Lightquick Web Design - Elements of the past and the future combining to make something not quite as good as either

The reason I just deleted my Pinterest account was - first of all let me explain my reasons for using Pinterest in the first place. I have had a Deviantart account for a year or so now which I use to promote what I do, I won't call it art, but it has elements of art and compared to the contributions of many it certainly has an artistic flare. My 'Deviations' are digitally created Steampunk icons and widgets that sit on your desktop making it look pretty whilst also providing functionality over and above that provided by Windows or Mac OS/X. Trouble is if you put all your eggs in one basket then there is the possibility that if there is a problem with the host, technical or otherwise then you are potentially a tadge screwed...you are always certainly at risk. Recently, Deviantart made some fundamental changes to their submission process that turned a simple submission method into a complicated one. DA are trying to promote the use of their Stash product, an online storage tool where 2gb is provided for free but any extra space is chargeable, this has been done to help monetize what DA is offering. I suspect DA is not making much money at the moment. Unfortunately the new submission process was released to the general public in an alpha/beta stage and forced upon a massive and unwilling group of DA-ers to test and fault-find. This process took months from October to March the update was beta-tested live and may tens of thousands of unhappy artists were prevented from submitting to Deviantart.  I was very unhappy about being forced to test alpha-grade software (DA admins admitted the software was being rushed to the pass in alpha/beta state) so with that in mind I did a search for good alternatives for my 'stuff' where I can display it with ease and with a good visual impact. I found Pinterest a while back and was impressed by the ease of being able to post images to the gallery, it also looked good. Over a period of time, I posted close to 300 images to Pinterest, I was very selective, posting only my own images to promote my work. I was very happy with the result and my google rankings crept up. Unfortunately, and at the worst time all my Pinterest images turned to mush... All of a sudden all my transparent image thumbnails had the transparent part removed and replace by large black blobs, ruining the pictures in my gallery.

In the process of pinning Pinterest stores copies of your images in a cache, duplicates that link to the originals. Pinterest obviously have to store these images for a long period of time so storage for them must be a major issue.  I suspected that they had compacted the files to save space so I contacted support to explain the problem. Despite acknowledgint he problem support basically did nothing for over a month taking days at a time to respond to any query I raised.

In the end I had to do the investigation myself and discovered that if you optimise PNG's you can damage the transparency. Pinterest had optimised the images in order to reduce the size taken by the originals and in the process they had ruined them. Grace from support suggested that I remove them all and resubmit the 300 pins manually - which was clearly not a practical solution as it would have destroyed the search engine links to each and every image. It was however, the only solution I was presented with. There is no method of redirecting an old PIN to a new one or modifying the pin's current image, a major drawback to Pinterest. So, the end result is that I had a gallery full of botched images that failed to display my 'art' correctly and that will give a negative impression on anyone that sees them. Either way, bad for my reputation.

There was no solution in the offing from Pinterest's engineering team either so the only thing I had left to do was to delete my Pinterest account altogether, images and all. I was loathe to do this as I thought I had found the perfect, easy to use gallery with great SEO potential but if they can't maintain your images then you can't trust them with what is in essence, your crown jewels. My advice, avoid pinterest like the plague. I will be pulling my Pinterest plugins, updating all my sites with the same advice and advising my friends to do the same.

Another reason for abandoning Pinterest, their Terms of Service - If you've read Pinterest's Terms of Service then it is wise to say that you really ought to try to avoid pinning other people's images as you are personally liable for any legal claims arising from the use of those images, you are also liable for Pinterest's legal costs if a case arises.This leaves you only being able to post your own images - but Pinterest strongly discourages you from doing that. All in all this is a bit rubbish and it is time to leave. BYE BYE Pinterest.

Note from Pinterest:

"We're sorry to see you go. Unfortunately, bugs happen. Our team does our best to fix major problems as soon as possible. Sometimes, other problems take longer to resolve. We deeply apologize if this has affected your reputation. I wish there was more I could do to help. As requested, I removed your information from this account.

Kind regards,

Grace Pinterest | Community Specialist | Pinterest.com/graceporter"

At least Grace was lovely and polite.

"Dagenham is dead. This monstrous misplanned place
Must kill the best that's in the human race,
The town's a blot upon the River's side"
The traveller spoke, but yet I knew he lied.

Dead? When I have seen those bitter fights
Where bosses schemed, and craftsmen held their rights,
And welded with a sure and patient hand
Their doubting fellows in a solid band?

