The AVR Logic Analyzer records all of the I/O Port and Data Direction register values every time the program is updated. You can then graph these values compared to the cycle counter value at the time it was recorded.

The major features of the AVR Logic Analyzer plugin are:

• Records all ports upon updates from the AVR Simulator.
• Can record up to 32,000 port and data direction register values and cycle count values.
• Uniquely displays ports that are configured for input for ease of troubleshooting
• Graphically display between 2 and 50 logic states for any number of ports defined on the project’s processor.
• Change colors of any part of the AVR Logic Analyzer display for easier viewing transition states.

The AVR Logic Analyzer is processor independant and will work with any AVR processor supported by the AVR Simulator and AVR Simulator 2.

AVR Logic Analyzer allows for quicker debugging and visual state changes on ports. If you work developing AVR processors, the AVR Logic Analyzer is a tool you need in your toolbox. For more information, you can go to the AVR Logic Analyzer home page, or if you already know it is right for you, the AVR Logic Analyzer can be purchased in our Shop.

WHMCS has a quick and easy way to generate reports as add-ons to the core WHMCS functionality. They are implemented by creating a PHP script file and setting some predefined variables within the script. Uploading the file to the correct directory installs the file to be used in the WHMCS admin area. The hardest part is getting the correct data out of the WHMCS database for use.

The requirement for this report was to display the top 20 articles from the knowledgebase along with their category and the additional information that is stored for articles (number of votes cast, number of people that found it useful, and whether it is a private article only visible to logged in clients).
Start by creating a empty PHP file and giving it a useful file name. For this report we named this file knowledgebase_usage.php. We then copied the contents of the sample given under the documentation for the WHMCS reports into the empty file and fill in the obvious information for the description, header text, and footer text.

Next, we needed to determine what fields we would like to display for each article and the titles for them. Looking at the WHMCS database structure with a database tool such as phpMyAdmin, the categories are stored in a separate table from the articles and are linked with a link table, so we will have to join these tables to get all of the information about the articles.

The articles table stores the number of views, the total number of votes on whether the user found it useful, the number of those votes that found it useful , and whether the article is for private clients only. We will display each of these values in our report.

Now that we have this information we can create the table headings. Back in the knowledgebase_usage.php, we create the array for the headings:

$reportdata["tableheadings"] = array("Category","Title","Views","Stats","Is Private");

We also have the information to create our SQL query statement. We have to select the title,views, useful, votes, and private columns from the tblknowledgebase table and the name column from the tblknowledgebasecats table and join them through the tblknowedgebaselinks table. Also we want to sort them by the most views and only show the top 20 articles. Our SQL statement looks like this:

SELECT `title`, `views`, `useful`, `votes`, `private`, `name` FROM `tblknowledgebase` LEFT JOIN `tblknowledgebaselinks` on `tblknowledgebase`.`id`=`tblknowledgebaselinks`.`articleid` LEFT JOIN `tblknowledgebasecats` on `tblknowledgebaselinks`.`categoryid`=`tblknowledgebasecats`.`id` ORDER BY `views` DESC, name LIMIT 0,20

We execute the query and for each row that is returned, extract the data, perform some formatting and put the values we want displayed into the existing report data variable:

$result=mysql_query($query);
while($data = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
$category = $data["name"];
$title = $data["title"];
$views = $data["views"];
$useful = $data["useful"];
$votes = $data["votes"];
$stats = $useful." (".$votes.")";
$private = $data["private"];
$reportdata["tablevalues"][] = array($category,$title,$views,$stats,$private);
}

Upload this file to the WHMCS/modules/reports directory and the report will appear when logged in to the admin area and clicking on the reports tab. The name of the report on the Reports page will be the file name with underscores turned into spaces and each word capitalized so for this report it will take knowledgebase_usage.php and title it ‘Knowledgebase Usage’ in the Report list.

The source code for this report is free and can be found as a downloadable zip file product in our shop.

We installed an eCommerce solution to hold our products, whether they be for sale or for free. We call this the shop, short for workshop. This gives you the ability to sign up for our newsletter whether you are interested in buying our products or just looking to download some free software. The shop uses PayPal for secure order processing and puts all of our products in a central location.

