Posted by Brett the Younger on September 30, 2008 under PHP | 
An online job application system that emails an administrator the application once it was submitted wasn’t sending the email. On my local machine it worked fine, but as soon as I tried on wcdev it didn’t work. The first fix was to use Phpmailer since Zend i5/OS doesn’t support the mail() function.
So the emails were being sent but a lot of times there was no subject line, or in other words it was left blank. After much trial and error and many file pushes thanks to Ryan, I figured out that it only happens when there is a file attached to the email.
After more exploration I saw that the subject was being passed correctly to the send function, but that it still wasn’t being set for some reason.
For one reason or another Zend ignores the subject field in the mail() function, but everything in the body and headers was showing correctly.
So the quick fix I found is to set the subject in the email header. So far it is working just like it should.
The quick hack is on line 909 or so of the PHPMailer class file:
/* mail() sets the subject itself */
// if($this->Mailer != 'mail') {
// $result .= $this->HeaderLine('Subject', $this->EncodeHeader($this->SecureHeader($this->Subject)));
// }
//The subject must be set in the header for the Zend i5/OS
$result .= $this->HeaderLine('Subject', $this->EncodeHeader($this->SecureHeader($this->Subject))); |
Posted by Dustin on September 29, 2008 under Websphere Commerce |
first of all you go download your fixpack from the place. then you put it in this directory
D:\Rational\SDP\6.0\runtimes\base_v6\updateinstaller\maintenance
after that you should backup your profiles (in fact the updater will tell you to but you can ignore it if you are brave) in D:\Commerce\6.0\wasprofile\bin to do this you open a cmd line and navigate to said directory then run backupConfig.bat file.zip
once the backup is complete (or if you opted to ignore it) you then back out of D:\Rational\SDP\6.0\runtimes\base_v6\updateinstaller\maintenance to D:\Rational\SDP\6.0\runtimes\base_v6\updateinstaller\
doubleclick update.exe
a wizard will start and you can “Next>” then browse to the new .pak file that you want to update. once you find the file and click “next” it will warn you to backup your profile. After that just sit and wait for things to happen.
oh you will need to shut down your server and instance of websphere if it is running.
Posted by Jason on September 19, 2008 under Web Development |
Litmus is a site that lets you test html emails in different email clients. It will also rate your emails for their ‘spaminess’ based on the engines of some of the more popular spam filters like Barracuda, SpamAssassin, etc. I think we should use this when we send our next html email.
Here is the sitepoint article that talks about it http://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/viewissue.php?id=5&issue=49
And here is the link to the homepage http://litmusapp.com/
It does cost money. Here is the pricing:
Pricing
The Litmus pricing structure seems to me to be a good fit for most designers and developers. They offer a three-tier system:
- a single-user 24-hour license (US$24)
- a single-user one-month license (US$49)
- a multi-user one-month license (US$199)
Posted by Sid on September 17, 2008 under Websphere Commerce |
Select “Operations – Find Inventory”:
Enter a product name or the SKU (without the prd_):
Select the item SKU (the one without the prd_) and select “Adjust Quantity”:
Select “Decrease…” and enter a value equal to the current inventory to take it out of stock, or select “Increase…” and give it whatever value you wish to put it back in:
Posted by Dustin on September 16, 2008 under Web Development, Websphere Commerce |
So everytime we start a new site, and I’ve been doing a lot of them lately but you wouldn’t know it because they never go live, we have to set up In Home Assembly on the big 3 (treadmills, ellipticals, exercise bikes). this always gets me because I can never remember the correct way to do a merchadising association. Therefore, for this cause have i decided to write this post in order that I can remember how to do these things next time.
the first few steps are easy so we’ll breeze through them.
- Create a new category in the master catalog.
- Create new products for In Home Assembly in the new category in the master catalog.
- set prices on said new products in the new category in the master catalog. (I think you see where this is going)
- generate SKUs on the new products in the new category in the master catalog.
- edit SKU’s ID in the new products in the new category in the master catalog.
Now here comes the tricky part, Setting up Merchandising Associations:
- in Accelerator go to Merchandise -> Find Merchandising Associations
- change “Number of Search results” at bottom of page to as many as possible.
- click “Find” (if it feels weird cuz you never typed anything just ignore that).
- find product SKU that you want to Associate In Home Assembly with.
- click little check box to left of said SKU (make sure no other checkboxes are clicked or you’ll pull your hair out).
- in the “code” box to the right type the SKU of desired In Home Assembly thingy.
- click Add
- you should see two new drop down boxes appear under “Target Catalog Entries” if you don’t you have too many checkboxes checked, uncheck some and start agian, but don’t start at the beginning start at the middle.
