These are steps to integrate zencart 1.3.8 with phpBB 3.0.1. These steps will ensure if a user create an account in Zencart, an account for the phpBB will also be created and your phpbb3 display appropriate Total number of user and Newest Member nickname at the board index.

1. Install your phpbb3 and ensure it runs perfectly.

2. Open your configure.php inside /includes folder of your Zen-Cart installation and edit this configuration define(‘DIR_WS_PHPBB’, ‘…..Your  Path to your phpbb3 ….’); with correct physical path to your phpbb installation. It must be your physical path! NOT your relative path. For example of physical path see your ‘DIR_FS_CATALOG’ value inside the same configure.php (ensure you have ‘/’ at the end of the path).

3. Enable link to your phpbb3 from your zencart administrator. Inside your zencart administrator go to “Configuration” -> “My Store” and set “Enable phpBB Linkage?” to TRUE.

4. edit class.phpbb.php inside your …/includes/classes folders. Try to find phpbb_create_account function and replace with the following code.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25

function phpbb_create_account($nick, $password, $email_address) {
	if ($this->phpBB['installed'] != true || !zen_not_null($password) || !zen_not_null($email_address) || !zen_not_null($nick)) return false;
	if ($this->phpbb_check_for_duplicate_email($email_address) == 'already_exists') {
		// $this->phpbb_change_email($old_email, $email_address);
	} else {
		$sql = "select max(user_id) as total from " . $this->phpBB['users_table'];
		$phpbb_users = $this->db_phpbb->Execute($sql);
 
		$user_id = ($phpbb_users->fields['total'] + 1);
		$sql = "insert into " . $this->phpBB['users_table'] . "(user_id, group_id, username, username_clean, user_password, user_email, user_regdate) values ('" . (int)$user_id . "',2, '" . $nick . "', '" . $nick . "', '" . md5($password) . "', '" . $email_address . "', '" . time() ."')";
		$this->db_phpbb->Execute($sql);
 
		$sql = "update phpbb_config SET config_value = '{$user_id}' WHERE config_name = 'newest_user_id'";
		$this->db_phpbb->Execute($sql);
 
		$sql = "update phpbb_config SET config_value = '{$nick}' WHERE config_name = 'newest_username'";
		$this->db_phpbb->Execute($sql);
 
		$sql = "update phpbb_config SET config_value = config_value + 1 WHERE config_name = 'num_users'";
		$this->db_phpbb->Execute($sql);
 
		$sql = "INSERT INTO " . $this->phpBB['user_group_table'] . " (user_id, group_id, user_pending) VALUES ($user_id, 2, 0)";
		$this->db_phpbb->Execute($sql);
	}
}

5. Enjoy your nicely integrated phpbb3 forum with zencart. From now on, if a user register an account in Zen-Cart, they will be registered in PHPBB as well.

If you have follow my instruction correctly, now when you create new account in Zen-Cart you will be asked to provide “Forum Nick Name”. You can login in the forum using the Forum Nick Name you have provided and your Zencart password.

Optional: You can manually copy Zen-Cart account that has been setup previously to phpbb user database to integrate them. Next, you can create theme that reflect your store for your phpBB forum. I will not go into detail in here and ZC developers should be able to do these. PS: if you find better solution please let me know

Bookmark & Share:

One aspect in SEO (search engine optimization) is having simple and descriptive URL. For example compare these two url:

1. http://www.yoursite.com/product.php?id=101
2. http://www.yoursite.com/product/laptop

The second URL is easier to remember for human / our visitors and it goes the same for Search Engine. Some search engine do not like special characters such as ‘?’,'=’ in URL.

Now Let me introduce you to MOD_REWRITE (rewrite module for Apache web server). This module is able to redirect a URL request to other page/URL. You can achieve the same behavior by using PHP redirect (header(“Location: destination.php”);), however, mod rewrite give you more control and robustness. What’s more, MOD_REWRITE redirect the user seamlessly which means the user will not know if they are redirected. I will go through the simplest steps to create SEO friendly URL using Apache MOD_REWRITE module. This blog is also serve as basic or simple guide on apache mod rewrite module.

Enough for the chitchat let’s go into main business. First of all you have to make sure that your apache server has mod_rewrite module enabled. By default this module is included in apache web server distribution but it is turned off. So go ahead, edit your server httpd.conf, remove ‘#’ in the Load Module section for rewrite_module or mod_rewrite.so, and restart your server.

All URL rewrite rules for mod rewrite should be put inside “.htaccess” file. Please note the behavior of htaccess file in apache which will apply the rule recursively, thus if you put your “.htaccess” in your web root folder it will affect all other folder under this root folder. Create a “.htaccess” file with the following content:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html displayPage.php?page=$1

Explanation of above rule:

• RewriteEngine on will activate any mod rewrite rule that we have specified, you can put “RewriteEngine off” to turn off rewrite rule on certain folders.
• RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html displayPage.php?page=$1
  This rule will rewrite the url which ended with “.html” so that it will go to displayPage.php. So if you try to go to http://www.mysite.com/our_products.html, you will be redirected to http://www.mysite.com/displayPage.php?page=our_products.
  
