Customer Rewards Point Module for Interspire

This is a very interesting feature to bring customers back to your site. I have worked on a rewards point module for Interspire shopping cart.
It works on all the interspire themes and very easy to integrate.


There are 2 sections in the module:

• Admin Section
• Assign points to each product
• Check the status under Orders tab whether orders are paid or customers have redeemed points against their purchase.
• Admin can also assign loyalty points to users and assign it to their account
• Admin can also set the minimum points against every order or amount spent.

• User Section
• Users can see the points earned in their My Account section
• Users can redeem points against products

Contact me if you want to know the module in detail.

Cannot modify header information - headers already sent error

This error ususally comes when we are working with session,cookies,redirects. If you are getting this error then try to follow the below steps to resolve:

• Session should be started at the begining of the script and it should be written at the very first line.
• There should not be any white spaces before session_start();
• If you are using any MVC framework then make sure there are no whitespaces in controller files after the class is closed (after the close php tag " ?> " tag).

Popular open source shopping carts

Paid Version

Interspire

Magento

X-Cart

Free Version

ZenCart

Oscommerce

VirtueMart

UberCart

WordPress Ecommerce

Magento

PrestaShop

Changing the cart quantity in Interspire Shopping Cart

The Cart "quantity" dropdown when changed to textbox allows only 2 digits that can be entered. To change this I tried the following:

1. Open the template folder that is being used. You can check in "Store Design" section of Admin about the template that you are using.
2. Go to Snippets and open  CartItemQtyText.html file.
3. Search for "maxlength=" and change the number or remove it.
4. Save the changes made.

Please note that the above steps has to be repeated when another template is used.

Changing CakePHP sessions settings

CakePHP manages its session inside CakePHP's /tmp directory. To manage cakephp session in wordpress integration add the following lines at the start of wp-config.php

$CAKE_SESSION_COOKIE = 'CAKEPHP';
ini_set('session.name', $CAKE_SESSION_COOKIE);
ini_set('session.cookie_path','app/tmp');
session_start();

?>

Integrating wordpress and cakephp

In one of my recent project I had a task of integrating Cakephp with Wordpress. The content pages had to be in Wordpress and other dynamic features were coming from CakePHP.

While trying to call Cakephp from wordpress or vice versa I was getting errors like "Fatal error: Cannot redeclare __()". These are mainly because of namespace conflict as Wordpress and Cakephp use some functions with same name.

CakePHP defines its functions in cake/basics.php. When Wordpress is integrated the file wp-includes/l10n.php gets included and has the same function names which results in fatal error.

The alternative is to add:

if ( !function_exists('__') ) :
// the function
endif;

for wordpress functions.

But I tried a different work around.
I kept wordpress and app folder of cakephp on root folder. To use same wordpress theme across the website I moved the header and footer.php outside of theme folder and kept in root.
So that the layout of cakephp also calls same header and footer.

Then I changed the .htaccess file to handle wordpress and cakephp related links separately.

This solved the fatal error issue and I was able to use wordpress and cakephp together in my website without any rework.

Tikona wifi with samsung galaxy tab

To connect to tikona wifi on your samsung galaxy tab, follow the below steps:

1.  Find Settings and locate "wireless and network"
2. Switch on wifi and go to wifi settings
3. Click "Add wifi network"
4. You will be presented with a form. Put tikonawifi in SSID textbox
5. From Security options, select 802.1x enterprise
6. Select TTLS as the EAP method
7. For Phase2 Authentication, select MSCHAPv2
8. Identity: put your tikona user id
9. Password: Put your tikona password
10. All other details leave blank 
11. Click Save and connect to the network
12. Now go to browser and open a web page
13. You will be rediected to tikona login page
14. Login using your tikona id and password
15. You are ready to go :)

I followed the above steps and it worked for me. Hope this post will be helpful.

Can't view contents in .chm files?

I downloaded "mysql .chm" help manual from a site and was not able to see the contents. It kept saying "address is not valid" in the right panel.


The solution to this is very simple.

1. Close the .chm file
2. Right click the icon and click on properties
3. Click on Unblock
4. Click on Apply and Save
5. Now double click the .chm file and you will be able to see the contents.

This worked for me and I hope it will work for you as well :)

Tools to connect to Mysql server

Here are the list of tools you can use to connect to your mysql server other than using the command prompt:

1. phpMyAdmin: This is a web based application to manage your database online.
2. Mysql Query Browser
3. Toad for Mysql: This is a freeware development tool for Mysql on windows platform.

Integrate Apache,PHP,Mysql on Windows

Follow these steps:


To install Apache:

1. Downlaod the latest version of apache server for windows from http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi
2. Downlaod the .exe file instead of binary
3. Run the installer.
4. On the "Network Domain" and "server name" put "localhost"
5. Put your emailid
6. Then choose the default recommendatios.
7. If you are choosing "Custom",then you can choose the options you want to keep and it will affect your httpd.conf file.
8. Once done, you can test whether apache server is running by typing: http://localhost/ on browser and it will show a default html message as "It works".

To install PHP:

1. Download the latest version of php for windows from http://www.php.net/downloads.php
2. I normally download the binary but you can download the installer and run.

To install mysql:

1. Download the latest version if mysql from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/
2. You can aslo download Mysql AB Query Browser as well as Mysql Adminstrator.

To integrate PHP,Mysql with Apache:

1. Open your httpd.con file.
2. Change the Document root to the working directory path where you will have all your project files.
3. The same path should be for where it is mentioned Optionss Indexes FollowSymLinks
4. Add index.php in "DirectoryIndex" filles, it will become DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.html.var
5. Where you have all the Add-type listed, add at the end "AddType application/x-httpd-php .php"
6. At the very end of you conf file add PHPIniDir "full path to folder where php.ini file exists"
7. Add LoadModule php5_module "path to/php/php5apache2.dll" (where php is installed, like c:/proram files/)
8. If you are using PHP 5.2.x series then load php5apache2_2.dll
9. Save the file
10. Open php.ini file, and uncomment the extensions that you want to keep like mysql,openssl,curl etc
11. To integrate with mysql, we need to move libmysql.dll as well as libmysqli.dll under windows/system32 folder.
12. Restart the server.
13. Check you configurations using phpinfo();