Connecting cPanel to GMail
GMail kicks the cPanel mail apps butt. So I always recommend that clients to use the free Google Apps to manage their email. This is a big bonus for clients as they get to use the simple GMail interface with their own domain.
The big benefits to using GMail is the:
- 7GB storage per a user,
- ability to access multiple email accounts from one GMail,
- easy to configure your iPhone to access it,
- looks really nice,
- plays nice with mail clients such as Apple Mail, and
- it is a lot easier for users to use. Read more
Outputing PHP to Excel
A few people have recently asked me about outputting data to Excel. This is a very simple thing to do from PHP with two lines of code.
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=webbased.xls");
Upselling
I am of those people who hates to shop. When I do I like to get in and out of the shops as fast as possible. This normally means I am totally focus on I went in to get that I forget to get the other things that I may need.
For instance on the weekend I brought a new iPhone. I get home and the first thing I realise is that I need a protective case for it.
During shopping at the store the sales attendent tried to sell me Mobile Me and Apple care which I repeatedly said no to. This caused me to have bigger blinkers on as he tried to push harder to sell me these two services instead of something I wanted. Read more
WordPress just got better
So I just found another reason to love wordpress with the iPhone app for wordpress allowing me to post posts while out. This means that I can write posts in a lot of new places and give out a lot more random thoughts.
So I have to admit that it is not as easy to post on the iPhone as a normal keyboard. This means That the posts from the iPhone are more likely to be shorter or I just have to get better at it. Read more
A website is your number 1 sales person
A website needs to be thought of as a sales person who is always working, takes payments upfront, and costs significantly less (no holidays, no super, and no christmas party). As such your website does need to be treated as apart of the sales team, it should present the image of your company, be up-to-date on your offerings, provide advise, make cross and up sells, and most of all help your customers buy off you.
Biggest benefits
- Take orders 24×7
- Receive payments instantly
- Save on costs
- A website can provide as much or as little information as a customer wants
- No time is wasted on tire kickers
Connecting your plugin to the WordPress Database
Connecting to the WordPress database is very simple. The $wpdb variable connects to the class which controls the access to the database meaning your plugin can easily use the database without having to write a connection script. The $wpdb class also contains routines which will make your life easier. This post details the $wpdb variable and the basic routines it supports. It is intended to help those building a plugin which needs a database and does not describe how to build a plugin.
Audience: WordPress Plugin Developers
Level: Beginner – Intermediate
Assumed Knowledge: You know how to build a WordPress Plugin and how to write queries in MySQL.
In this tutorial we are going to build a simple plugin which when a user visits a page in your WordPress environment their IP, the page visited, and time is stored in the database which the results will be shown in the admin section of WordPress. This plugin is going to be very basic yet you can easily imagine just how much analytics you could possibly do with the data captured.
Read more
PHP Password Salt and Pepper using sha1 MD5 Hash
Adding salt to passwords has become a very popular topic. In this tutorial we will look at adding more then just a little salt in hope to make the passwords stored in the database a lot more complicated to break.
What we aim to do is change “HelloKitty” into “bd6656780b4fcad95b4326dd6ee46cbcdb4d8a”.
Read more
My Top 10 WordPress Plug-ins
WordPress is a popular blog engine which is becoming more and more a CMS. What makes WordPress a lot more popular than the rivals is the plug-ins created by the community that extends base WordPress to unlimited capabilities. Starting a site with WordPress allows designers and developers skip a lot of the non-core development process and focus on the core functionality of the site. Below is a list of my top 10 plug-in.
Read more
OpenX Ad Server Blank Page During Upgrade
You do not need to edit the PHP.ini file and restart the Apache service to avoid the blank screen in an OpenX upgrade.
OpenX’s is opensource free ad server which gives you to the power to manage your online advertisements.
A lot of users/admins face a problem when upgrading their server especially if they do not own or run the host.
Read more
How to Create a CSS Table
Sometimes you will want to present non tabular information in a table format because you like the look of uniformity. The way to do this is to use divs in almost the same way you would do so for a table. The great thing about using a DIV/CSS table over a regular table is you have much more flexibility in manipulating the layout. For instance you might want every second row to have 3 columns of equal width compared to every other which 4 columns of equal width.
The code in this post will let you build the table pictured below. Taking this the next level will allow you to create the complex CSS tables used in loan results of the MortgageCorp Mortgage Calculator pictured left. I would recommend the CSS table over a regular table unless tabular data is being presented.
Read more