Web Design & Development Blog

Joomla has finally announced the first release candidate of Joomla 1.6. The final release is due January 11, 2011, with no current plans for a second release candidate. So, the end (of 1.5) is near!

Ever see a phone number get all messed up by the Skype plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer? It’s annoying. You’re thinking “I’ll just add this phone number, save the page / module / block / whatever” and be done with it, but you’d be wrong. Many Skype users unwittingly see many phone numbers displayed as clickable Skype links that let them place a call directly to that number.

You can stop this from happening in a couple ways:

• You could make the phone number a graphic
• Insert some hidden code into the phone number that prevents the Skype plugin from detecting it as a phone number.

Example

Before:

Phone: (555) 123-4567

After:

Phone: (555)<span style="display: none;">.</span> 123-4567

The hidden period is enough to stop the Skype plugin from workings its magic / evil. This technique was tested using Joomla but will work anywhere.

A Community Builder plugin for Joomla 1.5 that displays a user’s files. If the user is viewing his/her own profile, the user can also delete the file from the frontend, which is not yet supported officially by Phoca Download itself!  Download it here

I recently reworked a simple PHP site that uses standalone PHP files containing only HTML. We needed to redesign the navigation bar, which was simple a series of clickable images. These files were not generated by a Dreamweaver template or anything like that, meaning that we would have had to manually change each file every time there was a change to the menu. That seemed very annoying to me, so I created a file called navbar.php and included it into all the pages, using the standard PHP include;

<?php include(‘navbar.php’);?>
{codecitation}
The tabs are highlighted for the current page, so if you are on “About Us”, the About Us tab should be highlighted. To accomplish this, I wrote a simple function;
{codecitation}
function isactive($filename){
$urlfilename = basename($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']);
if($filename == $urlfilename){
echo “-hover”;
}
}
?>

A sample navigation tab would then look like this;

<a href=”consulting.php”><img src=”images/navbar-consulting<?php isactive(‘consulting.php’);?>.gif” name=”consulting” width=”104″ height=”35″ border=”0″ id=”consulting” onmouseover=”MM_swapImage(‘consulting’,”,’images/navbar-consulting-hover.gif’,1)” onmouseout=”MM_swapImgRestore()” /></a>

That simply uses the function to tell it which file name to match to the current page’s file name:

isactive(‘consulting.php’);

The end result is that on consulting.php, the HTML output for that tab would look like this:

<a href=”consulting.php”><img src=”images/navbar-consulting-hover.gif” name=”consulting” width=”104″ height=”35″ border=”0″ id=”consulting” onmouseover=”MM_swapImage(‘consulting’,”,’images/navbar-consulting-hover.gif’,1)” onmouseout=”MM_swapImgRestore()” /></a>

.. and that is done automatically using a single included file.

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Suppose you have a MySQL database table containing US 5-digit zip codes, except some of them are just three or four digits long because they had leading zeros, and those sometimes get dropped. Here’s how to add them back in;

For 3-digit zip codes:

UPDATE zipcodes SET zip = CONCAT(’00′, zip) WHERE LENGTH(zip) = 3

This will turn ’123′ into ’00123′.

For 4-digit zip codes:

UPDATE zipcodes SET zip = CONCAT(’0′, zip) WHERE LENGTH(zip) = 4

This will turn ’1234′ into ’01234′.