Harvest now allows businesses to create, send and manage estimates within Harvest accounts.

In a recent announcement Harvest said:

Everything is organized in a easy-to-scan dashboard for you to track what is outstanding, and what has been recently accepted or declined.

To enable the Estimates feature: Go to Manage > Account Settings, and you’ll find a new Customize Modules section. Click on Choose Modules and you can activate the new Estimates feature.

ServiceSeeking, an online Australian job prospect market (like eBay for businesses), have made an important change in the way that Jobs are posted by removing the “undisclosed” Job budget option making quoting simpler for businesses.

Jeremy Levitt from ServiceSeeking said:

Now, a customer will simply be required to tell you whether their job is small (5 Credits), medium (10 Credits) or large (15 Credits). We have phased out “undisclosed budgets” and all current projects have been adjusted as a result of the change. We hope this change makes quoting a little bit easier.

Personally, this is a great step forward helping me to focus on the work I want to do, be it helping maintain a site (small job) or develop from the ground-up an e-commerce site (large job).

1. Change the WordPress address and Blog address to your new domain, press Save, WordPress will likely have a heart attack but don’t worry this is part of the relocation
2. Open File Manager via cPanel or your provided hosting management software and ZIP all the files of your website, move this archive to your new hosting account and extract it using File Manager
3. Open PhpMyAdmin via cPanel or your provided hosting management software and explore the wp_options table
4. Do a search for “upload_path” within the option_name column of wp_options, update option_value to match your new hosting account path, this will allow WordPress uploads to work with your new hosting account
5. Connect to your new website via FTP and chmod the public_html directory to 777, this will allow WordPress to dynamically create new files within the root directory
6. Also chmod wp-contents, wp-contents/uploads, wp-contents/plugins to 777, allowing WordPress to save uploaded images, media and plugin files
7. Log into your WordPress administration using your new domain
8. Open Permalinks within Options and press Save Changs to rebuild your .htaccess file to make Page/Post permalinks work again

Done! You’ve successfully moved your WordPress website to a new domain and new hosting account.

The WordPress plugin Events Calendar (release version 6.5.2.1) has a known issue with showing the incorrect event dates within the calendar widget. The fix has been posted on WordPress Support and summary included below.

1. Open ec_management.class.php with a text editor
2. After line #54

   if(isset($_POST['EC_doPost'])) {

   paste this,

   $statusPost = $_POST['EC_statusPost'];

3. Comment out line #59 or #60

   'post_date' => date('Y-m-d H:i:s')

   by putting // at the beginning of the line

4. Under the commented line paste

   'post_date' => current_time('mysql')

This is a Registration For Interest for a future Perth-based day workshop – in August 2009 – covering the basics of purchasing a new website domain, setting up web hosting, installing web software and maintaining a new website using WordPress.

No assumed prior web development knowledge is required, but will be helpful.

Inclusions

What is included in the workshop:

• Continental breakfast, lunch catered by Subway and dinner caterering.
• Handbook with helpful cheat sheets and detailed instructions to refer to at home.
• Priority support from web experts within an attendees-only private forum

Requirements

• You must bring a laptop computer with a wireless card (to connect to the Internet). If this is not possible a laptop can be hired for the workshop, please contact me no less than a fortnight prior to the workshop.
• You must be willing to register a domain name for your website (e.g. visser.com.au) and pay the ongoing fees yourself (approx. $20 per year).
• You must be willing to pay website hosting and pay the ongoing fees yourself (approx. $50 per year).
• You must have the most recent version of the browser Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox installed on your computer.
• You should have a basic comfort with computer skills such as typing, copying/pasting, creating emails and browsing the Internet.

Objectives

Objectives of the 7 hour workshop is to achieve the following goals:

• Purchase an available domain from Webcity (www.webcity.com.au)
• Purchase website hosting from Host Ultra (www.hostultra.com)
• Download and install WordPress (www.wordpress.org) in our new website hosting account
• Install and activate a WordPress theme in our new WordPress site
• Modify existing and create new WordPress Posts and Pages

As the workshop is limited to a  single block of 7 hours a dedicated forum will be setup and made available for registered attendees to ask questions before, during, and after the closing of the workshop.