Where girls with shielded eyes and new-found skill
Beneath a blinding glare of sparkling showers,
Make white-hot metal streams obey their will
Creating joints that held tremendous power.

No! Dagenham lives, and spite of darkest night,
Will play its part in struggles for the right.
The ones who live amidst this sorry scheme
Will help to build the Britain of our dream.

                                                                   F.L. Ives

A brief note to let you know of another Steampunk kinematographical creation that is coming your way in the fullness of time. Terry Jones of the Monty Python team has used his full and rather starnge imagination to come up with the idea of the British empire conquering the moon in 1884... his idea? I thought it had already happened. How strange. Anyhow, here it is,  '1884' Terry Gilliam presents '1884 Yesterdays Future'.

 The website for 1884 Yesterday's future can be found here:

http://www.1884yesterdaysfuture.com/home_e.html

There is a new game on arriving in town that will tickle your steampunk fancies... it is called "Sir, You are being hunted!". It is set upon a small British island, think of a relatively unpopulated version of the Isle of Mull. The island has small hamlets with automatically generated names such as "Little Bumting" or "Much Canning in the Marsh". The game uses a BCG or British Countryside Generating engine to create realistically haunting backgrounds for you to hunt in complete with mists. In actual fact, it isn't really you that does any of the hunting, except to stay alive or obtain certain artifacts that you need to escape the island. Most of the hunting is performed by the AI in the form of non-player characters such as the unsurprisingly named "The Hunter". He is a tweed-wearing, pipe smoking, awfully polite but incredibly vicious robot that mimics the manners of a British country gentleman, minus the tea. He spends his time looking for you in the most realistic but peculiar manner and when he finds you, you are dead.

The game shows the eery and haunting landscape that the 'tweedbots' inhabit.  It looks familiar but unwelcoming. It reminds me of the opening scenes of the 1940s film "Great Expectations" where the main character Pip stumbles along the water's edge to the church in the marshes where he meets the escaped prisoner from the prison-hulks off-shore. If "Sir, You are being hunted!" generates just a portion of the fear inherent in the beginning of that old film, it will do well. Find it here: Sir, You are being hunted!

We have just released the latest desktop widget which is our Steampunk Resource Monitor Yahoo Widget.  The widget is strongly steampunk in style which means it has a pseudo-electro-mechanical interface that allows you to interact with the widget on a more personal level. Modern computer interfaces are often designed by computer nerds that don't have a clue as to how alienating their interfaces have become. The truth is that you often have to know about computers before you can interact with one. The new generation of tablets deisgners have understood this and have taken the computer out of their interfaces replacing them with simple gesture based interaction. Recognising that people want the interface to work with them rather than against them is the first step. We may also want to customise the interface to our own requirements, these steampunk widgets allow you to do just that. The mechanical nature of the widgets gives the user a method of interacting with the computer that is familiar: a gauge; a valve; a mechanical toggle; push buttons and sliding controls. These items are not uniquely steampunk as they already exist on computer apps in one form or another, using Steampunk style they are just made more friendly to identify and use.

For instance, each of the controls has a friendly tooltip so that when the mouse is hovered over each item a simple description will pop up. In addition a full help screen is provided.  The Widget is downloadable here:  

The  widget functionality is self-explanatory, tinker with it and you will soon get to grips with it. See the full instructions and diagram here for a fuller explanation . 

This is a Yahoo widget so it requires the YWE! engine which you can get here.

It will run on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and the new Windows o/s called Metro or something, oh yes, Windows 8...  one of the next versions will also run fully on Mac OS/X.

This widget has been tested on Windows XP Pro SP3, Vista Home 32bit, Windows 7 ultimate 64bit and Mac OS/X and it should work on these with no problems whatsoever.

One of the widgets that I have used to report current cpu usage seems to have been playing up recently. This was a widget by a chap called Jozerworx that was designed specifically for systems with dual or multiple processors. This widget used the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)  to extract this data from my operating system - Windows XP.  It has to be done this way because the Yahoo Widget Engine does not provide the level of granularity for cpu uilisation on individual cores within a dual or multi-core system. Using YWE! you can only extract the number of processors and the cpu utilisation of all the processors combined.

I have been writing a new steampunk widget that will provide a dashboard showing various system resources including memory, battery usage for laptops, wireless signal, disc capacity and individual cpu core utilisation. In order to obtain the individual core cpu usage it would also need to use the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interface to extract this information. I extracted some WMI code snippets from various sources and prepared to code my widget to extract the same information.

