PHP

• Turbocharge your Joomla site

  Over the years spent in web page building and maintaining (since 1995, when published my very first webpage on a self-hosted SCO Linux box) a lot of information has been collected, settled down and at the end the best and most important tricks helping to make a website became fast and stable in the same time where surfaced. Despite the fact, that I wrote about this subject several times, it's a subject wich never looses his actuality.

• Use the category alias to tweak your pages according to active category

  There are endless possibilities to made tricks with your template using a little bit of PHP code. Let me show you another one!

• Using the Page Class Suffix in Template Code

  The Page Class Suffix is a parameter in Joomla! content Menu Items. It is set in the Menu Item: [Edit] screen under the "Parameters (Advanced)" section. This will cause Joomla! to either add a new CSS class or modify the existing CSS class for elements in this specific Menu Item layout.

• Virtuemart PayPal old API problem - shipping not transferred to PayPal

  I am angry on Easter bunny. Really... He delivered to me a nasty surprise: lots of my customers complained during/after Easter weekend, that their shops, sometimes the Easter's week began to malfunction: the users using PayPal as payment gateway aren't charged correctly. After studying the problem, I found, that is happening on shops running versions of VirtueMart 1.1.3 to 1.1.9, charging shipping to customers and using the old PayPal API to communicate with the gateway. More precisely, the sipping net amount was not transferred, the shipping tax was sent correctly.

  Then, by searching for "virtuemart shipping not transferred to paypal" I discovered, that I am not alone: there where some 54k+ search results returned!

• Virtuemart Shopper Group discount problem

  The VirtueMart forums are full of complaints like:

  When a shopper from my wholesale group (50% off) opens the product page it shows the parent products discounted price as the price of each child. Any help would be appreciated.

  So, here's the much awaited fix!

• VirtueMart's SMTP problems

  More and more users are switching to Google Mail, Hotmail and other free mail services these days. It's a great move... unless you have VirtueMart and your Joomla is set to send your mails through SMTP. You may easily end seeing something like:

  Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to smtp.gmail.com:25

  The mails from other Joomla apps are sent, just the VirtueMart is behaving badly. Weird thing is, that you can see in the main Joomla config the mailer set up properly, and the port to be used is 465, as required for Google Mail, but as you can see the error message indicates that VirtueMart tries to use port 25! The problem is that VirtueMart has a code flaw, when sending mails through SMTP the port 25 is hardcoded, and isn't inherited from main Joomla configuration file.

  The fix is relatively easy, but you must get your hands dirty with some PHP code.

• When ~Error~ is the Only Thing Showing on Your Joomla Site (White Screen Of Death)

• White death screen on category blog page

  I was sure that ths is an error wich newer come back to me - was a relatively common one in early 2010-s, since dissappeared from my radar. Today one of my former students approached me with his problem. He took over a site running the latest Joomla, and when tried to change the blog list views to category blog views, as the siteowner requested, the respective pages ended up with a white PHP fatal error death screen.

• XML Parsing Error at. Error

  After moving a site to a new server I found this error in the backend - at least one error per page, but casually even more.

  XML Parsing Error at. Error

  No error number, no line number... What a heck!