My initial impression was I liked the component and it was better looking and laid out than the competitors, I was a fan. However, when I tried adding events, there was no option for them to be “private” unless I was logged in as a site administrator. All events added by regular users were public and required approval by an administrator. I went through the instructions multiple times and still couldn’t get it working.

So on September 20 I posted a message on the JCal support forums requesting help. After a day or so I got a response from the developers, Anything Digital, that they were looking in to it and then a follow up saying they’ve confirmed it was a bug and I could expect a fix in 24-48 hrs. So far so good, bugs happen, I can accept that, I was still a fan. But then things started to go downhill …

I waited 48hrs for the fix … nothing. So I posted a “bump” reminder message on the forums to get an update.

I waited another 48hrs … still nothing. No communication at all. I posted another message on their forums asking for a response and letting them know I was starting to think about asking for a refund and that so far I’d have little option to write a not very positive review on the Joomla Extensions catalogue.

I waited another 48hrs … still nothing. So I posted again, requesting a refund. Their official policy says “no refunds”, but I pointed out that a credit card chargeback would cost them more than a refund, so they may want to reconsider, and that continuing to advertise it as offering “private calendars” was false advertising. On September 28 I also wrote a review on Joomla.org describing my experience.

Another 24hrs went by and finally a response – more than a week after I was told I could expect a fix within 24-48 hrs. I was told that the fix was with beta testers and they also issued me with a refund and closed my account with them. September 29.

This was more than a little confusing. What I wanted was private calendars. I only asked for a refund after it seemed apparent they couldn’t provide them anytime soon and had poor support. If they had a fix and it would soon be available, I was more than willing to wait – all they had to do was tell me what was going on!

I was annoyed, but left it at that until today. Why? Well, yesterday my review on Joomla Extensions had now been approved by the Joomla.org site admins and was posted along with a response by Anything Digital claiming the issue was resolved with a link back to the forums (update: the review has mysteriously been removed). I thought, great, I still don’t have a solution maybe I’ll buy it again! So I went to the forums and got this response -

Sorry david_steadson, you are banned from using this forum!
Gave a bad JED review even though we refunded his money

This was completely false! I gave the bad review only after I’d waited a week for a response, and a day before I was issued the refund. Furthermore, when I went to the forums without logging in, there was nothing new in the thread except the acknowledgment it had been sent to testing. After looking around the site some more I found something even more irritating … they have indeed finally publicly issued the fix!

I still need a private calendar solution. What do I do? Give them the money again despite the bad experience with their support, including being outright dishonest in the statement above? Right now I don’t know what I should do. Their software is licenced under GPL which means anyone who has it is free to share it around, so I could just wait until somebody does that, but it could be weeks or months.

I like the software. I want to use it. I would have been a fan and written positively about them, but instead because of their lack of communication they’ve turned me into a foe, with a post like this on the internet for googlers to find for years to come.

UPDATE 2010-01-01: I now have the latest version of JCalPro version 2.2.7.441 and the Private Calendars functional still does not work, with users additions requiring administrator approval even for their own private activities.

This functionality is planned with Joomla 1.6, but as is often the case, I needed a solution now. Fortunately I managed to come up with one and I thought I’d share it.

The solution uses Stephen Brandon’s powerful MetaMod module. MetaMod allows you to enable various “rules” on a Joomla page for turning modules on and off, writing particular messages, redirecting – whatever you can come up with. Using MetaMod I created a rule that checks to see if the logged on user is a member of the GroupJive group connected to the forum he/she is trying to view. If they are not then it redirects them to another page. It does the same if anyone attempts to view the parent category. This step isn’t necessary if the parent category is unpublished in Kunena.

To enable this solution, download and install MetaMod and publish it on the Kunena forum component page. In my template I publish it with no title, in the footer, and with class -nobox so that it’s effectively invisible to users. In the module itself I set the following PHP code -

//
// Block access to GroupJive Forums
//
$group_catid=21;
$redirect_url='/';
$catid = JRequest::getVar("catid");
//Redirect if in main group category
if ($catid==$group_catid)
{
      $app->redirect($redirect_url);
}
// check if forum is in group category
$query="select parent from jos_fb_categories where id=".$catid;
$db->setQuery( $query, 0, 1 );
$row = $db->loadObject();
$parent_id= $row->parent;
if ($parent_id==$group_catid)
{
$username = $user->username;
$gj_query = "SELECT username FROM jos_gj_users
INNER JOIN jos_gj_jb ON jos_gj_users.id_group=jos_gj_jb.group_id 
where category_id=".$catid." and username='".$username."'";
$db->setQuery( $gj_query, 0, 1 );
$gj_row = $db->loadObject();
$gj_username = $gj_row->username;
if (is_null($gj_username))
{
      $app->redirect($redirect_url);
}
}

There are two things you need to change in the first few lines of code. $group_catid should be set to the Kunena category ID where your having GroupJive create forums. $redirect_url should be set to wherever you want the user to end up instead of the private forum. You may want to setup an error message page. In the future I think I’ll set mine to redirect to the main groupjive page with an error message stating the forums are private and they need to join. Alternatively I might simply redirect back to the page they came from. That’s it!

