Convert HTML to PDF Easy and Simple With mPDF

Sometimes we need to generate reports to PDF for printing or archiving. Perhaps, you may have experienced with creating a PDF in PHP but there are a lot of configurations and complicated command just to make a table. after a long search, I found mPDF library to easily generate HTML script to PDF, and my favorite part is its support to css. You can download it free at this link. In this post, I'll show you how to use it.

Create Static Drop Down Menu with CSS

Drop Down Menu

This post will talk about creating drop down menu with CSS easily. The CSS use the function to hide and display the child menu when its parent hovered.

I have analized and then adopted the css file from Joomla CMS template called ja_purity to simply create a drop down menu. This code makes a menu that has a child will show its child menu when we hover on it (parent menu).

Joomla : Create and Configure Banner

Sample Banner

Banner is used to display an ad, offers or a special information inside our website. Joomla provides this feature by default. Before creating an ad, we need to create a Category, Client (just like what we do when creating articles).

Here the steps :

1. Create one or more categories, for example : advertising, special offers, information
2. Create clients, for example : google (for its Adsense), Mr. Smith, etc.
3. Create the banner, it can contain images, text, or flash videos.
4. Note : If we choose to show the image, we have to choose it from the directory "images/banners", set "Custom Banner Code" to empty, because if there is a code here, the image won't be displayed.
5. The banner we have just made will not be displayed yet till we create a new module (mod_banner) to display it.

Conclusion:

To create one banner and make it displayed on our Joomla Engineed website, we need a category, a client and a module.

Then if we plan to make a 3 banners, we need 3 modules besides category and client (a client or a category may have more than one banner). 

Query String in Code Igniter

What is a query string?
Defining variables explicitly in the address bar is called query string. For example, http://localhost/blanc/test/shoes?size=42. The string ‘?size=42’ is a query string. Variable name is ‘size’, and the value is 42. This will be retrived in PHP :

$sizeFromQueryString = $_GET[‘size’]; 

So, the value of $sizeFromQueryString will be 42.
Code igniter (I use version 1.7.3) does not support query string by default. You can enable query string for the whole class or just implementing in certain class/controller. Follow the instructions below.