- the first checkbox “Association” should be set to “up sell” there is a trick to this cuz once you click the drop down you have to click it again…you’ll see.
- the next “Schematic” should be set to “none“
- click save
- find next product SKU and start all over again, but don’t start from the beginning start from the middle.
if you have any questions just look at how it was done on previous sites (ProForm, NordicTrack [even though it never went live], Reebok, Weslo, WorkouWarehouse, and now HealthRider).
Posted by Phil on September 10, 2008 under Web Development |
In my efforts to try to post more I have decided to share some tips about a few of the other Firefox add-ons that I find useful.
Today we will be covering:
- YSlow
- Live HTTP Headers
- Tamper Data
- XPather
YSlow is a firebug plug-in that has been created by the Yahoo Developer Network. It’s a relatively simple tool that shows up in your status bar (right next to firebug). It has a little speedometer and “YSlow” next to it. By clicking on it, you activate it’s function, which is to run a short series of tests on the site you are looking or working on. It then loads how long it took to load the page, the file-size, and the grade of the site. It then shows a “report card” on the left of the tool. The report card is broken down into performance areas. clicking on it will let you know what did wrong and give you a link to the Yahoo Developer Network guide to cleaning and speeding up your website. I personally used this yesterday and sped the WebTop up from loading in .5 seconds to .3 second (with and empty cache – .2 with a full one). I also sprited the site and cut off 80k worth of fat. I wouldn’t use this tool everyday, but it is nice to have around when you really want to see how your site performs (there are a ton of other features bundled in this, but for the sake of the post I’ll let you read it at the official YSlow website).
Live HTTP Headers is a great little app for firefox. Similar in nature to both Fiddler2 and httpspy for IE, this allows you to see exactly what is being passed through your browser as well as make small modifications to them and resend the request (remember kids, let’s not be malicious). If you don’t really know what fiddler or httpspy is, you probably won’t understand this tool… but I used it to find the real location of a video file I wanted to download that was being obscured by a flash player, so it can be helpful. Oh and I used it to find out why a page was throwing errors about content loading from both secure and non-secure links (turned out to be a tracking js file… dirty tracking js).
This of course brings us to Tamper Data. This is actually a “ninja approved” tool (meaning it came from ninja, and he uses it). This is perfect for checking values in a form submit in say a shopping cart. We used it to compare the values being sent from a ‘live’ cart, and our ‘dev’ cart. It came in very handy when testing the new HealthRider sight and enabled us to find that part of the cart was being double-html-encoded. Yep we could see that the cart was converting our string into html code (you know like a ‘space’ into a’ %20′), and then encoding that encode again. Very ugly stuff. So if you need to see what a form is really sending and you don’t want to skim through your headers etc. This is a great tool to see whats there. Oh I almost forgot, you can catch a form during submit and change the data on it on-the-fly. So we found the bad encode, switched it with a single-encoded string and viola! it worked.
The last tool XPather is not something that I think most of us here would use. However since jQuery has filters that use XPaths, this is a very helpful too to write some slimmed down jQuery-alized javascript code. This add-on allows you to generate and find XPaths in a document. If you’re a Firefox greasemonkey script writer, this will also come in very handy.
If anyone else has some great tools or add-ons that they’d like to share, throw them in the comments.
Posted by Phil on September 3, 2008 under Web Development |
It’s been a while since the last post, but never fear, we just got really busy (ask Dustin about Team Failure…). Anyway, for those on the intranet who have heard of the WebTop, it got a serious upgrade last week (and many serious tune-ups this week). For those of you who haven’t heard of the WebTop, you are in for a real treat. The delightful little web-app is hosted on myboxnumber:81. What does the WebTop do? Let’s take a very brief screenshot tour of the goodness that can be found inside it (it’ll be only a few pics because the webtop *should* be self-explanitory…ish).
(above)This is the WebTop, unless you know what the top nav is for, DONT CLICK IT. It is a “One-Click Regen®” bar. If you need to regenerate the static-homepage of a given site, click there and it will open the static homepage of the logo you clicked in a new window/tab. Also notice the clock in the corner (Dustin requested that 
). Oh and in case you’re wondering the blurry on the top right is the news box, it displays a news feed.
(above)This is the menu (notice that it may or may not resembled popular OS interface designs (wink-wink). Also note that as of yesterday the feature of rolling over one of the menu options now enables the sub-menu to appear (Thank Drew for that, before that you had to click).
The webtop was built using jQuery for all the heavy lifting and gimp for the imagry. Note that it is running a ton of pngs, so don’t even try to use IE6 with it. In fact, just dump IE altogether and use Firefox, Safari, or even Chrome (runs it like a champ). If you have any additions, suggestions, comments, or questions please email/IM/comment about it to me so I can implement/answer your changes/questions.