Alas, our experience with ZipCodeShop (ZCS), despite starting well, has not been a good one. I contacted them and told them I was looking at buying both components, and they were more than helpful. I purchased the ZCS Community Builder component, for US$99, and started trying to implement it in my site. I sort of got it working, and for 2 days ZCS support via email were extremely fast, and extremely helpful – though they did continue to ignore requests to be given access to their support forums. The component itself was encoded and hardcoded with a licence linked to my domain name. This concerned me as we had plans to change the domain name, but they assured me it would be no problem to do so. After a couple of days I was still having a few problems, and they informed me a new version was coming the following week, and that prices would be increasing - so I should buy the Moset’s tree version straight away. I elected not to do so.

That was in February. Since then I have lodged more than a dozen support ticket requests and followups through their online ticketing system. I have sent numerous emails directly. I have left messages with their Live Online Support. I’ve even tried several international phone calls. Nothing. I would be concerned they had gone of business, or the principles had some serious health issues or similar, but at the end of April a message appeared on their site stating they were upgrading their site and the new one would be up at the end of the week. At the end of the week, the message disappeared but nothing else changed. Thus, I’m left with an encoded component who’s bugs I cannot fix, and which I cannot easily customised for my purposes, as I was assured I could.

Sadly, posts on Joomlapolis indicate my experience is not unique. I left further messages last week advising ZipCodeShop I would be doing this blog post, but there has been no response.

In the meantime I’ve developed a replacement component to the ZipCodeShop radius search component using the excellent Fabrik development framework, available at www.fabrikar.com. For those who have been left wanting by ZCS I’ll try to blog about my solution in the next week.

We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.

For example, I asked WolframAlpha “how far from Stockholm to Moscow?” Instead of providing me with a list of pages where I might get the answer, I was given the distance in kilometres, the approximate flight time, a map, plus some other potentially useful information like the current time in both cities and their populations.

I’m about to have lunch, so I asked WA – how many calories in a pancake? This time I was given the average calories, some other energy measurements, and an interesting graph of where pancakes like in a distribution ranking of different food and the caloric content.

It’s going to take a while to learn when’s the best time to use WA over google, but I think this is going to be a great tool!

The odd thing about this is that even being aware of this Law of Tripled Time*, computer folk (including myself) still can’t seem to accurately estimate how long a job will take. Now I think I know why! It’s because of the Inverse Law of Tripled Time*.

It’s well known in the IT/Computer field that pretty much every task or project takes at least 2-3 times more time than you think it is taking while you’re actually doing it. You start some task, an after about an hour or so, you look up at the clock and discover that 3 hours or so have actually passed. You start some project, and after a month or so working it, you suddenly realise you’ve been working at it for 3 months.

So our estimates of how long a project will take are actually fully in sync with how long it feels like it’s taking – it’s just none of it matches what’s happening on the clock and calendar!

* I just made these up, if you see them again, remember you read them here first!

Installation went pretty smoothly and everything looked fine – until I went to open the shared folders from my main PC -

Cannot Connect. The Network Path Was Not Found.

Interestingly the supplied “console” software would quite happily list the folders being shared, but connecting to them failed. It appears that MS is using newer web technologies to provide the information about what’s available, but use older local area network technologies to actually connect to the shared resources. This is fair enough – if it works!

I checked and discovered that Microsoft had supplied a connection troubleshooter with their Home Server Toolkit. I installed and ran that and it advised me -

No DHCP server, or DHCP server is not reachable

A DHCP server was not detected, or the test cannot communicate with the DHCP server.

By default, Windows Home Server gets its IP address configuration from a DHCP server that is on your home network. Normally, the DHCP server is located on your broadband router. Without the DHCP service, your computers cannot get their IP address configuration and cannot communicate with each other.

To fix this problem, ensure that your broadband router is powered on and is connected to the network. Also, ensure that your broadband router is configured as a DHCP server.

Alternatively, you can assign static IP addresses to all computers that are on your network, including your home server. You need advanced networking knowledge to do this. If you assigned static IP addresses to the computers that are on your home network, you can safely ignore this issue. Look for other others issues, particularly name-resolution issues.