We maintained the Coyne Technology Systems Blog for articles about products and information in fact, our design orignated from the wp-burn theme for WordPress, which was caried out across the entire site. We re-designed our static pages to use this theme and incorporated the theme into the eCommerce shop.

On the top of each page is the high level menu system that allows the visitor to see the major locations in the site. On the right of the content displays the navigation depending on which major location the user is in. Static pages show product navigation, blog pages show blog roll links, categories, and recent articles, and the shop shows eCommerce related items.

We hope you enjoy the new format and would welcome feedback!

We are constantly being asked to develop more and more complex sites. Those that include static pages, blogs, shopping carts, and more. The advancement of software these days is allowing each of them to create XML sitemap files to define the individual pages of their particular specialty. WordPress blog software can be loaded with a plug-in to allow it to generate a XML sitemap for example. If your install of that software is in a subdirectory say /blog/ then it will generate it in that directory. So a site with a Zen Cart installation in the /store/ directory can have another sitemap in that directory for its produts. Using a sitemap index file you can easily allow each piece of software to generate it’s sitemap and pull them all together into a single file for the search engines to find.

The first thing to do is list out all software that generates a sitemap and where it resides. In the previous examples lets say we also have some static pages, so what we will have is a sitemap at /blog/sitemap.xml, a sitemap located at /store/sitemap.xml and a root sitemap at /sitemap.xml. The first thing to do is rename the /sitemap.xml to something say /sitemap_static.xml.

Now create a new text file called /sitemap.xml. This file will also be XML in the same manner as the sitemaps, but it will list each of the other sitemaps. The first line in the file will be the tag to indicate that it is XML and its encoding:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

The next line states that it is a sitemap index and the particular schema it adheres to:

<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

Now add a sitemap entry for each sub-sitemap that you have giving it a location and a last modified time:

<sitemap><loc>http://www.example.net/sitemap_static.xml</loc><lastmod>2009-11-12</lastmod></sitemap>
<sitemap><loc>http://www.example.net/blog/sitemap.xml</loc><lastmod>2009-11-10</lastmod></sitemap>
<sitemap><loc>http://www.example.net/store/sitemap.xml</loc><astmod>2009-11-15</lastmod></sitemap>

Don’t forget to close out your sitemap index tags:

</sitemapindex>

Now when you make chages to only a portion of your site, you can either submit only the sitemap of the portion that changed to the search engines or the index file and let them determine what has changed. So if you write a new blog entry, and your /blog/sitemap.xml file is updated, you can either resubmit just the /blog/sitemap.xml or /sitemap.xml. Don’t forget to change the lastmod time in your index file when changes are made to the sub-sitemap files.

Put a line in your robots.txt to point to your sitemap index file. This will allow search engine spiders to find the files in your site. You may have submitted your site to a number of search engines, but that one that you left out may still eventually find your site and when it does, the first thing it will look at is the robots.txt file and see your sitemap index. The format for the robots.txt file to include a sitemap is:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

This will tell all the search engines where your index file is and once they read it, they will find that it is an index and pull in all the sub sitemaps making your site much more search engine optimized (SEO)!

For more information on sitemaps, see http://www.sitemaps.org

The changes to the files are for Zen Cart version 1.3.8a and may be different for your system depending on what version you are running.

For this change we will be editing the core Zen Cart files and since there are no overrides for the admin area as discussed in this article, be sure to make backups and to remake the changes if you upgrade or overwrite the core files for whatever reason.

In the the file:
[admin]/includes/modules/category_product_listing.php
using the name you used for your Zen Cart admin directory in place of [admin] (you DID rename your Zen Cart admin directory, right!?).

At around line 843, the function zen_draw_pull_down_menu is called with two parameters:

zen_draw_pull_down_menu('product_type', $product_restrict_types_array);

Using phpMyAdmin or some other way of accessing the zen database, browse the [zen_prefix]product_types and get the value for the type_id of the product type that you want to set as the default. For this example, we want the ‘Product – Music’ to be default which has the type_id=2. Now in the category_products_listing.php file, add a comma and the type_id value like so:

zen_draw_pull_down_menu('product_type', $product_restrict_types_array,2);

And your done! Now you can add ‘Product – Music’ types without the step of selecting the type. Also, if you wanted to add products of other types as well, just change the selection in the drop down.