Joomla 3.0 Beta1 Released

Joomla 3 will be the next major release of the Joomla CMS, with Joomla 3.0 the first short term support release in its life cycle. The beta release follows two alpha releases.

 What are the new features of Joomla! 3.0?

• Incorporation of Twitter Bootstrap into a jui media package.
• A new responsive administrator template--Isis-- and interface.
• A new front end template--Protostar-- built using Twitter Bootstrap Updated accessible template called Beez3
• PostgreSQL Driver. You will be able to run Joomla 3.0 sites using the PostgreSQL database.
• PHP Memcached Driver
• Use of JFeed for feed management rather than SimplePie
• Installation of language packages directly from the extension manager
• Guest user group present by default
• Saving blank articles allowed
• New administrator statistics module
• Update TinyMCE to version 3.5.6
• Continued clean up of older unused code, files and database fields and tables and improved standardization of tables.
• Improvements to Smart Search
• Extensive work on code style standardisation and consistency
• Unit testing in the CMS
• Updated system tests in the CMS

Moving to Joomla 3.0 from Joomla 2.5 will be a migration not an upgrade, although for the core of Joomla! the migration should be simple. However it is likely that templates for Joomla 2.5 will need modification to work with Joomla 3 as will many extensions. Always test prior to migrating and consult with the developers of any extensions and templates you use.

Download Joomla 3.0 Beta1

Solved: Firefox closes without warning message

I've been using Mozilla Firefox since many years I don't really notice since when my FF had become rude and start closing without any warning doesn't matter how many tabs you've opened. That was irritating at times when you hit close button by mistake.

I found a really great new thing about Firefox which is there configuration that can be seen by typing about:config in address location bar. You can configure a hell of things here.

Solution:

1. Type about:config into the location bar and press enter
2. Accept the warning message that appears, you will be taken to a list of preferences
3. Locate the preference browser.tabs.warnOnClose, if its value is set to false, double-click on it to change its value to true
4. Repeat this for these 3 preferences browser.warnOnQuit, browser.warnOnRestart and browser.showQuitWarning"

That's it. This will show a warning message whenever you'll quit firefox.

FEEL SAFE N ENJOY BROWSING :)

Solution: Could not load file or assembly or one of its dependencies System.IO.FileNotFoundException

I found the following error while uploading blog to a dedicated hosting server in a sub directory inside its wwwroot and it should have worked on www.websitename.com/blog. See how horrifying this error is:


Could not load file or assembly 'WebPageSecurity' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'WebPageSecurity' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Assembly Load Trace: The following information can be helpful to determine why the assembly 'WebPageSecurity' could not be loaded.

How I did it
What I did was quite normal i.e. uploaded files to sub directory /blog/ opened IIS7 and converted blog directory to an Application. I left the application pool as it is "Default Application Pool"

Finding Solution
Google was really not helpful in this issue. A lot of people have the same issue but no proper solution. The missing dll "WebPageSecurity" was actually present in the root website's bin folder so it was obvious that blog app is confusing with its parent's resources. So to isolate them I tried to create a new application pool for blog but no luck. Also I tried to place the blog files outside of wwwroot. Nothing really worked.

What worked for me :)
I noticed that the Default Application Pool is working in Integrated Mode, just for a try I changed the Mode of Blog application pool to Classic... Lo and behold. It worked like a charm. Give it a try if you're stuck on the same island.

jPlayer: An HTML5 and JQuery based audio video player

Today while searching something else, I came across a really cool thing. A flash-less media player.. wow. jPlayer is the HTML 5 and JQuery based audio, video player which supports playlists and multiple media formats such as OGV and M4V for video and OGA and MP3 for audio. I tested jPlayer on my system and surprisingly its compatible with most browsers such as Firefox 3.6, Safari 5.0, IE 6.0, and Chrome 11.0 and it worked seamlessly. Pretty impressive!

The cool thing is that it offers full control of it for JQuery programmers. You can set seek media, set volume, change video/audio, load playlist, and do a hell of things that most of the paid/expensive media players do such as Longtail's JW Player. Its Javascript based so most of the frontend developers would love it.

Video player demo

Audio Player Demo

 Video playlist and audio playlist players

Download jPlayer | jPlayer Demos

How to send HTML email using Microsoft Outlook or Windows Live Mail

Few days ago, I had to send an html email with a fairly complex structure and with few images and backgrounds. I composed the html of it but when I was about to send it, I came to know that Microsoft Outlook, Express or Windows Live Mail (that’s what I use) doesn’t give any facility to this. It was quite surprising for me. I didn’t find any easy solution to it by searching on internet. Wise men say that create a way if you don’t find any.

As you may know, Windows Live Mail supports including HTML signatures and we can import external html files as well. This is what I incorporated.

Please follow the steps below:

Step 1: Compose the email

Compose the email in html. Read more information and guidelines on composing html emails here.