Whilst coding and testing I could not make the widget report the correct cpu levels for the individual cores on a core 2 duo system, initially I thought it was my code but looking deeper it seemed as if the mistake was in the way WMI was reporting. I checked older widgets and found they were also reporting core cpu usage values higher than they should have been.

I looked at the WMI code on Jozerworx' multiple core cpu widget and it seemed there definitely was a problem which was causing the widget to report core cpu usage at 100% over reality. When I compared the widget to the information shown in windows XP task manager, XP's reported total usage was 50% of what the widget was stating. The sampling interval was the same, so something, somewhere, was very, very wrong.

I checked the Yahoo Widget Engine's system.cpu function and it reported the same overall cpu usage aover the same interval as the Task Manager, confirming my suspicion. It was only the WMI interface that reported the usage 100% higher than it should have been.

The formula provided by Microsoft is to sample the processor usage at two different points in time N1 & N2 and take two time stamps D1 & D2, this provides the cpu usage over the sample interval. Here is the code:

                // Formula - (1- ((N2 - N1) / (D2 - D1))) x 100

                var object = "Win32_PerfRawData_PerfOS_Processor.Name=0";
                oldtimestamp = timestamp;
                for( loop =0; loop < processorCount; loop ++ )
                {
                        wmiCpuValOld[loop] = wmiCpuVal[loop];
                        object = "Win32_PerfRawData_PerfOS_Processor.Name="+loop;
                        wmiCpuVal[loop] = parseInt(wmi.Get( object ).Properties_.Item( "PercentProcessorTime" ).Value);
                        timestamp = parseInt(wmi.Get( object ).Properties_.Item( "TimeStamp_Sys100NS" ).Value);
                        cpuPerc[loop] = (parseInt(( 1- (( wmiCpuVal[loop]-wmiCpuValOld[loop] )/( timestamp-oldtimestamp )))*100));
                        cpuPerc[loop] = cpuPerc[loop] / processorCount;
                        if(cpuPerc[loop]<0)
                       {
                             cpuPerc[loop] = 0;
                        }
                 }

The above is my version of the code, the original extracted from the konfabulator forums. I looked at the widget code and increased the sample rate to x 5 , x 10 and discovered that the error isn't in the above code but that the reported WMI values do definitely seem to be doubled... still not quite sure why, WMI provides PercentProcessorTime for core 0 and 1 and it does report something but it seems that the resulting number simply needs to be halved, it may have something to do with the number of cores in my Acer 7720, two in my case. It may also be to do with the fact that I am running XP Service Pack 3.

To test I simply changed the widget code and modified the CPU data (cpuPerc[loop]) for each core by dividing it by 2 and adding each cores values together, the result matched the total processor usage, matching what the default YW engine provides over the same interval and XP's task manager.

OK, so I have a fix but it does not seem right and I still don't quite 'get' why WMI is doing this. I can only find one other chap on t'net who is experiencing the same issue. I now need to test it on a 4 core system to see if it exhibits the same error and whether the number of cores is part of the issue. I do understand that there has been some backporting of Vista WMI changes to XP and that may have caused the problem.

When I finish the code changes to the steampunk resource monitor widget it will be able to report on 1-4 core processors, it is almost completed and will be available soon. 

I was asked by another developer why I still continue to code with the Yahoo Widget Engine now that support has been withdrawn by Yahoo. Well, regardless of their support the widget engine still works on Windows/Macs and it is very easy to code in it. In fact Yahoo's support for the widget does not mean much as they didn't do much with it for years...

In any case my widgets are known specifically for their 'Steampunkiness' so if someone wants one of my Steampunk widgets they either already have the engine installed or they will install the engine just to have my widgets (the engine is still downloadable at the same location as ever). I am still having 150+ widget downloads per day from my site alone, hundreds elsewhere. Also, creating widgets is a very easy process. I use photoshop as the development 'IDE' using a conversion script that creates widgets from photoshop layers almost automatically.  I can knock up a complicated-looking widget using photoshop in minutes . The javascript is portable and can be converted to JSON pretty easily, see my website(using firefox or chrome) for the result, look top left - the orrery started as a widget, so the coding investment is not lost.

