The Tech Diary

AUser Manager is a fantastic component that adds much-needed security to the Joomla! user registration process.  It transparently adds full-featured AJAX Captcha and RBL tests, all without any hacks or modifications to core Joomla! files.

I've attached a slightly modified version of 1.5.10 that has the following "improvements":

• AUser Manager parameter options to disable the strong password generator, username available AJAX notice & password meter.  They're enabled by default, but it gives the admin the option to make com_auser look more like com_user if they wish.
• en-US language file that's a bit more native for those of us on this side of the pond.
• Audio digits and letters taken from Pat Fleet's (the voice of AT&T) freeware IVR prompts for asterisk.  They're easier to understand than the computer-generated mp3s.
• Minor spelling changes (my obsessive-compulsive nature kicked in on these)

Hope my effort adds to this already great component.  Long live Joomla!

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CSV Improved for Joomla 1.5 is the fastest and best way to quickly and easily populate your Joomla 1.5 VirtueMart store.

We're setting up several new web stores that will be selling a variety of items.  VirtueMart is the most popular e-store / shopping cart component for Joomla 1.5 and I've used it a number of times in the past.  After spending a few years fighting with osCommerce, VirtueMart is an absolute thrill to implement.

Once VirtueMart is set up, the first challenge is entering all of the products we wish to offer for sale.  If you're running a small store with only a handful of products, doing this by hand via VirtueMart's native interface is pretty simple.  If you've got hundreds, or even thousands of products, this would be a tiresome and tedious chore.

Fortunately, a number of our distributors with whom we're working supplied us with their product listings in CSV format.  I'll explain more about this file format later, but this allows us to import an entire catalog into our new store in just a few steps using another Joomla! component called "CSV Improved".  If you read the reviews of CSV Improved on Joomla's extensions site, you'll notice two things that nearly every reviews says:

1. CSV Improved is THE tool to do what we're attempting.
2. CSV Improved has a HUGE learning curve.

Since none of the alternatives were appealing, I decided to dig into CSV Improved and see how hard it really is.  I download and installed the 30-day trial and then headed over to the documentation.

I've worked with hundreds of third-party add-ons for various open source programs, and I found CSV Improved's documentation to be one of the most lacking examples I've encountered.  While I'll give CSV Improved's author credit for using a wiki to document his project, the examples and tutorials aren't very straightforward and there are NO pictures.  Of course I'm well versed in the English language (which appears to be a secondary language for the author), but when explaining how something works on the computer, a picture truly is worth a thousand words.

So I figured I'd take this opportunity to make a few journal entries here on the Tech Diary chronicling my learning process with CSV Improved.   My aim is to provide simple, easy-to-follow instructions on how to get CSV Improved fully up and running.

I'm doing it here on Tech Diary for a couple of reasons.  First, the Tech Diary is a place where I can keep track of the various projects I'm working on.  If I record everything here, I'll always know where to go when I have to do it again.  Second, I'm hoping that this will be a resource for other VirtueMart and CSV Improved users that might be initially discouraged by its apparent difficulty to use.  By the end of the tutorial you'll be an expert at using CSV Improved for Joomla 1.5.

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Well, it appears that I've successfully installed MyBlog on the Tech Diary.

The installation was fairly standard, although it's not intuitive how to give users access to the blogging capabilities.  The last install of MyBlog I did was on Joomla! 1.0.x with Community Builder already installed.  I may install CB here, but time constraints prohibit that at this time.

The default install should create a item in the default User Menu to each user's blog.  Since I didn't have a User Menu set up, it wasn't created.  Time to figure out how to manually add that.  To add it, I created a new menu item called "UserMenu" in the Menu Manager, then went to the Maintenance tab in MyBlog admin and clicked "Fix dashboard link".

Further updates as events warrant.

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