Ok some eagle eyed visitors have noticed that the special offer for bfForms for Joomla 2.5.x has continued past the midnight expiration – simple answer was that I went on holiday and forgot to take down the special offer page – and now I can’t from my holiday destination because the sFTP Port is firewalled on the free wifi – so if you have been hanging on – quickly grab bfForms for Joomla 2.5.x for only £7.99 before I return from my holiday and expire this offer

Check out this offer now →

Thanks for all the requests for assistance, support queries and emails – I’ll get to them at the weekend or next week, but as for now I’m on holiday (vacation) with my 5 year old daughter with very basic web browsing access (They have firewalled all ports except http and still then prevent me accessing some sites – but hey, its free!)

Next week (w.c 20th Feb) I’ll be working part time, and then from the 28th Feb back to Full time.

Butlins Minehead

(Official Site) Well this place is a whole lot better than the picture the Trip Advisor reviews paint! I’m impressed by it all and will probably post a whole page review later this month. This place has so much for a 5 year old to do during half term break that her poor daddy is exhausted!

We are now in the last few hours of our special pricing offer for Forms for Joomla 2.5.

The normal price is £19.99 but for the next few hours you can download forms for only £7.99 using the button below.

Check out this offer now →

More information on our excellent Forms For Joomla 2.5 can be found on its website over here

This offer will expire at midnight today (GMT)!

Your site may have low, moderate or high risk vulnerabilities still!

Joomla 2.5.1 and Joomla 1.7.5 (oh ok and Joomla 1.5.25) are the latest Joomla versions available, all previous Joomla versions have reported security issues that have been made public.A helpful tip!

Its easy to upgrade your site for free by following the documentation on the Joomla.org website, but we understand that some customers dread the “what if” or need assistance when things are not as straight forward – and we are glad to help.  Some customers just dont have the time to go through all their sites upgrading - thats fine, we will make time! We understand that a lot of people, upgrading Joomla is not their day job, they have better things to be doing running their business.

If you have left it a long time to upgrade you might find you are a few versions behind already!

We are happy to provide quotes for any upgrade task, our minimum fee is GBP50.00 (+vat if applicable) and we’ll leave you to get on with running your business!

Get a quote for upgrades now! →

When I last reinstalled my mac (after a hard drive failure) I decided not to install all manner of small apps that I found “just to try them out” but to use as much of Mac OS as I could with the default settings. After all, if Apple say thats the default and thats the best way to work then I’m sure they have their reasons. For example, I never reinstalled LaunchBar, in favor of using the Mac Spotlight feature.  I’m not really missing these little apps and I challenge you to do the same.

However. Occasionally an app comes along that just fits the way you work so well that you just cannot live without it after trying it.  CloudApp is such an app.

The main reason I use CloudApp is to instantly, and seamlessly, create screenshots of what I see and be able to share those by a url in an email, Skype chat or forum post.  If you take a screenshot using your Mac (CMD+Shift+4) it will instantly upload that screenshot to the cloud, and put into your clipboard a URL to the image!

Click here to see an example http://cloud.phil-taylor.com/400z2C1X0c0B2M1S1q0h

So why is this good?

• No more having to attach large images to emails (I have a 27″ screen!!)
• No more having to screenshot your screen, FTP upload to a server, and send that url
• By the time the image is uploaded and url is in my clipboard I can just paste (CMD+V) and the URL is there!
• Allows me to instantly show parts of my massive 27″ screen to people on Skype with ease
• Can be proxied using a custom domain (http://cloud.phil-taylor.com/)
• Basic level of 10 screenshots a day is FREE (But you will soon pay like I did!)
• The screenshot is laid out with a nice border and looks good.
• Its cloud based – gotta be good right?
• Has a mac app in the mac store, puts a small cloud in your menu bar that can be dragged to
• Has a web app for you to view previous uploads
• There are other apps that use the API so you can use this on Windows, iPhone, iPad
• You can also use it to share FILES (Example: Joomla 2.5 )or shortify your urls.
• The list goes on….

I recommend you check out CloudApp today, you might find it changes the way you work with screenshots forever.

(This is a non-paid post, I’m simply sharing my joy at finding something good that works )

UPDATE: All sites now back online and working well.

Unfortunately @Rackspace are having network issues with cloud servers and because our load balancer is in their cloud we currently have no secure.myjoomla.com or fix.myjoomla.com services available.

Rackspace say they are working on the problem, we however are making dns changes to bypass the loadbalancer but these might take some time to kick in depending on your dns caching.

Sorry about the downtime, you will be able to download shortly.

Thanks to @uptimerobot for the alert notifications – an excellent service as always

We have all seen Google mark websites as “This site may compromise your computer” when it detects a website has been infected with a hack or malware, well this is called the “Safebrowsing list” (Ironically as the sites on it are less than safe to browse!)

You can use PHP and a Google API to tap into this wealth of information, and along with the Zend framework and some code I knocked together you can query this huge database of sites very easily.

I have published the code over on GitHub at: https://github.com/PhilETaylor/Bf_Google_Safebrowsing

Its simple to use (once you have Zend bootstrapped) with an example such as:

$google = new Bf_Google_Safebrowsing ( array ('apikey' => 'YOUR API KEY' ) );
if (TRUE == $google->isListed ( 'http://www.phil-taylor.com' )) {
 // Dang! Why is that listed!
}

If its useful to you then great, I dont think many people will be using it daily, but its a handy bit of code to have in our tool chest.

Occassionally in PHP Joomla Extension/Plugin development you need to work out if the current rendered page is inface the default home page.  The old way of doing this was to check the Itemid, but later versions of Joomla have a better way.

In order to see if you are on the homepage you can do something like the following snippet of code:

$menu =& JSite::getMenu();    // Load the menu
$active = $menu->getActive(); // Get the current active menu
if ($active->home ==1) {      // See if this is the homepage
	// Yes! This is the homepage!
} else {
	// No this is not the homepage 
}

(and a new website launched!)

I’m pleased to announce that the new bfForms for Joomla 2.5.x has now been released and can be downloaded from its very new website at http://www.Joomla-Forms.com/

Download forms for Joomla 2.5 now →