To sum up I suppose I still use YWE for Rapid Application Development or RAD. I still haven't found a method of RAD coding that is as convenient, straight-forward and is compatible for both windows and Mac. I am still looking at QT designer and Xwidget(JS/VB scripting) but often with these environments, as soon as they become stable they also become obsolete. I still code in VB6 for the same reason. I am sure VB6 will outlast .NET and there is still nothing that compares with it as a good 'RAD' tool as VB6 or the Yahoo Widget Engine.  

If you are running Joomla 1.0.15 and your provider upgrades from PHP 5.2 to 5.3 you will be faced with a lot of error messages of the type:

Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated
Function eregi() is deprecated
Function eregi_replace() is deprecated
Function split() is deprecated
Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated

To fix this situation if you are going to continue run Joomla 1.0.15 on PHP 5.3 you have several choices: Firstly, find a friendly host that will continue to run PHP 5.2 for you. This is possible but let us be honest this is only a temporary solution as PHP 5.2 will eventually be shelved by everyone and when 5.3 is rolled out everywhere, you will be left out in the cold. It is only a matter of time. However, if you do need such a friendly host then contact me and I'll provide the details.

Secondly, upgrade your Joomla 1.0.15 website, extensions and applications to the latest version of Joomla 2.5. This is a fine and laudable idea but in reality it is rather a lot of work, probably several days and of course, an upgrade - it isn't. It is a straight site rebuild from scratch which may end up looking just the same as the old site but for a lot of work and a lot of cash. To perform a Joomla site migration you have to migrate to 1.5 first and then of course you have to migrate to 1.6/7 then to Joomla 2.5 and again to 3.0 when it comes out, bearing in mind the current frequency of Joomla releases means that you could be rebuilding your site every year to eighteen months...and this does not even take into account all the 3rd party application data you will also need to migrate.

Thirdly, you could migrate to Joostina 1.3, Joostina is Joomla 1.0.15 on steroids and is fully compatible with PHP 5.3. The upgrade from Joomla 1.0.15 to Joostina 1.2 was very  simple, you just needed to copy the PHP code over the old joomla code and then you had a fully Joomla 1.0 compatible site that ran all your Joomla extensions. All you needed to do was to change the language files from Russian to English.

The upgrade from Joostina 1.2  to 1.3 (to obtain PHP 5.3 compatibility) is merely an upgrade and not a whole migration as is the 'upgrade' from joomla 1.0 to 1.5. Apart from copying the code the only significant changes being a few extra columns in certain tables. The good thing about Joostina 1.3 is that it is fully PHP 5.3 compatible. As long as your joomla extensions are all PHP 5.3 compatible then you are laughing!

The only major obstacle is that Joostina is still a Russian CMS and the English translations are lagging behind. I can now easily install an English version of Joostina 1.2  and with the English language translation files in place you could easily use the backend, seeing only a very few remaining untranslated items. Joostina 1.3 is fully PHP 5.3 compatible but as yet it seems that no-one has been able to find the time to convert the backend language files to English. Give me time though and I intend to do it so this route will finally be a realistic option. Click here to view a site running Joostina 1.2 on PHP 5.2 http://www.newventureproducts.co.uk (PHP 5.3 site build in progress - link coming soon).

So, that brings us to the main choice, you can simply make changes to your Joomla 1.0 installation to make it PHP 5.3 compatible. This is probably the easiest option and it will take approximately a day.

Option no.4 - Make Joomla 1.0 installation PHP5.3 compatible - How to actually do it?

You will need a good ftp tool such as WinSCP to transfer the files to your PC where you will be making the changes, a good search and replace tool such as Ecobyte's "Replace Text 2.2" , a good search tool such as 'baregrep ' and a good code editor such as 'context '. You will be searching for occurrences of deprecated PHP 5.2 functions such as eregi, eregi_replace, ereg, &new and split and you will be amending them so that they stop generating any errors when your PHP is upgraded to 5.3. Baregrep can make it very easy to see where these functions occur in the Joomla code, simply search all *.PHP files for the deprecated  functions. When you are confident about making the changes, Ecobyte's search and replace tool will make it very easy to actually make the changes to the code without any accidentally making any mistakes.
 
The first task is to transfer the files down to your PC so you can make the changes locally. Either take a backup, transfer the backup down and restore it locally or simply transfer all the site files down manually. I transferred not only Joomla but all my 3rd party components, modules and mambots, the lot, as I was prepared to make changes to them all at the same time.

