Tarique's Travails

[CakePHP] A slightly modified QRcode Helper I was working on a project where I needed a helper to create QRcode by various methods. After searching I found a good CakePHP QRcode Helper by Max Dörfler which helped me a lot but few functions were still missing in that, like generating QRcode for Wifi network. The [...]

[CakePHP] Organizing themes in sub-folders CakePHP offers a wonderful built-in theming solution. However, the only shortfall is that all themes are to be kept in a single folder and there is no direct way to organize them in sub-folders. This post assumes that you are familiar with CakePHP Theming concepts. If not, then head on [...]

[How To] Create a component in Joomla – Part II In my last blog post I wrote about How To Create a component in Joomla. The output text was hardcoded into the view. This doesn’t follow the MVC pattern exactly because the view is intended to only display the data, and not contain it. In [...]

Announcing the release of Sphinx Search book Many of you must be following my posts on Sphinx Search Engine over the past one year or so. Well, today I am happy to announce the release of my book Sphinx Search – Beginner’s Guide published by Packt Publishing. The book was released earlier this month, that [...]

[CakePHP] How to show ‘all’ records options while still using paginate Admittedly this is a marginal case but recently a client wanted to show “All” records along with a list of ‘per page’ options for paginated records, for example, something like ’2, 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, All’ or you need to use ‘field sort’ [...]

[How to] Optgroups in select for Drupal CCK module Many times we have taxonomy terms with parent/child relation with requirement that only the child taxonomy should be selected while adding a new content. One such case is Category/Albums in a photo gallery where one must select an album while adding a photo but category plays [...]

[How To] Live index updates in Sphinx search Sphinx search engine can index huge databases with ease and speed. However, when new data (in database or the configured data source) comes in, there is no point in re-indexing everything again and waste our CPU cycles and other resources. Sphinx offers live (almost real time) index [...]

[How To] Post data using PHP streams Recently, I needed to work on a project that needed to post information to another site without the user actually leaving the site and I needed to do this more than thrice and to different urls ! And I did it! Any guesses how ? What ? Ajax [...]

[HowTo] Backup and Restore MySql Databases Do you have a backup of your important mysql databases ? No ? Think about it .. What if you have a Operating System / Filesystem crash ? What if your databases get corrupted due to some reason ? What if you accidentally drop your database or some important [...]

[Getting Started] Functional tests using Selenium Remote Control (RC) If you don’t like testing your application, most likely your users won’t like to test it either. If you have read my last post on Selenium IDE or have used Selenium IDE before read on, we are moving into the next level, if you have not [...]