Joomla Staging Site Creation
- Make a fully functional Joomla website without hassling with DNS records or adding a new domain;
- Make the staging site easy to access, yet obscure it from casual or accidental observation;
- Give me the ability to test new-to-me concepts and extensions over a period of weeks or months;
- Give me the ability to move a site developed on my office Joomla installation to a staging site;
- Give clients the ability to easily connect and approve or reject features;
- Go live with the development site without that itself becoming a major project;
- Keep any existing website working without disruption;
- Test and debug moving from one major Joomla version to another;
- Make the entire process predictable and easy.
My hosting company is Rochen, which provides CPanel to administer the back-end of each site. As long as you have CPanel available at your host, and under CPanel you can create a subdomain and they make the program Softaculous Apps Installer available there, this procedure should work and check off every one of the above bullet points.
The best YouTube tutorial in a step-by-step, which works with Rochen, is on the link below. I encourage you to watch it to familiarize yourself with some basics, although the specific problem referred to in the video may not apply to you.
You need a well-oiled accounting system.
This is a great article explaining why every new and growing business needs to pay attention to their accounting system now.
Article on a business accounting system
Downloading a file from Microsoft Update Catalog
I was stuck on this for quite a while, trying to directly download and install an out-of-band update to fix a problem that Microsoft caused with another update. Specifically this is in regard to KB50000802 (or 802), which was fixed with KB5001567. But try as I might, I couldn't find the correct technique to get this file to download.
Then it hit me: This is freaking Microsoft so they've undoubtedly done something they didn't document and is just slightly squirrelly. It occurred to me to try the download with Internet Explorer instead of Chrome. No, that didn't work either. But when I tried it using Microsoft Edge the download fired up and I was able to get the file into the Downloads folder and launch it.
Obviously they did something with ActiveX or .Net, and it's probably documented somewhere. But if downloading an *.msu file doesn't work, try it with Edge.
Then simply launch the file by double-clicking on it. Good luck.
I have helped several clients implement Positive Pay reporting on their system. It is normally a situation of shooting in the dark, guess-work and trial-and-error that is, without exception, unnecessary. These problems are caused by a severe lack of communication skills from most banks.
Positive Pay, for the uninitiated, works like this: Your business prints checks (or uses ACH direct deposit or funds transfers) to pay bills. The Accounts Payable program generates a small text file that is uploaded to the bank with a list of valid checks that are to be honored. If a check is presented to be paid and it isn’t on the list the bank refuses to honor it and sends it back.
This is all to prevent fraud and it works. I have clients who, before implementing PP, had fraud attempts that were usually in the tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes they were detected and stopped, but not always. Positive Pay stops it cold.
Passport Software response to COVID-19
A lot of companies have issued generic policy statements about the Corona Virus.
Passport Software is taking action. This is the statement from John Miller, the company president. I'm all in. If you can help out here, call or email me on the contact page.
I have just offered to provide our manufacturing solution at no charge to any company trying to set up operations to contribute to the war against COVID-19.
This is a link to a brief Youtube video.
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