Extra Topics (Joe’s Blog Site)

Elgg is an open-source social networking platform. I was installing it lately when I encountered this error. I thought there was an error in the installation script because there’s a folder named “actions” not “action” as indicated in the error message. I even tried renaming that folder to remove the “s” but I got a ‘Call to undefined function‘ error. I checked my PHP version and its 5.2.6. I realized it has something to do with the directory access.

Solution
Read the INSTALL.TXT included in the root folder of your installation. It says:

A note on settings and .htaccess

The Elgg installer will try (yeah try harder!) and create two files for you:

* engine/settings.php, which contains the database settings for your installation
* .htaccess, which allows Elgg to generate dynamic URLs

If these files can’t be automatically generated, for example because you don’t have the correct directory permissions, Elgg will tell you how to create them. If, for some reason, this won’t work (Yup, this didn’t work alright!), you will need to:

* Copy engine/settings.example.php to engine/settings.php, open it up in a text editor and fill in your database details
* Copy /htaccess_dist to /.htaccess

That’s it, simply copy or rename htaccess_dist to .htaccess and it will work. My advice to all of you reading this article, next time read the installation manual first. And that includes me, darn!

Oh yah, after doing this, try to restart the installation by going into your site again. Elgg’s installer is NOT very user-friendly.

jEdit is an excellent programmer’s text editor. It has an auto-complete feature, code parser, intelligent bracket matching which skips quoted literals and comments, and lots of keyboard shortcuts. Best of all, since it’s Java-based, it’s portable so it can run on any operating system. It’s also very small, about 11.2mb when installed with the necessary plug-ins.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you forgot your Super Administrator password for your Joomla/Mambo, you can never recover your password because the passwords are hashed using MD5 algorithm. In other words, the passwords are encrypted.

However you can reset the value in the password field in the database. Set the password to a known value and then you may log-in using that new password. You can try to paste the following hash code to the password field. The password is ‘secret‘:

5ebe2294ecd0e0f08eab7690d2a6ee69

But to do this, you would have to find the field entry in the database. Some people have difficulty in locating the table or the database. That’s why I created a simple PHP script. All you have to do is to run the script from your server and it would allow you to specify your own password then it will automatically reset the password for you. You’ll have no hustle on finding the field from your database!

The script's interface to reset Joomla/Mambo admin password

How to use the script to reset your Joomla/Mambo password:

1. Download and unzip the package to your computer (adminreset.zip)
2. Upload the file adminreset.php into your server’s main folder where your Joomla/Mambo is installed.
3. Execute the script like

   http://yourserver.com/adminreset.php

4. Follow the simple instruction in the script.
5. After using the script, delete it from your server as other people might use it.

Did I emphasize that this script works for both Joomla 1.0.x and 1.5.x? Well it does…