1 [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.*)$
RewriteRule info_([0-9]+)(\.[a-z]{3,4})?$ index.php?_a=viewDoc&docId=$1&%1 [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.*)$
RewriteRule tell_([0-9]+)(\.[a-z]{3,4})?$ index.php?_a=tellafriend&productId=$1&%1 [NC]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (.*)$
RewriteRule _saleItems(\.[a-z]+)?(\?.*)?$


Unfortunately, I couldn’t get these to translate directly into my httpd.ini file, but I found this solution on the Helicon forums:


[ISAPI_Rewrite]
RewriteRule .*?/cat_(\d+)(?:\.[a-z]{3,4})?([^?]*)(?:\?(.*))? /index.php\?_a=viewCat&catId=$1?2&$2 [I,L]
RewriteRule .*?/prod_(\d+)(?:\.[a-z]{3,4})?(?:\?(.*))? /index.php\?_a=viewProd&productId=$1?2&$2 [I,L]
RewriteRule .*?/info_(\d+)(?:\.[a-z]{3,4})?(?:\?(.*))? /index.php\?_a=viewDoc&docId=$1?2&$2 [I,L]
RewriteRule .*?/tell_(\d+)(?:\.[a-z]{3,4})?(?:\?(.*))? /index.php\?_a=tellafriend&productId=$1?2&$2 [I,L]
RewriteRule .*?/_saleItems(?:\.[a-z]+)?(\?(.*))? /index.php\?_a=viewCat&catId=saleItems?1&$1 [I,L]


Just put the code above into your httpd.ini file, upload it and the changes should take effect immediately with no server reboot required.

Happy Cubecarting!

It’s something that can have you pulling your hair out in frustration but the solution is so simple.

Finding (and replacing) text in your MySQL database tables has almost become a past time of mine recently, converting a foreign database into reading something a bit closer to the English language.

If you use a frontend to your MySQL database (like phpMyAdmin or SQLyog, Navicat, etc) then go to create a new query and enter the following (replacing the table and field names as required of course!):

UPDATE tablename SET tablefield = replace(tablefield, "findstring", "replacestring");

It’s Brian Zimmer I have to thank for that, so please view the example on his website for including more search options. Also worth a mention is MybesInformatik who’s site I stumbled on when I couldn’t remember the URL for Brian’s site!