Add styling and formatting to the Wordpress Administration view of custom fields by updating WP User Manager with this unofficial update.

WP User Manager

I install and configure WP User Manager on all commercial Wordpress-powered sites requiring custom user profile fields, Dealsway Solution’s plugin really is in a league of its own, plus I’d like to give back to the Wordpress community!

A modified release of WP User Manager 0.4 is available for download that ammends the HTML and CSS styling of custom fields to conform with the Wordpress 2.5 Administration layout.

Download WP User Manager 0.4.1 Update

Warning: date() expects parameter 2 to be long, string given in /htdocs/michaelvisser/wp-content/plugins/wp-forum/forum-functions.php on line 668

Look familiar? There is a bug in the current release of WP-Forum which exists in the plugin’s PHP function ul() hidden away in cookies.php of the plugin root directory. To fix this issue open cookies.php with your favourite text editor and replace…

function ul($user_id){
if(!isset($_COOKIE[’session’])){
update_usermeta( $user_id, ‘lastvisit’, time() );
return true;
}
return false;
}

with…

function ul($user_id){
if(isset($_COOKIE[’session’])){
update_usermeta( $user_id, ‘lastvisit’, time() );
return true;
}
return false;
}

Save your changes and refresh the page. All done.

Alex from Zirona has released a Wordpress plugin that allows visitors to donate money in return for a back-link of their choice. The process has been automated and no interactions are required making this a great revenue generator for power-bloggers and niche hobbyists who can now be rewarded for their efforts.

The donations cloud is something like a tag cloud, only that it displays – donations. The more a person donates, the larger the link to his/her website will be.

There is a critical bug in 0.1.1 (currently available version at time of writing) whereby if you increase the value of DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT and a visitor donates a value less than your DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT amount the donation will not be visible and the visitor who just generously made a donation will call foul.

To resolve this issue do the following:

1. Open an FTP connection to your website
2. Edit donationscloud.php (/wp-content/plugins/donationscloud/...)
3. On line #45 change the value of “5.00″ to be the same as what you set for DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT within settings.php (/wp-content/plugins/donationscloud/...)
4. Save changes

By increasing the minimum value that visitors can donate any future donations will appear in the donation cloud. Looking at the source for Donations Cloud it seems there is no minimum amount checking meaning someone who donates $4.99 will not receive a back-link, this should be announced to visitors and/or a server response mentioning that a donation of less than the minimum amount will not generate a backlink.

Over the past month I’ve been stretching a vanilla installation of Wordpress (now 2.5.1) into a secure Intranet site for distributing news updates as well as an enabling technology for performing electronic tasks across the workplace.

To date it’s been a complete hit with staff placing high and frequent demand on the system from a staff base of 15-20 employees. The majority of staff and client details are sourced from a maintained SugarCRM installation which are regularly referenced by Wordpress.

I’d like to be able to shortly discuss what components were used and steps to creating your own Wordpress-powered intranet system.

I added a feedback page to allow staff members to contact me with suggestions for improvements, feature requests and to file bug reports. Various staff members are now seeking to further integrate critical tasks (quote generation, time management, etc.) into the web-based platform.

One of my gripes in Wordpress plugin development is the function add_action() with the admin_menu property as there’s no easy way to disable a erroneous plugin in the Wordpress Administration without editing that plugin file.

I often find myself digging through my active Wordpress site database when developing custom Wordpress plugins and theme solutions, thanks to the Wordpress development team you can disable plugins by editing the active_plugins record within the wp_options table as follows…

1. Open PHPMyAdmin and connect to your Wordpress site database
2. Open the wp_options table
3. Browse the contents of wp_options until you locate the active_plugins record
4. To deactivate a single plugin decrement the value of a (eg. 4 to 3)
5. Remove the statement from the initial declaration of i to the ; following the declared plugin path
6. Save changes

Example contents of active_plugins record

a:3:{i:0;s:19:"akismet/akismet.php";i:1;s:41:"popularity-contest/popularity-contest.php";i:2;s:15:"stats/stats.php";}