  1. ^(.*)\.html - is a regular expression, any URL that match this expression will be redirected. Please note that we can capture any characters that match regular expression by using brackets “( )”. We can refer to this captured string for redirection purposes by using $n (n = number 1,2,3,4…). For more info on regular expression go to http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html
     
  2. displayPage.php?page=$1 - is the redirection destination. $1 is variable which will contain any character that has been captured before, in our regular expression.
     

Now create “displaPage.php”, inside this page you can get the page parameter and display the actual page accordingly. For example:

<?php

    $requestedPage = $_GET['page'];
if ($requestedPage == 'our_products') include("page1.php");
else include("index.php");
?>

Now, If you try to access “our_products.html” in your server you will be viewing “page1.php”. You can do many things inside the displayPage.php in this simple example you may find it is not quite useful, but imagine if you rewrite product name in the url (i.e. fender_electric_guitar.html) into their product code / category code (product.php?productId=50541). In order to achieve this, you can query your database and look for the product id for any product name, inside displayPage.php. Hope you find this blog helpful.

Bookmark & Share:

Within the last couple of days, I have been stressfully tried to upgrade Zencart shop with French language. I have backup the same data in the old database exactly, and move it to my workstation. I have installed French language pack for zen-cart, but it does not work. The special characters in French / other languages (i.e. é, à, ç and the like) was rendered differently (become ê, é, etc.).

At first, I thought the problem was on the database. Since I am not allowed to upload any new files to the server and I don’t want to create security risk by uploading phpmyadmin, so I used MySQL Administration tools to process the database. I have tried to use backup function and MySQL Migration tool but the characters on the web page is still faulty. I have also tried to change the collation and database type from “latin” to “utf8”, but again it did not work.

Finally, I just figured out that it has nothing to do with the database. I just have to change the CHARSET of the html page of the zencart, which can be modified from the language file (English.php, French.php, etc.). The strange characters was rendered differently because It was rendered using iso-8859-1 not UTF-8. The solution is to modify the following line “define(‘CHARSET’, ‘iso-8859-1′);” into “define(‘CHARSET’, ‘utf-8′);”.

Bookmark & Share:

When I wrote stylesheet for my website (www.ferolen.com) couple weeks ago, I encountered some errors. One of the CSS problems is a gap that mysteriously appears between DIV elements. Most of the time we would like to has two div elements to stick together smoothly especially if we use it to contain background image. You have set the padding and margin to 0, but it does not help. However, if you apply border around the DIV, magically the gap disappear. These symptoms usually occur when you have element with margin inside the DIV. How could we get rid of the gap but without the border? The answer is by applying 1px padding to the DIV element or set the margin of the child element of the DIV to 0.

For Example, the following case could be solved by adding “padding:1px” to #div2 or set the margin of “p” in div2 to 0;

.

Bookmark & Share:

Two of the most well known agile methodologies are XP (extreme programming) and scrum. Both of these practices have similarities and differences. As agile software development techniques, they have same characteristics which are relatively short development time and consist of several iterations. In this blog, the explanation of both practices will be discussed as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each method.

XP which is also known as extreme programming is an agile software development approach which consists of several practices and values. Many articles stressed the values of communication, simplicity, feedback, and courage in XP. Communication value is where team member uses verbal communication to other team member over formal written document. The team members in XP project includes developers and customer representatives who should understand the domain and know what is needed. XP also emphasize simple design and solution to fulfill customer requirements. In development process, feedback from customer, system testing, and other team members are important. XP also encourage the developers to write code only for current requirements in pair and do code refactoring if needed in the future.

People often think that scrum is same with XP. Scrum is a subset of agile software development techniques. It is an iterative process to develop or manage certain project and it will produce shippable product which can be presented to the customer at the end of iteration. Unlike XP, scrum emphasizes the management side of a project and does not define a detail engineering practice. Iteration in scrum is called sprint which will deal with certain features defined by customer in a backlog. After the team chooses the most risky feature in backlog they will develop it. A sprint usually takes thirty days and can be decreased to one week if the system is simple and easy to develop. During a sprint, team will have a meeting each day to discuss what has been done, what the obstacles are, and what will be done.

XP specify the software engineering practices such as test-driven development, refactoring, pair programming, simple design, etc. On the other hand, scrum focuses on the management side which quite general so that it can be implemented on other project beyond software development project. For example, scrum does not specify pair programming or test driven development, but it specify how we manage the requirements or requested features. Scrum can be seen as a wrapper for existing engineering practices. Scrum requires self organizing team which cannot be disturbed by requirement changes once they started the sprint. If the customer wants to change the feature, they have to wait until the iteration finished and then introduce the change. In contrast, extreme programming is more acceptable to change during iteration which usually only last for two weeks.

XP and scrum has subtle different. They emphasize on different side of a software development project. It will be great if we can combine both of them to manage our agile software project.

Bookmark & Share: