Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

26May/130

Still more PHP 5.3 fixes for Joomla! 1.5

When you're on a roll, you're on a roll...

Almost done patching this particular old rowboat. This installment deals with quieting this bit of error log noise:

PHP Deprecated:  Function eregi() is deprecated in blahblah\components\com_htmlmap\views\htmlmap\tmpl\default_map.php on line 20

26May/130

Updating the TCPDF library in Joomla! 1.5

TCPDF is an excellent PHP class for creating PDFs from dynamic (or static, for that matter) web content. Unfortunately, the version of TCPDF bundled with Joomla! 1.5 (all 1.5 releases after at least 1.5.8 - someone please correct me if I am wrong - was version 2.6.000_PHP4, dated March 7, 2008. It's also not very PHP 5.3-friendly (there are other parts of Joomla! 1.5 which are not fully compatible with PHP 5.3, but this article will focus on TCPDF). Time to freshen up, methinks.

21Oct/120

Mass editing users in WordPress

Eek!

A thousand apologies to those of you who have received email notifications of my last post, which added two new categories to the blog. Following up on an enhancement request from a long-time friend to provide email notifications of new posts, I installed the Subscribe2 plugin. Not fully understanding the ramifications of setting "Option for Registered Users to auto-subscribe to new categories is checked by default" to "Yes," I set that, which automatically enabled all existing users as subscribers to newly-created categories, even if they were not subscribed to any categories previously (my reading of this option was that only new registrants would be auto-subscribed to new categories, thus saving them click-time during setup).

2Jan/120

A new year, a new WordPress version

Happy New Year, all.

I specifically held off upgrading WordPress from 3.2.1 to 3.3 until more of my plugins had been updated and until I'd had a chance to read up on what others were experiencing. All things considered, though, the upgrade seemed to be fairly painless (though why some people insist upon running their own websites and doing such installations and upgrades themselves I shall never understand), and this evening, it seemed that I had a handful of plugins which were candidates for updates, so I took the plunge all the way 'round.

If you happen to notice anything amiss, please bring it to my attention via the contact form or direct email (most of you reading this blog probably have it, but in case you don't, just use lgrosenthal at the domain of this site or .com, and you should get right through to me.

Thanks for reading, and again, Happy New Year!

11Apr/110

New version; new theme

After reading some truly hair-raising comments about the WordPress 3.1 upgrade, I had resigned myself to waiting for at least the .1 version to be released. Upon logging into my admin panel over the weekend, however, I was greeted by the prompt to upgrade to 3.1.1, and threw caution to the wind.

The upgrade went off without a hitch (WordPress is truly slick regarding its handling of updates, themes, and widget installations, and I am rarely - if ever - left feeling that I must use my IT talents to maintain my own blog), and I then set about looking for perhaps a slightly less drastic theme.

The result is what you see. So far, I'm quite happy with the result (I haven't changed anything on the handheld side, still using Carrington Mobile). If you have some comments or if something doesn't seem to work quite right, please drop me a note via the contact page and let me know.

Enjoy!