For more information about Windows name resolution, NetBIOS, HOSTS files, and other name-resolution possibilities, see “Host Name Resolution” at the Microsoft Web site (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=98161)

Okkayy … I understand that. I’ve been involved with TCPIP network for almost 20 years. I also know that their assumption “Normally, the DHCP server is located on your broadband router” is often false in this part of the world. I have a direct 100Mb ethernet connection to the ISP, as do many folk in the major cities of Sweden. The ISP, Bredbandsbolaget, supplied me with a wireless bridge to provide WiFi access and additional ports for my various PCs – but all of them get their IP addresses from the ISP’s DHCP server – not from the bridge or a router.

I understand all of this. But how many “normal” people do? So what would be the next step? Click on the link supplied for further help I guess. Go on, click on it – http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=98161

Now seriously, how many “average” home users, the target group for Home Server, are going to understand even a few sentences of that? And even if they did, it doesn’t provide an answer! You need to be a network engineer to solve it.

Or if you’re lucky and googling “Windows Home Server” and “network path not found” you might find this post!

The solution is actually quite simple. When your PC connects to a DHCP server to get it’s internet address, it also gets some other settings. It’s more than possible those settings will not be appropriate for Windows Home Server. In particular, my error was caused because NetBios over TCP/IP was not enabled. This is a way for computers, usually on a local area network, to talk to each other over an “internet” based network. It’s set either via DHCP or in the “advanced” settings of network connections. In Windows Home Server you can reach it by clicking Start then going to Control Panel/Network Connections/Local Area Connection. Click Properties, then select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) then click Properties and then Advanced. Once there, click on the tab labelled WINS. At the bottom you’ll find NetBIOS setting. The default is to get the setting from a DHCP server. If that’s not working, change it to Enabled and click OK.

You may need to make the same changes on your Client PCs, it will be in much the same place.

Hopefully that helps someone.

UPDATE: After a while the above “fix” stopped working for me. It appears, though I’m still not 10=% sure, that my Vista PC was deciding whenever it rebooted to be the Domain Master Browser and not doing the job properly – stopping itself and other PCs being able to connect to the Home Server. Setting the IsDomainMaster parameter in the registry to false seems to have solved it.

As always though, migrating websites to new servers can be challenging. In this case I was moving from IIS6 to IIS7 plus upgrading to the latest versions of PHP and MySQL. In addition, Asgard was using the Helm control panel for website management. The originally developers of Helm, WebHostAutomation, offered a free 5 client licence for Helm and this would have been ideal for maintaining my sites – but unfortunately Helm was bought out by Parallels and they’ve dropped this deal. While I could just maintain the sites through Windows, I liked the simplicity of a control panel and have decided to give DotNetPanel a go. DotNetPanel has a free 5 client licence!

DotNetPanel proved relatively easy to setup, though there was of course a learning curve . With PHP I was eager to test the new FastCGI capabilities of IIS7 and I found a great walkthrough on IIS.NET.  The first site I migrated was fittogether.eu, a new health based social network site based on Joomla we’re developing. It worked perfectly. I then migrated mlmfacts.net, a wiki I’m setting up to try and track all the different companies in the multi-level marketing world, and that’s where problems began – it simply wouldn’t work, complaining about not being able to load various “includes”. I then tried setting up a wordpress blog (this one!) at david.steadson.com and encountered almost the same issue.

After several hours of digging (and I’m not a PHP programmer) I eventually narrowed it down to a problem with the PHP function realpath() not providing the correct answer. I won’t go through the details here, you can read a bit about it on the iis.net forums where I reported the problem, but eventually I discovered the issue was actually with how DotNetPanel sets up websites. A site like this wordpress blog is installed in c:/HostingSpaces/David1/david.steadson.com/wwwroot. Various folders for logs and backups etc are placed in c:/HostingSpaces/David1/david.steadson.com. This isn’t a particular unusual setup, on Helm for example the site would have been in c:/HelmSites/david.steadson.com/wwwroot.

So what was the problem? Well, by default Helm gives access to the account folder, /david.steadson.com, to the user account the web service runs under. On a default IIS7 install folk tend to setup their sites under c:/inetpub and this directory also has read permissions for the web service. DotNetPanel on the other hand did not give this permission and I eventually found others who had reported similar problems. Adding the permission allowed the sites to work fine!

The only other “challenging” migration task was setting up “friendly URLs”. At Asgard we used a commercially IIS6 isapi module called isapi_rewrite that allowed websites to do URL rewriting using .htaccess and much the same syntax as used on *nix with mod_rewrite. This year though, Microsoft released a free IIS7 module, URL Rewrite, which does much the same thing, though with different syntax. Thankfully it comes complete with an “import” tool for importing mod_rewrite style rules and it’s working a charm.

So far I’ve migrated my various Amway hobby sites – www.amwaywatch.com, www.amwaytalk.com, www.thetruthaboutamway.com, and www.amwaywiki.com, next step is some of my other business sites and a handful of friends websites! I’ve requested Server Beach shutdown the server they’re on in the middle of next week, so I’m on a deadline ….