What you have there is called ‘User Account Control’ and not only does it interfere with the more seasoned users’ ‘Windows Experience’ but it will make the lower end computer slow to a crawl.

Are you sure you Reeeeeealy want to do that?

It’s incredibly easy to turn off and I was going to write a step by step as a how to but obviously someone else got there first! They detail four ways to do it:

• MSCONFIG
• Registry Editor
• Group Policy (gpedit)
• Control Panel

I used option 4, the control panel method. This is more preferable for me because I prefer for Windows to adjust it’s own behind the scenes files and even more of an obvious option if they provide a nice interface to do it with!

The site is: http://www.petri.co.il however I have copied option 4 in to make it easier for you:

• Open Control Panel
• Click on one of the user accounts
• Click on the “Go to the main User Account page” link
• Click on the “Change security settings” link
• Under “Turn on User Account Control (UAC) to make your computer more secure” click to unselect the “Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer” and press OK
• You will be prompted to reboot your computer and once restarted it will no longer bother you

You can reverse the procedure by just re-checking the box and restarting again. I feel I should add that even though you have turned UAC itself off, you will not have turned off another small annoyance in the security bubble thing in the system tray. A small price to pay for a less irritating and slightly faster user experience.

Please Restart... Please Restart... Please...

Ok.. so that may be a little over the top, maybe minutes of work but it’s still irritating losing all of the windows I have spend days opening and lovingly arranging. After the umpteenth popup of the day I thought I would Google the answer to turn off this unwanted menace.

I found a site that told me exactly the answer I was hoping for and I was popup free in under 5 minutes. The depressing thing is that it was written in 2006 and it took me nearly three years to build up the inclination to do something about it.

So here’s how to do it:

• Click on the Start button and choose ‘Run.’
• Type: gpedit.msc.
• Expand Local Computer Policy, Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Windows Update.
• Select “Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations.”
• Choose “Enable” and then type in how many minutes you want to wait.

I do feel it necessary to put a little disclaimer in here, gpedit is not something that you should really go playing with and I imagine you need to be an administrator on the machine (most home computers are set up so you are the admin) to make the change

I got this handy hint from Tech Target however you are bombarded with advertising as you enter the site. you have been warned.

It is now freely available to download on the Session Manager download and information page.

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

It allows your readers to sign up to email series’ on your site through an AJAX powered sidebar widget. It fully supports the CAN-SPAM Act requirements although the malicious spammers among you can turn it off on the settings page.

It supports fully configurable auto-email messges and landing pages for confirmation of signup or unsubscribe.

We will be releasing a Beta in a week or two (Early January 2009)

Features include:

• Support for Registration & Comment forms (Inbuilt support for adding more)
• Advanced advert display management (optionally set your own times and dates for on and off)
• Multiple questions per advert
• Accessibility support (alt tags and hint option)

We will be releasing it on or after 25/12/08 on Newmedias so keep an eye out and let me know what you think!

The plugin will be FREE and you will also have access to the Newmedias support forums where myself and Tim Nash are available most of the time to answer any questions and sort out and problems for you.

The plugin allows for category groups to be created and adverts (or more categories) created within each one. Adverts can either be created by an admin exclusively or by any site member using the form on the front end.

Give it a go and let us know what you think. Ask Tim for the beta if you are interested or wait for the product version. Available at www.newmedias.co.uk

Gaj from www.gaj-it.com asked CNMS to write this very plugin a few weeks ago and he is in the process of using it on his website at the moment.

Deals Press, as it’s been branded, allows you to create products on your blog and store prices for each from various suppliers. It is highly configurable and templated so you can make your adverts look as clever as you like.

Price histories are kept in the Database and a stats module is planned to show you prices over time and cheapest suppliers, etc…

I don’t yet have a URL for it although I will update this post when I know.

I wanted to use some AJAX within a wordpress plugin i’m writing called Your Responder to handle a form submission and feedback without having to refresh the page.

I was reading through the Codex looking for anything AJAX related and came across a bundled script called SACK. It actually stands for Simple Ajax Code Kit and i’m happy to say it does exactly what it says on the tin. I haven’t even looked at the advanced features yet but a basic ajax request can be made in a few small lines of easy to follow code.

The full wordpress example is here but I thought I would give a explanation of my own…

The first stage is to incorporate the SACK library. Of course there is a special way to do this in wordpress but it’s very simple:

wp_print_scripts(array('sack'));

Copy that somewhere into your plugin and it does the same as putting a ‘<script src=”" />’ into the head of the html page.

