I had installed Joom!Fish on my Joomla! site to support Mandarin Chinese. When Extended Menu module is installed, I got an error like “Deprecated use of Mambelfish …”

After some search, I fixed the problem by:

“comment line that is line $GLOBALS[ ‘mosConfig_mbf_content’ ] = ‘1′; .
This is inside mambots/system/jfdatabase.systembot.php.”

Detailed discussion can be found at: http://www.joomfish.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=91

function get_short_text ( $t_str, $n = 100 ) {
 // this function strips out all html tags, then take the first n chars of the string, but always stops
 // at whole words
 
 // strip out html tags
 $search_tags = array (”‘<script[^>]*?>.*?</script>’si”,  // Strip out javascript
                 “‘<[/!]*?[^<>]*?>’si”);          // Strip out HTML tags

 $replace_tags = array (”", “”);

 $t_str = preg_replace($search_tags, $replace_tags, $t_str);

    if ( strlen( $t_str ) > $n ) {
     $t_str = substr( $t_str, 0, $n );

  // trim off partial word at the end
  $pos = strrpos( $t_str, ‘ ‘ );
  $t_str = substr ( $t_str, 0, $pos + 1 );
    }  

 return $t_str;
}

I had been trying to edit the hosts file on vista but always receives a message saying no privilege. I didn’t even recall setting up an admin user during vista installation.

Finally found a solution on the Internet:

http://www.maximumpcguides.com/edit-the-windows-vista-hosts-file/

1. Open Notepad with Administrative privileges by clicking Start, All Programs, Accessories, and then right-click Notepad and select to open as Administrator.
2. Now that Notepad is open with Administrative privileges browse to (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc) in Notepad and open the hosts file.

Thanks Brent!

I prepared a list of customers to send holiday card to then needed to print them out. Spent some time figure out things since this is the first time I used Mail Merge. Here are the steps that worked for me:

1. Exported customer’s list from Quickbooks into an Excel file
2. Cleaned up Excel file to removed duplicates, etc.
3. [important] set up data for Mail Merge - refer to: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP052037601033.aspx for detailed instructions
4. Create a new Word doc, and follow the instructions on http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP052037601033.aspx
5. TIP: in step #9 of the above Microsoft help page, on “Arrange Your Labels” screen, you will need to click on “Address Block” on the top right section to bring up a dialog box, then click on the button “Match Fields …” to open up the dialog box to match your fields to Mail Merge. But if you had named your columns intelligently, use names like “first name”, “last name”, etc. then the “Matching” is not necessary

Please consult the original documentation for examples and more information.

Usage Example:
$format = "'l M j, y \a\t g:iA'";
date($format, strtotime($date_str)


Result: “Thursday Nov 29, 07 at 2:09PM”

Last week, I spent some time customizing a Pligg installation. After reading many pages of code to familiarize myself with the process, I decided to share my findings in hopes that it will be helpful to some others who also need to customize the look of a Pligg site. Click here to read the whole article.

I was working on a project today and found that the content in a table I created all squeezed together, even though that I had set “cellspacing=10″.

After some investigation I found that in the CSS code, padding and margin of all elements was removed:

body * {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

I could, in theory, define a table with padding. But setting margin and padding to 0 for all elements is not a great idea in general. Unless you DO want to define style of ALL element by hand.

A better approach is to be specific only to specific elements.

Similarly, I noticed that on many website, just because ul is used for navigation items, the “list-style” is changed in general:

ul li {
list-style:none;
….
}

Doing this will cause all unordered-list to lose the bullets unless you define another style.

A better approach is to be specific:

#nav ul li {
list-style:none;
….
}

DotNetNuke is suitable for a small, local community with defined
  feature needs like, for example, a reading club:

    * The site can be created within a few minutes
    * The site can be customized with an uploaded logo
    * The admin can add pages to the site
    * The admin can easily add an event calendar
    * The color of the headers, fonts, and background can be changed
    * The site offers high-end access control, so the admin can control,
      down to the page level, what public sees, what admin sees, and
      what registered/logged-in user sees

  But without spending a good deal of time, it’s difficult to:

    * Add or modify even a small feature that was not already there
    * Re-skin the page to look exactly like a PhotoShop design provided
      by a designer

Continuation to my post on Nov 27th about Salesforcs vs. Appshore .. during my one month trial period with both applications:

Salesforce:

• sent me account activation email
• sent me several emails asking for feedback
• account manager called and left a message, asking me to call and talk about my experience with sales force, offer to help
• account manager followed up her call w/email, asking me to call or email back. I emailed back saying that I would contact her if I needs to.
• 1 week before the end of my 1-month free trial, I received an email about participating a 90-min usability testing for $50 amazon gift certificate
• 2 days before the end of my free trial, received email about subscribe to the service (pay) or convert to free lifetime personal account

Appshore:

• account activation email is the only email they send out proactively
• good support by phone, when you call them

Seeing business cards filling shoeboxes and me spending more time searching for a phone number of a contact … .I decided it’s time for a serious CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application.

Once again, BCM for Outlook crashed my poor WIN XP, so I uninstalled it totally. ACT! is tedious to integrate with Outlook and also only locally sits on my computer. I narrowed down my options to Salesforce and Appshore.

Signed up for trial accounts with both and used them for a number of days … here is what I experienced.

Overall, salesforce is a BETTER app than appshore:

• user interface is more polished (while appshore looks more home-grown)
• more features and more flexible

But more features means more complex user interface.

Appshore is a simpler app, and has bugs here and there. They didn’t do their homework too well. However, user Interface is simpler than salesforce, and more intuitive in some cases.

I didn’t use salesforce that much yet. So the fact that I didn’t encounter any bugs might not mean it’s bug free but just from the polished look, I tend to think it has less bugs than appshore.

For now, I would probably stay with appshore simply because it cost much less and the features are sufficient for me.