Replacing ereg

When you have a local copy of the site ready for change, use baregrep and search for 'ereg' in all PHP files. All occurrences of any function starting with 'ereg' must be changed to '@ereg', this will suppress any error messages generated when PHP is using these functions. You can't do the changes manually as there may be many occurrences of the text to change, you'll need a bulk text changer like Ecobyte's "Replace Text 2.2" or a similar tool to make the changes. Ecobyte's "Replace Text 2.2" isn't the easiest tool to use but get the hang of the tool as it does the job well.

look for:   ereg

(note the preceding space) and replace with:  @ereg
complete with preceding space.

look for:   (ereg

and replace with:  (@ereg

look for:   !ereg

and replace with:

!@ereg

-oOo-

Things to watch out for:

Take care not to replace any other occurrences of this text string in help messages or in text/code elsewhere. For example in the Dutch translation of some components the word Geregistreerd is used regularly and it contains 'ereg'. Also some daft programmers use the text 'ereg' in their variables, joomlaXplorer does this using a variable $ereg.

Basically, you will need to review all your changes to ensure that only changes to deprecated code are made.

You should watch out for the geshi library files \libraries\geshi\php-brief.php and \libraries\geshi\php.php - don't make any changes in these two files as it is simply referring to the utilities and not calling them.

Purists will state that suppressing the errors is not the right thing to do and instead you should be replacing the 'ereg' functions with PHP 5.3 'preg' functions. This is the 'ideal' thing to do in an ideal world but in reality the number of changes you would be making and the amount of testing you would have to do makes this a little impractical. Be aware that these 'deprecated' errors are just warnings in any case, their job is to make the site owner aware that these 5.2 functions will one day be removed from future versions of PHP. The good news is that regardless of the messages, they work perfectly well in PHP 5.3 and 5.4, so for the medium term, usage of these functions is secure for your Joomla 1.0 site. We are not talking months but several years here regarding the availability of PHP 5.3 alone. Web hosts first started running PHP 5.2 in 2007 and it is stll here in late 2012. PHP 5.3 arrived in mid-2009 and will be available until 2015-2016.

Replacing split

The second task is to search for use of the function 'split' and replace it with the new PHP 5.3 function 'explode'.  It is a straight like-for-like swap, easy to do. Be careful of replacing every occurrence of split as this is also a commonly used word and is likely to be used elsewhere in 3rd party code, possibly as a variable, just look for all uses of the split text and be prepared to exclude files that make use of the word split in other ways.

look for:

 split (

(note the preceding and subsequent spaces) and replace with  explode(
complete with preceding and following spaces. 

 split(

(note the preceding space) and replace with  explode(
complete with preceding space.

.split(

and replace with .explode(

Note that the word split is used in other functions such as preg_split so don't just do a general search and replace on the word 'split', ensure that you replace exactly as specified above with a preceding space and full stop.

Replacing &new / & new

The third and final task you will need to perform is to look for all occurrences of '& new' and '&new' statements and replace them simply with 'new'. Once again, be careful and selective where you make changes as '&new' may also appear as part of a hard-coded URL especially in 3rd party components that build URLs such as virtuemart.

Removing set_magic_quotes_runtime errors

The magic quotes runtime was previously used to ensure that any functions that returned data from any sort of external source including databases and text files would have quotes escaped with a backslash, it was deprecated in PHP 5.3. As a result the following error will occur many times when you have Joomla cacheing switched ON:

Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated in Cache/Lite.php on line 524

Some changes need to be made to this file /includes/Cache/Lite.php

All occurrences of the set_magic_quotes_runtime function need to be replaced by a conditional if statement.

for example:

                        //set_magic_quotes_runtime(0); - this the old line
                        // Check if magic_quotes_runtime is active
                        if(get_magic_quotes_runtime())
                        {
                            // Deactivate
                            set_magic_quotes_runtime(0);
                        }

The function occurs three times in various forms within the file, simply change each occurrence and add a wrapper to each. When you turn cacheing back on the error will no longer occur.

-oOo-

com_contact vcard.class.php error

When you click on the contact page of your site if you are using the Joomla 1.0 contact component, the following error may occur.

