Archive: development

Magento is a typical PHP Model View Architecture (MVC) system which routes its URLs in ways not particularly different from other PHP MVC Frameworks like codeigniter, symphony etc. But the difference it has with other MVC architecture is that most of its routing directives or configurations are XML based i.e. found in one XML file [...]

Many database queries rely on seeing if two columns match / differ, however sometimes you may want to check if either column contains a sub-string of the other. MySql allows you to do this, but it isn’t that well documented, so hopefully this will help someone looking for this in the future SELECT * FROM [...]

Not many people are aware of the Path Tools extension for netbeans, and even fewer know how to make it really useful. Effectively it provides 4 buttons - Copy Path, Open Folder, Open Terminal and Edit Path, the latter three being configurable. Its default for Open Folder is great (for gnome users) but that's the [...]

There is a new feature in Netbeans that tries to auto fill the variables for methods and functions in PHP. Whilst this may be something that is a time saver for some, it often gets these wrong, and if you are using descriptive variables in the method then these are overwritten if you have a [...]

I recently installed the latest version of Netbeans (7.1) and decided to have a look through the available plugins at the same time. In there I found one called Quick File Chooser. This replaces the file selector with a keyboard optimised version, which includes auto-complete and narrowing down a file list as you type. If [...]

On occasion, google and other tools will tell you there's errors with your sitemap.xml file and not give you the information of what exactly is wrong, so we wrote this little tool to crawl the sitemap and check for 301 redirections and 404 errors. It is a noddy file and should have much more error [...]

Well known is how Loaded Commerce/CRELoaded protect their google banners they wack on all opensource versions of their code. Once you have removed the footer in the current version though, it checks the output buffer and you will find it after the closing html tag of your page. The function that does this is cre_uregisterBasicFunctions(); [...]

Often we will be asked to work on a site and have to test backend features but without asking for admin passwords, so we need a way to create admin users without admin access. Of course we already have file and database access. For this, we use phpmyadmin or adminer to give us database access [...]

If you need to test your code against the (ahem) interesting interpretations of the various iterations of Internet Explorer then this is a great resource for you. Turns out Microsoft have thrown web devs a bone by offering free virtual machine images with the various IE/OS flavours for you to test on. You can download [...]

Ever need to quickly test some HTML that you copied from some where? If you have Firebug installed, you can open a new tab, go the the HTML tab in Firebug, click edit and paste your HTML and Firefox will render it. This is faster than having to open a text editor, paste the contents [...]