ChronoContact “Daily Hints” bug

The current version of ChronoContact for Joomla 1.5 has a serious bug.

Once installed, the Forms Management tab in ChronoContact will display a white page preventing you from managing forms in the component.

jalal reported the issue on the Chronoengine forums, along with the solution he discovered on his own.

Re: Forms Management link not working
Postby jalal » Tue Dec 29, 2009 2:17 pm

OK, I’ve sort of fixed it for now.

I commented out line 37 in admin.chronocontact.html.php (which pops up the tooltip) and things work correctly now. More specifically, it is line 4820 in the same file that is causing the segmentation fault (“$rssDoc =& JFactory::getXMLparser(‘RSS’, $options);”).

If I get a moment I’ll see if I can figure out more, but the above gets things working for me.

cheers

Re: Forms Management link not working
Postby GreyHead » Tue Dec 29, 2009 2:46 pm

Hi jalal,

Ah OK it’s probably the “Daily Hints” — I’d forgotten about that problem. You can disable them from the Parameters Icon in the toolbar now that you can get into the Forms Manager.

Bob

Here’s hoping they remove this “feature” before releasing the final version…

Javascript navigation in PDF files

I’m currently working on an enhanced, interactive version of a 24 page brochure I designed. In the PDF, we’re adding web-like navigation items, including the standard previous and next buttons.

Going through this tutorial, the best bit is how to use Javascript to create forward/next buttons. Since the original post is from 2007, I wanted to blog it quickly for my own future reference. (For Javascripters out there, I’m sure this is old news, but for me this is a neat trick.)

Note that you can also use JavaScript to move to the next page. Use the Run a JavaScript action and type the following in the JavaScript Editor:

this.pageNum++;

this.pageNum--;

Thanks to acrobatusers.com for showing the way.

TweetDeck on Mac OS after Migration Assistant

Not sure how many other Mac users are going to have this problem, but it is worth blogging just in case.

A couple weeks ago, my laptop died. Once I got the replacement in, I used the Migration Assistant in Mac OS to restore my Time Machine backup.

Restoring from Time Machine should be done when formatting the computer, but in my case I am working remotely, didn’t have the Apple installer CD, and the laptop was up to date with the exception of my files, applications, etc. So Migration Assistant was my only real option without driving to the Apple Store and spending money I don’t need to spend.

Migration Assistant did a great job, but there are some oddities after migrating, since some aspects of your user environment are tied to your account name and the directory structure under /Users. And because I was essentially importing a previous admin account into a laptop that already had an admin account, I had to rename the account I was importing. This resulted in directory structure changes which Adobe Air and/or TweetDeck didn’t like.

After Migration Assistant completed, I logged out of the laptop’s new admin account and logged into my old laptop’s admin account, which is where all my files and other data are stored. The user environment looked fine, all my apps ran fine, etc. But TweetDeck balked. TweetDeck loaded but wouldn’t log into Twitter or display my settings.

Here is what finally fixed TweetDeck for me.

Go to this directory on all user accounts on your Mac OS computer:
/Library/Application Support/Adobe/AIR/

Delete this file:
eulaAccepted

Go to this directory on all user accounts on your Mac OS computer:
/Library/Application Support/Adobe/AIR/ELS/

Delete the folder named something like this:
TweetDeckFast.F9107117265DB7542C1A806C8DB837742CE14C21.1

Only after deleting these files on all user accounts did TweetDeck reset and let me log into Twitter. Happily enough, the settings for each of my TweetDeck columns was retained.

Hope this helps some other Mac OS / TweetDeck users. If this information helped you, please let me know.

Fliq for Mac tip: print to your iPhone

This tip is taken from the Mark/Space Newsletter #81

Print to your iPhone with Fliq

Here’s a great way to use Fliq for the Mac and Fliq Docs to “print” a document to your iPhone for viewing on the go. This is especially useful for documents and files that the iPhone can’t normally display, such as iWork ‘09 documents, RTFs, PhotoShop files, and Delicious Library lists. It’s easy to do.First, set it up:

1) Create an alias of “Fliq” in your Applications folder

2) Rename it “Fliq PDF to iPhone”

3) Open the “Library” folder (in your home folder)

4) Open the “PDF Services” folder (in the Library folder)

5) Drag “Fliq PDF to iPhone” into the “PDF Services” folder

That’s it! You’re all set.