Next comes the actual call:

  var mysack = new sack("www.yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins/myplugin_ajax.php");    

  mysack.execute = 1;
  mysack.method = 'POST';
  mysack.setVar("vote", vote_field.value);
  mysack.onError = function() { alert('Ajax error in voting'); };
  mysack.runAJAX();

  return true;

Does it look complicated? If your answer is yes then I urge you to have a look at the actual AJAX code to accomplish a POST request. I shall go through this line by line to help it make a little more sense:

The first line sets up a new variable called mysack which is actually an occurence of the mysack object. It allows you to call any function from the library and set up variables within it without interfering with any other SACK requests on the same page. The url in the call is an absolute link (I have yet to test with relative links) to the PHP script that the request will be sent to, much like the ‘<form action=”">’ tag.

Ignore the execute line. For a simple example just appreciate it has to be there. The method line is directly the same as ‘<form action=”">’ so can accept, to my knowlege,  either GET or POST.

The next line ’setVar’ you can duplicate for each field you want to send to your back end script. So if you wanted to send something that will appear to the server as $_POST['field1'], you simply write:

mysack.setVar("field1", document.getElementById("input_field_id").value);

Remember this is a JS function so where I put my document.getElement… call, you can write anything that javascript understands (although to keep it tidy, it’s probably best to sort it out earlier and store in a variable).

On error is probably best to leave empty unless you want to show a div on the screen saying something like ‘invalid request’. Remember this will be shown to your site users to an alert box probably isn’t the best approach.

Finally we fire off the request using runAJAX().

The PHP backend

At this stage your user is looking at your site and has, in some way or another, fired off an AJAX request. If the request was intentional (ie: not triggered by something passive) then they most likely expect something like a message back from the server or event to occur.

In the above example we declared a new instance of the SACK library with the url we want to send a request to (www.yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins/myplugin_ajax.php). The PHP script we need to write obviously needs to be at this location.

There are two things you really need to remember with this:

1. AJAX requests accept anything echoed as it’s response and will throw an error if it’s not sent proper JS code.
2. Use a PHP ‘die’ statement to send your response to the client.

All the first one means is that, when testing, a print_r($_POST); will not work properly and if you can see AJAX/JS errors (via Firefox and Firebug or similar) then you will most likely be prompted to fix your code.

The second one is simply a recommendation from the Wordpress development team which I agree with. If you concatenate your response JS code into a variable and then run a ‘die’ with your variable as the argument then it’s likely to work.

See the following example of what would be your ‘myplugin_ajax.php’ file:

<?php
if (isset($_POST['vote']) {
    //Perform some DB bits here
    $feedback = 'alert("Your vote was successfully recorded");';
    die($feedback);
}
?>

If you now understand what to do then I recommend trying it before reading the next section because it will only confuse matters if you are just getting to know either AJAX or Wordpress.

We are checking in $_POST for a variable called ‘vote’ and notice there is no ‘else’ statement. We don’t need an else unless you want to report error messages back to the server which in this case I don’t.

Wordpress doesn’t allow immediate access to any files inside it’s directory structure so things like Database access and shared function usage won’t be possible. The only way we can make this work is to incorporate the handing code into the main plugin itself. Simply add your version of this code to your main plugin PHP file which will be called from within wordpress.

This also means that your setup URL for SACK will simply be the homepage of your blog. This will work because wordpress scans it’s plugin directory when it initiates its framework looking for hooks. As long as your plugin is active it will run your logic. The die statement will also stop that instance of the script from running hence the if statement with no else.

Good luck and let me know if you need any help, spot a mistake or just want to say something

Now we have been working on Your Responder and Your Classifieds which are both very nearly ready to see the light of day (at least in a beta capacity).

Your Responder is an autoresponder plugin for wordpress that we have been writing that allows users to sign up to an email series or an email list.

your Classifieds is a classified adverts plugin that does what it says on the tin. Initially we will be writing it so simply allow people to host classified advert sites but eventually we will incorporate both paid advertising for both paid directories and preferential placement.

Watch this space! See www.newmedias.co.uk for more information

The file could not be written to the cache

Luckily a far low down on Google had a sensible answer which was to add the following code (PHP) before the call to session_start();

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE')) {
    session_cache_limiter("public");
}

Other sites were talking about security settings in versions of IE below 6 but they didn’t really help. I thought I would post this in the hope that it helps anyone else that has the same problem.