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23 Mar 2011

IE6 fixes for Umbraco 4.5

Published by matt

Umbraco 4.5 is not so huge a departure from previous versions that IE6 support is impossible.

The tree

The tree works but is a bit of a mess due to some positioning issues, and the use of positioned background PNG sprites.  To fix these, append this to /umbraco_client/tree/themes/umbraco/style.css.

21 Mar 2011

Apache on VPS servers

Published by matt

A reminder to myself and a warning to others...

Had a problem recently with a new VPS server.  It was a fairly standard, entry level affair, using Parallels and Plesk.  It was serving a Drupal site, though hardly a very high traffic one.  Yet it was regularly failing - the Apache processes would just get killed, quite often along with the monitoring program I installed to try to figure out what was happening (monit), and sometimes the Plesk control panel services.

17 Jan 2009

Web interface testing and automation

Published by matt

Some time ago, I had a client requirement for continuous live testing of an online application process. It was a multi-step application for insurance, so it had a lot of server-side logic, as well as plenty of client-side javascript validation. Obviously, the best way to test this is to simulate a real browser session. This way you can detect obscure errors such as javascript validation errors stopping form submissions - things that would not show up in standard unit testing.

10 Jul 2008

Secure FTP

Published by matt

A combination of two things recently combined to make me change the way I use FTP.

Firstly, I had started to use SmartFTP, but they stopped offering a free version and I was unwilling to upgrade to a product that seemed to have a very frequent upgrade cycle, with the newest version subtly altering the way you were used to working with it.

Secondly, I have lately needed to work with more Linux-based web servers than usual, which offer SSH access, and some of which block standard FTP access.

16 Jun 2008

Overriding Drupal's mail() function

Published by matt

I've moved this article at nmglc.co.uk/content/overriding-drupals-mail-function.  It outlines a quick way to override Drupal's default mail function() with your own.  It came in handy when I was trying to send email from a Drupal site hosted on my ISP's shared server and fell foul of a security requirement that PHP calls to mail() had to include extra header arguments.