In vcard.class.php at line 36 you will find the function 'quoted_printable_encode'. This function is declared twice. To avoid the error add some code to checking if the function already exists. Add the if statement and subsequent closing curly bracket }.

if(!function_exists('quoted_printable_encode')) {
 function quoted_printable_encode($input, $line_max=76) {
       .
       .
       .
       }
}

-oOo-

That's it, that is the changes made. So how do we test? Many professional hosts can turn on PHP5.3 selectively, so if you are running WHM and CPANEL then each of your domains can simply be toggled between PHP 5.2 and 5.3. It might be wise to build a duplicate site and switch that to 5.3 as a trial

You could simply inform your users and switch your target site to PHP 5.3 - but that might be just asking for trouble. I suggest you build a duplicate, switch it to PHP 5.3, make the changes, at first it will still generate hundreds of error messages of the type:

Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated
Function eregi() is deprecated
Function eregi_replace() is deprecated
Function split() is deprecated
Deprecated: Function set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated

But as you selectively apply your code changes to the site you can watch as the errors disappear... When the site is complete it will be ready to go live.

If you have made the changes locally you should then start to migrate them back to the live site using your FTP tool. I recommend that you copy chunks of the code up, folder by folder. Perhaps, first the administrator sections, modules, templates &c.What I dois to rename the old modules folder to modules.1 and then copy the new modules folder across. This means I have the old unchanged folder to hand just in case I need to restore a file or two.

Then check the backend works as you copy each folder in turn. Any errors introduced will be easier to diagnose if done bit by bit. Check the standard Joomla back end and then the components, modules and mambots. Check the errors as they occur and fix them as they crop up. Most will be caused by accidental or mistaken replacements. Remember, you have the backups and can restore any file you need.

Then copy the include folder, front end mambots, modules and components folders, taking care to test as you copy. In this way it should be possible to make and migrate all the changes within the span of one day's hard work, even including time spent diagnosing mistakes made in error, in the code.

-oOo-

It will take a while but the end result will be a Joomla 1.0.15 site that is fully functional in PHP 5.3, a site that will be able to run for three/four more years, this will give you time to replace those ereg functions with the correct 'preg' functions so that the site will be fully compatible with even later versions of PHP beyond 6.0.

Bear in mind that there is a real concrete benefit from running Joomla 1.0.15 in PHP 5.3 - the site will run significantly faster as PHP5.3 is definitely quicker than 5.2. It will run faster than an equivalent Joomla 1.5 site and that one benefit alone benefit cannot be dismissed.

Lastly, a kind soul called Micheas Herman has created an unofficial patch of Joomla 1.0 to take it to 1.0.16. What he has done is to replace a lot of the deprecated functions with updated code that is now compatible with PHP 5.3. However, the changes are incomplete and as a result there are still occurrences of deprecated code in the code base and so errors will occur. I estimate that the job is approx. 70% complete and I am guessing that Michaes simply made changes to prevent any errors that were occurring on his site. These may well correct the majority of errors in the majority of sites - so the patch may well be suitable for you. However I consider it a work in progress but a good base from which to continue to make the changes. I making the remainder of the changes myself and will offer an unoffical 1.0.17 patch to download when it is ready.  Michaes 1.0.16 patch is here and my Joomla 1.0.17 patch will be here when it is ready - it is currently untried and untested but the changes have been made to the code.

-oOo-

To show you that running a Joomla 1.0.15 site on PHP 5.3 is possible, here is an example of a modified Joomla 1.0.15 site running Virtuemart 1.0.15 on PHP5.3 - carstuffdirect.co.uk. This site has had all the deprecated ereg functions replaced by preg_match syle functions. The site is an un-cached and un-optimised site that runs efficiently and definitely faster than a comparative Joomla 1.5 site. So, if you want your Joomla 1.0.15 site to be transplanted deeper into the 21st century without having to incur all the work to migrate and rebuild a new site from scratch then this is a workable alternative. None of this work is beyond a Joomla specialist and you could possibly do it yourself if you are an Joomla enthusiast - with some technical competence, some confidence and the free tools  listed above. 

If you want someone else to carry out the work for you then it could be done for a mere day's pay ... contact me here:

I believe I have just created the only (I think) Pinterest mambot/plugin for Joomla 1.0 that currently exists. The mambot will provide a simple "Pin it" button on the top of your content pages that will allow you to automatically  link images on your content pages directly to Pinterest. See it here, top right next to the Facebook share button. Click on it. What is Pinterest? Well, Pinterest is the new social media site that allows members to post pages of glossy images extracted from the sites they like best. Pinterest users create a portfolio page showing a range of images they personally 'like'. It is very similar to Facebook where you like a page's contents but with Pinterest it focusses on pictures and images instead. The end result of a lot of pinning is a page that visually reflects the character of the pinner. You can see one of my Pinterest pages here at Steampunk Today.

