Development Blog

PHP: Round Number to Minimum Precision

While working on an e-commerce system, I needed to use PHP to round a number to a minimum number of decimal places, but allow for more if needed. For instance, if the value was 1.2, I’d want it rendered as $1.20, but if it was 1.256, I’d want it to keep the precision and render as $1.256. I ended up converting the number to a string, splitting by the decimal, enforcing the minimum precision and then using PHP’s number_format() function, like: Read More »

Joomla 2.5 Component Categories Sub-Nav

I recently found Joomla’s feature to easily add custom component-specific nested Categories. It makes for a quick way to create categories similar to what is used in com_content and an interface to manage those categories without having to build it all manually. You can use JForm to easily add a select menu of your custom categories. The categories interface can even include a custom sub-menu to easily get back to the rest of your component.

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Joomla! 2.5 Toolbar Popup Link Icon

Today I needed to add a new toolbar button to a custom Joomla! component. In the past, I’ve used a more convoluted method of overriding the submitbutton() (or Joomla.submitbutton) JavaScript function and triggering the modal popup manually, but stumbled upon a better solution. Read More »

ProcessForm/NateMail Patch Update

I’m still planning to develop new form processing scripts, but in the meantime, a patch update has been posted for ProcessForm to deal with possible error messages in PHP 5.3+ about the eregi() function being deprecated (has been replaced by the newer preg_match() function). Also, I’ve switched the encoding to utf8 to better support non-English characters in the email text, confirmation screen and MySQL storage.

ProcessForm info and download page ยป

Ajax Form Submission in Joomla 2.5 with jQuery

I’m developing a custom c-commerce component for Joomla 2.5, and today was struggling with using Ajax from my admin lists. I wanted to make small changes to the list via Ajax without having to reload the entire page – publish state, deletes, quick edits, etc. To handle the Ajax form submissions, I was using jQuery and the jQuery Form Plugin. Read More »

Custom Admin Quickicon in Joomla! 2.5

I recently had to dig up how to add a custom admin Quickicon (the icon links on the left side of the Administrator section’s control panel) in Joomla 2.5. In previous versions, I’d just built a custom admin module for each icon. Now, there seems to be a somewhat easier way. Read More »

Joomla Component Preferences Button

I ran into a frustrating issue today while developing a custom component where the Preferences button would not show up. In case I’m not the only one that encounters this, here’s what happened…

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Custom 404 Error Pages in Joomla

I’ve recently had to build custom 404 pages for a few Joomla sites, and it seems like every time it comes up, I have to dig around for the information again and look up how I did it last time. I’m posting the details here so it’s all in one place for me, and hopefully it saves you some time and effort as well. Read More »