Fedex 2 Day Shipping always costs $11.83 issue

Discovered a really bothersome issue with fedex, for random zip codes all over the US it returns the same shipping rate of $11.83 for  FEDEX_2_DAY shipping. These zip codes were talking about random places like South Dakota, Colorado, Arizona to name a few.

If you have Fedex shipping, you may want to start watching the calculations on the 2 Day shipping. I am still not totally convinced that its not only just an issue with this particular fedex production account. I have sent support a request, and will update this post with the findings.

To confirm that the issue was not just code in joomla/virtuemart I downloaded and setup the Fedex example api code and ran tests with versions 9,10, & 13 all in production.


Here is the link to the Fedex Developer resources and api
https://www.fedex.com/wpor/web/jsp/drclinks.jsp?links=wss/getstarted.html

There is a link on this page for the "Web Services Developer Guide" but its really hard to see/find due to its styling, so here is that link too.

Quick RegEx snippet for filtering WordPress generated thumbnails

use this little snippet to filter out Wordpress generated thumbnail images. This is useful for wp-commerce and other sites with tons of images that need their thumbnails re-generated

([0-9]+x[0-9]+)

Best Practices for Coding HTML Emails

Design Tips for Email Newsletters  - The big things to look out for when designing or coding an email.

• Background Images don't work for email clients, you may use a solid background color behind live text.
• Image Maps cannot be used and are not compatible with many email clients
• Width 600px
• all images need style="display:block" for gmail and some other web based clients.
• No Javascript EVER
• Inline CSS only and must be basic things like fonts, colors, background colors etc CSS2&3 styles do not apply and cause problems

To be compatible with as many email clients as possible the design created will be sliced and built in HTML table tags. You need to design the html for 10 years ago, yep email clients are old and janky and love nested tables and hate divs and CSS.

Virtuemart Orders Report By Category

Attached is a custom add-on report for InteraMind Reports.

This report finds all of the orders within a date range and outputs the persons name, product information and the Root/Base Category from each product they ordered.

This is a handy report and allows for us to easily import these customers name & email into our preferred email marketing software.

For Example if I made an order with 2 items

Computers -> CPU -> Intel i7x
Software -> Business -> Quickbooks 2012


The resulting csv would look like 

19 June 2012, CodePyro, info@codepyro.com ,Computers
19 June 2012, CodePyro, info@codepyro.com ,Software

Download the Virtuemart Orders Report By Category InteraMind Reports

Breezing Forms Emailed CSV attachment Field sort order

In the latest version of Breezing Forms the email notification with CSV attachment is an awesome feature. I really enjoy that component for joomla its incredible and makes my job much easier.

Today's request and issue that bugs me is that they sort the fields in the CSV instead of leaving them as in defined in the admin.
example
EXAM1_QUESTION1. EXAM1_QUESTION10,EXAM1_QUESTION11, EXAM1_QUESTION2

This is annoying; To Solve

Edit lines 4391 and 4401
comment out   ksort($fields);

How to Track FB likes in Google Analytics

Google recently released some upgrades for Google Analytics that will track your social interactions. This is great information and allows you to track interesting things like a FB share that leads to an e-commerce sale.

Here is google's How To document
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSocial

And some more information about each social report
http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1316556

Ill have to upgrade my social sharing and see how it works.. stay tuned

Replace Test urls in Wordpress to live using phpmyadmin

Just a quick help snippet for those of us who test wp websites on a test domain before moving them to a live url.

This issue arises when using a test domain for building a site and uploaded images, pdfs etc link to the test domain. When you make the website live the links still point to the old url in each and every post and page. Here is a quick SQL snippet to replace those old urls.

    UPDATE wp_posts
    SET guid =
    REPLACE(

        guid,
        "http://TestDomain/",
        "http://www.LiveDomain.com/"

    );

 UPDATE wp_posts
    SET post_content =
    REPLACE(

        post_content,
        "http://TestDomain/",
        "http://www.LiveDomain.com/"

    ); 


update wp_options
set option_value =
replace(
       option_value,
       "http://TestDomain/",
        "http://www.LiveDomain.com/"
);