Sticky Post

Changing the WooCommerce Shopping Cart Expiration Time

Mark September 6, 2017 Cart, ecommerce, plugins, woocommerce, WordPress 3 Comments

Buy the WooCommerce Cart Expiration Plugin here

WooCommerce defaults to a 48 hour expiration time for all user’s carts. After this time, a user’s cart is deleted and the user will have to restock their basket with the same items before continuing to shop.

The default expiry time can be changed by using the wc_session_expiring and wc_session_expiration filters in your site’s functions.php. This is fine if your expiry time is at 12 hour intervals as the WordPress cron system only runs the session clean up twice daily and you also have to consider if you really want to hardcode cart expiry in your website’s code?

There is a plugin that takes care of all of these problems

  1. Gives you control of the cart expiration time directly from the WooCommerce system settings page
  2. It changes the WooCommerce session clean up to an hourly period to allow cart expiration times of greater or less than 12 hour intervals
  3. It is fully supported on multisite installations of WordPress and WooCommerce

You can purchase the woocommerce cart expiry time changing plugin here

Buying the plugin rather than making the changes to the WooCommerce system yourself gives you the following benefits:

  1. When the plugin is updated and new features are added you will receive an email update along
  2. Using the plugin to control the cart expiration instead of changing the code yourself means you can update WooCommerce without undoing your changes.
  3. You have the benefit of being part of a community of users actively using and providing feedback on improvements to the developers of the plugin.

Compiling Andreas Antonopoulos’ Mastering Bitcoin book from source code

Mark January 13, 2018 Programming No Comments

Andreas Antonopoulos’ Mastering Bitcoin book is available as an open source project on Github.

It can be compiled from source code pretty easily using asciidoc. Here’s how to do this using OS X

  1. Install asciidoc. I use homebrew:
    “brew install asciidoc”
  2. Clone the git repo:
    “git clone https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook.git”
  3. cd to the cloned repo
  4. and compile the book with:
    “asciidoc -b html5 -a icons -a toc2 book.asciidoc”
  5. This will give you the book as a html file located in the new file book.html in the root of the repo director

    Mastering bitcoin compiled to HTML

END

 

 

Tracking page views in angulartics2

Mark October 31, 2017 Angular, Google Analytics, Programming No Comments

Angulartics2 is a great package for vendor agnostic tracking in Angular apps. When using the package with Google Analytics, page view tracking is wired up automatically using the Angular  routing module.

 

The angulartics2 documentation does not include information on how to send page views using the module however it is pretty simple to do, just inject the Angulartics2 and Angular common Location modules into your module’s constructor like so:

import { Angulartics2 } from 'angulartics2';
import {Location} from '@angular/common';

constructor(
 private location: Location,
 public angulartics2: Angulartics2,
 )

and you can now track page views manually using the following method:

this.angulartics2.pageTrack.next({ path: '/your-path/' + issue.slug, location: location });

Fix for “/dev/vmmon not found, display cannot be initialized” in VMWare Fusion

Mark March 8, 2017 Programming, VIrtual Machines No Comments

When attempting to run any of my VMWare Fusion virtual machines on mac macOS (OS X) I was getting the “/dev/vmmon not found, display cannot be initialized, internal error” error every time I try and start a virtual machine.

I tried reinstalling, upgrading and downgrading VMWare Fusion all to no avail.

The Fix for the dev/vmmon not found error

The problem is caused by having both VirtualBox and VMWare fusion installed on the same machine. Run the Sun provided uninstallation script, mirrored here to  uninstall VirtualBox. This allows you to run your VMWare Fusion Virtual Machines without the “/dev/vmmon not found…” error.

Reinstalling VirtualBox after this install doesn’t seem to cause this error again, though a reboot might change things there in which case I will update this post.

Allow users to select and copy text in Ionic 2 apps

Mark January 10, 2017 Ionic, Mobile Apps No Comments

In Ionic 2, the selection and thus copying of text is disabled by default. Enabling selecting and copying of content inside an Ionic 2 app is pretty simple. Here’s how

First, add this class to your app.scss file

https://gist.github.com/ae4e3480192852d512f337e5fd018baf

Now you can add the “selectable” class to individual elements in the app or to ionic elements using the ngClass attribute. This will allow your users to select and copy text from within your Ionic 2 app  ?

Selecting and copying text in an Ionic 2 app

Selecting and copying text in an Ionic 2 app

Logging with angular2-logger in Ionic 2 apps

Mark November 22, 2016 Ionic, Mobile Apps, Programming 13 Comments

As far as I am aware Ionic 2 does not yet have any decent logging options. But as Ionic 2 uses AngularJS 2, we can make use of the angular2-logger module

Angular2-logger is a Log4j inspired logger for Angular 2 apps allowing you to set your desired log level (OFF, WARN, ERROR, LOG, DEBUG etc)

I’ve found it best to implement the angular2-logger as a provider in Ionic 2 apps and inject it into  your classes rather than instantiating a new instance of the logger for each component in your app.

Once you have the npm module installed, create a LoggerService provider in your app with the following ionic command:

ionic g provider LoggerService

then add the following code to the generated logger-service.ts file

https://gist.github.com/077e6777afc172b482b0115eb0bc785d

I’m configuring my log level using a config class but you can change the code above to use your own preferred method.

Now you can inject the LoggerService into your component’s like so

https://gist.github.com/6cf99c2854c25c591ef3c38b0b0c86ec

And then log messages in your components like this

https://gist.github.com/ed2196a29c2007193a2ff615a9189478

And add the following references and providers to your app.component.ts file

https://gist.github.com/1298ce006a4bdbd0990224d84931aebf

Now say goodbye to your console.log naffness for good 🙂

WordPress REST API: Forcing authentication for all requests

Mark November 4, 2016 APIs, Programming, WordPress 2 Comments

I’m working on a project that will be using WordPress’s REST API to feed JSON data to a mobile app. We only want authenticated users to be able to query the REST API.

Out of the box, the REST API exposes all public content by GET request without any authentication requirements.

We’re using Enrique Chavez‘s JWT Authentication for WP REST API to allow us to authenticate users and get an authentication token. We have made a modification to the JWT auth plugin to expose the “validate_token” method by adding the following code to line 143 of the class-jwt-auth.php file.

 

https://gist.github.com/8e0d7235bd462bcb65c55223aa861f8f

like so

screenshot-2016-11-04-12-39-05

This gives us access to the validate_token method elsewhere in WordPress.

We then hook into the REST API’s “rest_pre_dispatch” hook to require the presence of a valid token before exposing any API data with this custom filter in our theme’s functions.php file.

https://gist.github.com/0c873a0560f68b94452f86c643ccf90b

 

Rhoscolyn

Mark June 30, 2016 Drones No Comments

Last week the family all ventured to Rhoscolyn on the beautiful Isle of Anglesey for a big wedding do. I used this as an excuse to get a new toy to film the week’s fun.

I’ve stitched some of the more scenic clips together in this video. It’s all very cliched. Queue “floating” music…