Problem in saving translation in FaLang

Problem: While creating multilingual pages in Joomla 2.5 using FaLang extension, translated matter is not saved or displayed on the page. Sometimes you can use an alternative browser and save the text, but this is not consistent.

Solution: This is really a workaround rather than a solution.

1. On the control panel of FaLang, click on Translation. Here you will see all the articles to be translated. By default all the articles go into 'Translation incomplete' state, indicated by a yellow bulb icon and into 'Published' mode.
2. Use the appropriate filters to view articles. (Select: Language, Select: Content elements)
3. Open the article. You need to 'Un-publish' it and change 'State' to 'Translation not existing '. You can do this in the tab named- 'Publishing' which appears at the top right side of the page.
4. Save the article and close the file.
5. Open the file again. Edit the Publishing tab. Select language, Click on 'Published' – checkbox. In the left section of the page there are blank form fields for Title and Alias. Write Translation of Title and Alias. Go to field: Article Text. Paste your translated content.
6. Save the file.

Now the translation will be saved and you should see it in your Joomla pages!

PHP mail() returns False on website hosted at Yahoo

Noticed this problem when I used my favorite form2mail script on a website hosted at Yahoo. (small business hosting). The mail function was always returning False. After debugging the problem I reached the conclusion that it was something in the additional_headers argument that was causing the error. If I removed that argument, the mail function would work.

Then I came across this Yahoo article which explains why I was getting the problem.

Yahoo correctly tries to enforce that the From: address in the header is set to an email address within YOUR DOMAIN only. So for example, if your website is www.foodoo.com, then the From: address must be something like info@foodoo.com. It cannot be info@somethingelse.com because doing that will allow spammers to misuse it!

Setup was unable to open information file

I had SP3 installed on my PC. But there was no SP3 CD. So had some trouble installing IIS and other win components. So I obtained a SP3 EXE. It took half an hour to install, but it installed without errors.

When I went to add/remove components to install IIS, I got the error:

Setup was unable to open information file fp40ext.inf

This was followed by some 'error 0x2'. Looked up on the net and found some good pointers.

fp40ext.inf is a FrontPage extension info file. It was missing from the C:\Windows\inf folder. I copied it to this folder from C:\ServicePackFiles\i386 folder. Then I got the error fp40ext.dll was not found. Copied this file too from ServicePackFiles to the c:\windows\system32 folder. Then I got the error about missing pinball*.inf file. Taking cue from a website, I opened the sysoc.inf file and commented the line for pinball, using ';' character. Also commented the line for msnmsn (the next error source).

After this, the add/remove component dialog box opened, I was able to install IIS (except for the file admxprox.dll which I got from Xp-SP2 CD) successfully.

Mambo guestbook unhacked

Found out that one of my Mambo website's guestbook (com_guestbook) was hacked. When clicked on the "Sign my guestbook" link, it would redirect to the URL - http://www.vur6un.somee.com, which was also a bad address!

I went through the Mambo database using phpMyAdmin and exported the whole db as an SQL file. Then searched the file for the above URL and found the culprit record in the mos_guestbook table which had the URL embedded in it.

When guestbook was being displayed the code in the bad record would get EXECUTED and cause the page to be redirected to the specified URL.

After deleting this record from the mos_guestbook table, the guestbook started functioning properly again.