How to create a Welcome tab on your businesses Facebook page

I have been asked this a lot recently. “How do we make the facebook page look nicer?”.

Facebook is very limited for styling as they want to make sure your styling does not take away from facebooks images to much. So when a client showed me the facebook page for beauty flash which showed a different tab to the wall tab when you first entered, I was interested on how they done this.

I have put together a quick video explaining how this can be done.

How to identify the browser in PHP

Bastian Allgeier has posted a great article on how to identify what browser is being used to view your website. The code is written in PHP and set the HTML class to the browser being used.

The implementation involves downloading the PHP code from Bastian’s website and adding two line of code to your PHP script. Then adding CSS accordingly.

Full Article

Display the contents of an array in Smarty

Some time you just need to see what variables are available in an array in Smarty. In PHP this is usually done using “print_r($foo)” where $foo is your array. But in smarty this is done using the following method.

{$foo|@print_r}

When you use this command I recommend placing open and closing pre tags around the command to ensure the output is formatted in a readable format.

The @ tells smarty to pass the entire array to the modifier rather than calling the modifier for each element of the array. Smarty also ships with a modifier that does similar to print_r(): {$foo|@debug_print_var}. You may also consider smarty’s debug facility (which you can enable in-template by inserting a {debug} tag or you can enable by configuring the Smarty object appropriately — see the docs for more info)

Use video to explain how to do something

As a developer/Tester I need to explain how I have fixed something or why something has broken. Usually this involves writing complicated emails with step by step instructions on how to replicate the issue.

I came across screen toaster which make it much easier to create video tutorials of what is happening  on your screen. Usually you would have to install a windows application and then get this to capture video, convert it to a web format and upload it to your webserver or youtube. Screen Toaster does all of this as a web app. So just create a free account and put your headset on and you can create and upload a video in a couple of minutes. Then send a link to your contact asking them to follow your instruction on the video.

Here is one I made earlier, where I explain to a client the new functionality I have added to their shopping cart.