At the moment the mambot will only pick up a page with locally hosted images embedded, so simply ensure that each one of your articles has an locally-hosted image regardless of any other content it provides. The current mambot does not currently register any videos embedded using youtube but hopefully that functionality will come soon.

The plugin can be configured to display the pinterest button in a vertical or horizontal stack. It can be turned off or on for the front page or excluded from appearing altogether in defined categories. The button can be simply styled by incorporating your own CSS into a styling field and additional pinterest buttons can be configured to appear anywhere in your text. It can also be made to work on virtuemart 1.0 items by a minor change to the shop.product_details.php file. I also have it working on Jdownloads. Instructions on how to do this can be easily extracted from me, all you need to do is get in contact.

Ensure you enable the plugin after installing it. If the pinterest link does not appear at first, do not worry, it will, try clearing the Joomla cache and your browser's cache. A couple of refreshes after that and it should start to appear site-wide. Sometimes it takes a while for a Joomla 1.0 plugin to wake up!.  You can see the mambot working on this page, top right. Try clicking on it. It should find the clipboard image and post it to your pinterest page along with the article title.

This Mambot is based upon a totally different social bookmarking mambot created by Patrick Swesey in 2007. It was radically changed by Dean Beedell in 2011 to provide Facebook buttons and it has now been modified further in 2012 to provide that missing pinterest linking functionality that you've found so hard to find for Joomla 1.0.15. It should also work on Joostina 1.2 built sites (Joostina is Joomla 1.0.15 on steroids)

As of today it has been tested on Joomla 1.0.15 and Joostina 1.2 ONLY, running Artio JoomSEF, mostly everything works but if it doesn't please don't complain - just get in touch and we can try to fix it. Remember it is free but a donation is gratefully accepted in return for support.

If you like this plugin please find a lot more useful stuff in the downloads section and consider getting in touch with me by emailing me here to say how much you like/don't like the plugin or simply leave a comment below. You can find the plugin here. for free download.

Virtuemart 1.1.n is a legacy application - in that it generally requires the Joomla  legacy plugin to be enabled.

For example: you may find that on the VM dedicated pages that no error is generated but where you have just a standard Joomla page (such as the contact page) and it displays a virtuemart module somewhere, then the following virtuemart parser error may be generated.

Warning: main(/administrator/components/com_virtuemart/global.php) [function.main]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/sitename/public_html/components/com_virtuemart/virtuemart_parser.php on line 74.

The reason for this is that Virtuemart 1.1.n uses joomla 1.0 legacy variables such as $mosConfig_absolute_path and $mosConfig_live_site and these are no longer defined by Joomla 1.5 when running in native mode and so are only defined by Virtuemart itself. When you call a virtuemart module on a non-virtuemart page then the module finds these variables are undefined and the page falls over in a heap, generating error messages like the one above.

So, to fix this you need to either turn on legacy mode to cause Joomla to define those legacy variables (legacy mode slows the site down) or you need to ensure the following lines of code exist in virtuemart.cfg.php at approx. line 19.

global $mosConfig_absolute_path,$mosConfig_live_site, $mosConfig_secret;

// these path and url definitions here are based on the Joomla! Configuration
define( 'URL', 'http://www.sitename.co.uk/' );
define( 'SECUREURL', 'https://www.sitename.co.uk/' );

$mosConfig_absolute_path = '/home/siteholder/public_html/'; // Here you insert the root of your files
$mosConfig_live_site = 'http://www.sitename.co.uk';

With these lines in place - the two variables should be defined all the time and the error should not be generated. Although the current version of virtuemart is 2.0, it is not possible for everyone to upgrade. VM2.0 is still an immature product and VM 1.1 is stable and works, there are hundreds of plugins, templates for VM11.1. This answer will still be of use to many that are running virtuemart 1.1 for any undefined reason.

PS. It is still possible for the site to throw a wobbly when these changes have been done. I have one site configured above that occasionally hangs for a long time then throws the same virtuemart parser error message. If this occurs then you need to enable the legacy plugin again, refresh the caches and all will be well.  I still have not identified the conditions where this instance of the error occurs. The site in question runs with Joomla cacheing enabled, SQL Query cacheing, Artio SEF URLs and of course, legacy Virtuemart.