When you want to print to your iPhone:

1) Launch Fliq on your Mac and Fliq Docs on your iPhone.

2) From any application, choose “Print…”

3) In the print window, select “Fliq PDF to iPhone” from the “PDF” menu (pictured at right)

1-2-3… a PDF is sent to your iPhone into Fliq Docs! By the way, this is also a great way to print or Fliq files and documents to someone else’s iPhone.

Menalto Gallery 2 – hide view count

When everything else is fairly configurable, why are some things so difficult?

Here is how to hide the view count on albums in Gallery 2 using the Matrix default template.

Edit /themes/matrix/templates/album.tpl

Replace this:

showViewCount=true

With this:

showViewCount=false

Color code e-mail in Apple Mail

Have you figured out that you can color code your Apple Mail messages?

Go to Format –> Show Colors

Select a message in your inbox, then click a color in the Colors palette.

You can’t sort based on the colors, but at least you can do more than just mark as flagged, read/unread, or by priority to quickly find something in your inbox.

PayPal shipping per order

Here is a simple hack that took me a while to locate, so here is a post to document…

The PayPal cart and buy now buttons allow you great variety in shipping, but how do you charge a flat rate for shipping per order? It isn’t obvious.

Add the following line of code to your “buy now” or “add to cart” button forms:

<input name="handling_cart" type="hidden" value="2.00" />

The value above is the flat rate you want to charge per cart in dollars.

Update:
The above works as long as people are ordering one type of product. If more than one product is added to the cart, the handling_cart value for that product will be added also. If someone knows how to get true per-order flat rate shipping implemented, let me know.

Joomla 1.5 hack – replace the META Generator tag

In Joomla 1.5, the system automatically creates a META Generator tag that you might want to change or hide.

The default tag looks like this:

<meta name="generator" content="Joomla! 1.5 - Open Source Content Management" />

There is no way within Joomla to change or remove this tag, so you have to put a little line of PHP in your template.

Edit your template and look for this line:

<jdoc:include type="head" />

Just above that line, paste in the following:

<?php $this->setMetaData('generator','my site'); ?>

The two lines together should look like this:

<?php $this->setMetaData('generator','my site'); ?>
<jdoc:include type="head" />

In the above code, substitute your custom generator tag value in place of the words my site.

Because this hack is in your template, you don’t have to worry about the next upgrade to Joomla overwriting hacked core files.

Thanks to gabha.net for showing the way.

Creating a favicon.ico that loads in IE

I’ve never had a problem with browsers, specifically IE, loading favicons created for my client sites. But this week I had one site where the favicon would load in every browser EXCEPT Internet Explorer.

Normally, I create favicon images in Adobe Photoshop, at 16×16 pixels, and use Save for Web & Devices… to create a GIF named favicon.gif

I rename favicon.gif to favicon.ico and upload. 

This week, I downloaded and used successfully an Adobe Photoshop plugin called ICOFormat from Telegraphics.com

I’m a big fan of one-trick ponies, and this is a good one. It does one thing and it does it well.

I opened the previous favicon I had created then selected File –> Save as… and selected the ICO (Windows Icon) format option. Posted the revised file and suddenly IE was loading the favicon.

Open .dat attachments on Mac OS

Occasionally in Mac OS, I’ll get an e-mail with a .dat file extension. .dat is pretty generic, but typically this is from an older Microsoft e-mail program bundling the message and one or more attachments into the .dat. The Microsoft program knows what’s there, but the Mac doesn’t.

In the event I receive a .dat file, I fire up TNEF’s Enough, a freeware application from JoshJacob.com

Save the .dat file out of the e-mail, then drag and drop it on top of TNEF’s Enough. This great little utility makes extracting attachments from .dat files quick and easy.