1. Create new html file and compose it according to your requirements
2. Save it as an html file on your computer (emailtemplate.html in our case)

This is how our email looks in design view. I used few <p>, <strong> , <img> and <table> tags for instance.

Step 2: Create new Signature

In your Windows Live Mail(Or Outlook)

1. Go to Tools > Options
2. Go to Signatures tab
3. Press New Button
4. Select File
5. And browse the HTML file that you just created.

Step 3:  Insert in your email

1. Compose new email
2. From Signatures drop down
3. Select the latest signature that you just created (HTML Email in our case)

Feel free to comment if you need more help!

Microsoft Launches Demo HTML5 website

Microsoft presents a demo website to be seen/tested on newly launched IE9 beta. Site uses cool transition effects, mouse over behaviors, media such as videos with Silverlight players, images(with preloaders), fade in/out effects. The site looks not that good on my Mozilla 3.6.10 however text is more Antialiased on IE9.

See it here: beautyoftheweb.com

Not sure when HTML5 is going to be a common practice in web design industry.

How to make a fast flying DNN site

Speed of DNN site has always been an issue however you can minimize the delays till some extent and this is true that a DNN site can run as fast as any other site built with PHP.

There are two major factors:

Dead sites
Yes, your site dies or sleeps if its not opened by a user for a certain time(in minutes of most of the servers). The IIS shuts down the process and cleans the memory in that case resulting a very long time on next first hit.

Rendering Time
The loading time of a page depends on the rendering time, design level things like CSS, image optimization, Cache settings, compression settings etc. Also, disabling the features that you don't need in a site will reduce the burden.

1. Skin should be fully CSS based

2. Use some other menu provider (Native navigations i.e; Nav, Solpart etc are slower)

3. It also depends what modules you're using in your site. Text/HTML is the fastest module.

4. For every new dnn project, we always optimize it according to Mitchel's most useful post in his blog: http://www.mitchelsellers.com/blogs/articletype/articleview/articleid/283/how-i-get-my-dotnetnuke-sites-to-run-so-fast.aspx

5. Also, there's a very good document about this topic found here DotNetNuke Performance Configuration Best Practices by Mitchel Sellers

6. Never let your application sleep.

I hope this helps!

Keep a DNN website alive for FREE

After a long time, I found something really great and free of cost and more than that it's one of the most demanded service/hack/whatever by the community. Mandeep's http://www.dnnmonitor.com now offers free ping service to keep your DNN website alive and in memory. It requires you to register only a free account and then let you add your websites and does the rest of good work itself. The website allows only the DNN websites currently. The best thing I guess is to give the url of your keepalive.aspx file. I've not yet seen the reports/graphs that they provide based on the hits to your website.

I remember the times when we used to use the desktop utilities like Renegade Mind's keep alive utility for DNN but the major drawback of it was, if the computer where its installed shuts down or goes out of internet connectivity then your site is gone again :S

I hope the service will remain free forever :p

ASP.net Tab Missing IIS Manager

That is a common problem when beta versions of Visual Studio
aren't fully uninstalled before the release version is installed, or when
Visual Studio's components are uninstalled in the wrong order.

Solution
FDBK21319#2: Remove Registry Entries that cause the problem
Thanks to Chris Adams:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/forums/F...D=20592&INTID=6

To fix, check the following 3 regkeys :

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{7D23CCC6-A390-406E-AB67-2F8B7558F6F6}\InprocServer*32
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{FD5CD8B1-6FE0-44F3-BBFB-65E3655B096E} \InprocServer32
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{FEDB2179-2335-48F0-AA28-5CDA35A2B36D}\InprocServer*32

Under (expand) InProcServer32, look for the presence of a non-2.0.0.0 (example 2.0.36.0)
and remove it. It has a reference that causes this to break.

WARNING : don't fool with the registry if you are not proficient doing that.

Option B
You can work around the problem, if editing the registry doesn't fix it, by using
Denis Bauer's ASP.NET Version Switcher to switch ASP.NET versions.

http://www.denisbauer.com/NETTools/...onSwitcher.aspx

While it doesn't edit ASP.NET configuration files, at least it allows you
to pick the version of the framework will be used for specific websites.

Here's instructions on how to manually uninstall beta versions of Visual Studio 2005
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/s...ll/default.aspx

Or, you might want to use the VS 2005 beta cleanup tool.
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=47598


Source: http://www.thescripts.com/forum/thread559064.html

Adding UNICODE data (Urdu/Arabic or RTL data) into Database

Problem:

Adding unicode data to the database produces weird question marks '????? ???? ??????' on output or displaying data.

Solution:

We can very easily correct this from the query analyzer using the "N" prefix, which instructs SQL server to treat this data as unicode. For example, the following code works perfectly.

sample query

update tblUrduArticles
set UrduDesc = N'بول کہ لب آزاد ھیں تیرے'
where ArticleID = 1296

I've checked it sql server 2000 successfully, hopefully it will work for you as well.

Regards

Imran Saami