You've bought a genuine copy of Artio JoomSEF 3.4.2 and you can't get rid of the text that appears on the bottom of each and every page: "Joomla SEF URLs by Artio". Why do you want to do it? Well, perhaps you don't want to advertise someone else's prodct or services on your website? or perhaps you think that Google spiders will see this link, assume it is spam and mark down your site accordingly? or perhaps you think it does not look professional to have an unrelated link on the page. Perhaps you want to disguise the fact that the site is a Joomla site from botnets that are attacking your Joomla site - regardless of your reason for wanting to do so, the boys at Artio have spent a lot of time and money creating this JoomSEF product and their reason for placing the link on the page is to mark the product as being the unregistered, free version. They want some payback from you using their component for free. The advertising they get from each and every site that uses the component and displays that link is a small payment in return. Some organisations give their software out for free, that is the beauty of open source software. Artio are in that half-way house where you can obtain their software for free, you can analyse and change the code freely but you need to read their terms and conditions before you do so. By removing that text from the free version you may be doing something morally or legally 'wrong'.

There are reasons where you might want to legitimately remove it, perhaps you have paid for support are trying to upgrade to the commercial version of the product but you are getting no response from Artio's forum (response times even for paid queries are notoriously slow) Perhaps you have paid Artio but don't want to upgrade to a later version for a technical reason (later version has a bug or lacks a feature) so you are stuck withn an older version that you can't upgrade to the paid version... then you might want to make the changes to remove this inserted, unwanted text and may feel entirely justified in doing so.

I've written this article a few times for different versions of Artio JoomSEF and every now and then I regurgitate it as Artio change their method for placing the text on the screen. In the past they used various means to obfuscate the code but of late the string is in plain text. This makes it easier to remove.

So, down to the nitty-gritty. To remove the that appears on the bottom of each and every page: "Joomla SEO powered by JoomSEF" you need to edit the file joomsef.php in your components/com_sef folder.

If your ftp tool has downloaded this file properly at about line 818 you will see the line:

        $buf.='<'.'d'.'i'.'v'.'>'.'<'.'a'.' '.'h'.'r'.'e'.'f'.'='.'"'.'h'.'t'.'t'.'p'.':'.'/'.'/'.'w'.'w'.'w'.'.'.'a'.'r'.'t'.'i'.'o'.'.'.'n'.'e'.'t'.'"'.' '.'s'.'t'.'y'.'l'.'e'.'='.'"'.'f'.'o'.'n'.'t'.'-'.'s'.'i'.'z'.'e'.':'.' '.'8'.'p'.'x'.';'.' '.'v'.'i'.'s'.'i'.'b'.'i'.'l'.'i'.'t'.'y'.':'.' '.'v'.'i'.'s'.'i'.'b'.'l'.'e'.';'.' '.'d'.'i'.'s'.'p'.'l'.'a'.'y'.':'.' '.'i'.'n'.'l'.'i'.'n'.'e'.';'.'"'.' '.'t'.'i'.'t'.'l'.'e'.'='.'"'.'W'.'e'.'b'.' '.'d'.'e'.'v'.'e'.'l'.'o'.'p'.'m'.'e'.'n'.'t'.','.' '.'J'.'o'.'o'.'m'.'l'.'a'.','.' '.'C'.'M'.'S'.','.' '.'C'.'R'.'M'.','.' '.'O'.'n'.'l'.'i'.'n'.'e'.' '.'s'.'h'.'o'.'p'.' '.'s'.'o'.'f'.'t'.'w'.'a'.'r'.'e'.','.' '.'d'.'a'.'t'.'a'.'b'.'a'.'s'.'e'.'s'.'"'.'>'.'J'.'o'.'o'.'m'.'l'.'a'.' '.'S'.'E'.'F'.' '.'U'.'R'.'L'.'s'.' '.'b'.'y'.' '.'A'.'r'.'t'.'i'.'o'.'<'.'/'.'a'.'>'.'<'.'/'.'d'.'i'.'v'.'>';


Simply replace this line with the following text:
       
$buf.="";

Make sure you back the original file up in advance so you can restore it in case your edits go awry.

This article is not intended to deter anyone from paying for their Artio JoomSEF component. It is here purely to help those who need to remove the text and who feel justified in doing so. I put Artio JoomSEF on all my sites, I recommend that others do so. Every now and then I send Artio some cash for a new site I am building which I am paid to build. I feel justified in removing the advertising text with the knowledge that I will be sending Artio some cash in the very near future as soon as the site has been sold or payment is received from the client.