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Programming

MVT & Google Optimizer

Topic: Programming, Web Design, Software| No Comments »

Recently, I redesigned my photography community website, The Lens Flare, and everything has been positive so far except for one thing. The pages viewed per visit has dropped in half.
I suspected that the problem had to do with the navigation. I wanted to test a few things out to see which one would be […]

Xcart 4.1 and CDSEO module creates bugs in the Review module

Topic: Programming, Web Design| 3 Comments »

Xcart is a fairly popular e-commerce shopping cart program, and one of the add-on modules that you can buy from a third party company is called CDSEO. This rewrites all of the links to be SEF using a folder-style syntax instead of the regular ?variable=value syntax.
However, it causes some problems with X-Cart. One […]

X-cart 4.1 multiple monthly payments module

Topic: Programming, Web Design, Computers & Technology, Software| No Comments »

This is more of a set of modifications rather than an actual module, but the end result is the same.
First thing you’ll need to do is backup your existing site and database. I’d recommend using a test install of Xcart so that nothing in production gets messed up. With that in mind, the first […]

Install/Upgrade to Rails 2.0.2 with Eclipse, Aptana RadRails, and Subclipse

Topic: Programming, Web Design, Computers & Technology, Software| 3 Comments »

If you’re getting started with Ruby on Rails, one of the better platforms to program in is Eclipse largely due to RadRails and the SVN plugin called Subclipse. Eclipse and the community versions of the plugins are free, so it’s definitely worth taking a look at.
This article is assuming that you have a working […]

Upgrading Invision Powerboard 1.2 and 1.3 to use PHP5 and MySQL5

Topic: Programming, Software| No Comments »

Invision Powerboard 1.2 and 1.3 are still used by many people because they’re free, where the newest versions are not. However, the coding for them isn’t 100% compatible with the latest versions of PHP and MySQL. Many web hosting companies are moving to PHP5 and MySQL5, and this will break the default installation […]

Rails Select Helper

Topic: Programming| No Comments »

Ruby on Rails has a bunch of built in tools to make it easy to create HTML form elements. In fact, there are so many different ones that it’s sometimes confusing to know which one to use.
Here is an example of how to build a static drop down box with the display text and […]

Ruby on Rails lessons applied to PHP

Topic: Programming, Web Design, Software| No Comments »

Ruby on Rails is a programming framework for building websites using the Ruby language. Everything is set up to work a certain way; for example, the MVC (Model-View-Controller) model. What this means is that database stuff is put in the model area, the controller contains application logic, and the view contains mostly HTML. […]

Woes of editing code from other people

Topic: Programming| No Comments »

I’ve been editing an ecommerce website platform called X-Cart, which is a pretty good system written in PHP with Smarty templates. It’s a bit on the slow side, and is missing some functionality that I need such as the ability to do multi-payments, but all and all, it’s a fairly decent package.
We do a […]

Editing X-Cart ecommerce shopping cart system

Topic: Programming, Web Design| No Comments »

There are a few things in the X-Cart shopping cart that typically needs to be edited before the site is ready to go live.
The order notification that is sent to the admin includes the credit card number in the email. For obvious security reasons, this is not desirable.
There’s a variable you can turn off […]

Regular Expressions and negative lookahead assertion

Topic: Programming| No Comments »

I consider myself fairly good at regular expressions, which is a way to match specific patterns within a string of text; however, today, I learned a new little nugget of information regarding pattern matching.
We needed to match any filename that ended in html or php, but didn’t start with the word “form”. The regex […]

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