AyaNova 6.5 has been released:

As a registered user of AyaNova, we wanted to let you know that we have released the maintenance update 6.5.0.0 as well as let you know about our newest feature

*******************************************

Ad-hoc reporting - add data to reports via API methods!

*******************************************

New feature of AyaNova 6.5 brings the full power of the AyaNova business object library into the existing scripting language behind AyaNova reports allowing for nearly complete freedom to insert any ad-hoc information into reports from any area of AyaNova.

For example, a detailed service workorder report template could be extended using the API to include displaying the Unit's custom fields data.

Check out the Help section

http://www.ayanova.com/AyaNova6webHelp/accessing_additional_data_fiel.htm for an overview and the AyaNova Support Forum section http://forum.ayanova.com/Forum101-1.aspx for examples

*****************************************

Maintenance update 6.5.0.0 now available!

*****************************************

As always, check out what fixes and new features are in this maintenance update by viewing on the forum  - see topic http://forum.ayanova.com/Topic5256-96-1.aspx

If the fixes and new features are to areas that you use in AyaNova, than we highly encourage you to update as per the steps (if AyaNova Lite refer to http://forum.ayanova.com/Topic5254-96-1.aspx or if full AyaNova refer to http://forum.ayanova.com/Topic5255-96-1.aspx )

If you have not yet upgraded to AyaNova 6 from an older version, do review the answers to common upgrading questions on http://www.ayanova.com/FaqUpgrading.htm including checking out all of the many new and expanded features and plug-ins that will help you manage your service efficiently and effectively.

If any questions, do let us know

Thank you,

Your AyaNova Support Team

Posted 5/20/2010 to the AyaNova forums by John from Ground Zero Tech-Works:

We've been cooking something up in the lab and it's nearly ready to unleash upon the world:

As part of our ongoing effort to ensure AyaNova remains the most powerful and developer friendly service management software on the planet we have a very cool update coming that will enable you to use the AyaNova API methods from the code behind reports in the report editor.

This will bring the full power of the AyaNova business object library into the existing scripting language behind AyaNova reports allowing for nearly complete freedom to insert any ad-hoc information into reports from any area of AyaNova. For example the basic client list report could be extended using the API to print a list of all the Units each client owns under each client in the report.

Because this is the full AyaNova business object library this also means information can flow the other way, in other words a report can interact with and update AyaNova objects as well. For example you could create a plugin for AyaNova that tracks report usage and then add code in the report that logs the printing of the report using the Integration object in the API. Or update a custom field in a client for example based on information in the report.

Release date TBD.

View the original thread here.

Just recieved this email from Ground Zero Tech-Works:

As a registered user of AyaNova, we wanted to let you know about our newest plugin and that we have released the maintenance update 6.3.0.0!

*************************************************************

New importexport.csv plugin updates existing AyaNova records!

*************************************************************

New importexport.csv plugin now available that can update your existing AyaNova client records, part records and/or unit records when importing into AyaNova using a CSV format file

For an overview of the many new plug-ins including the new importexport.csv utility that can update your existing clients, parts and/or units, see the Plug-ins web page http://www.ayanova.com/plugins.htm#ClientImportExport

*****************************************

Maintenance update 6.3.0.0 now available!

*****************************************

As always, check out what fixes and new features are in this maintenance update by viewing on the forum  - see topic http://forum.ayanova.com/Topic5193-96-1.aspx

If the fixes and new features are to areas that you use in AyaNova, than we highly encourage you to update as per the steps (if AyaNova Lite refer to http://forum.ayanova.com/Topic5191-96-1.aspx or if full AyaNova refer to http://forum.ayanova.com/Topic5192-96-1.aspx )

If you have not yet upgraded to AyaNova 6 from an older version, do review the answers to common upgrading questions on http://www.ayanova.com/FaqUpgrading.htm including checking out all of the many new and expanded features and plug-ins that will help you manage your service efficiently and effectively.

If any questions, do let us know

Thank you,

Your AyaNova Support Team

HaveAByte was recently was granted technical responsibilities for advance-tapes.com / advancecollege.org - a website with legal case summaries going back to 1992, developed by the late Professor Steven R. Finz and recently taken under the wing of Pincus Legal Education, a client of HaveAByte.  I wouldn't be surprised if the website goes back nearly that far as well.  It's a pretty amazing website for those interested in these legal case summaries, there are thousands of cases posted.  If you saved every page on the site to your PC, there would be over 6000 files.  I also truly love the design - I'm a real minimalist.  :)

Of course, in this modern age, we use databases to store smaller bits of information, use shared include files (to share content across pages), and then would build the case summary pages dynamically with code pulling the cases from a database.  This entire site could potentially be around 50 actual source pages, and easy to update.  However, amazingly, it is actually 6000 unique HTML files due to how far back it dates.  Looking at the site, however, you'd never know this - the menu footer and various other common elements are virtually identical across all 6000+ pages, as it was very well constructed.

It's a bit like going back in time to when everything was simply an HTML page and edited manually, but when you add the modern expectations that clients have which have evolved over time, it presents an interesting challenge to update.

Enter TextCrawler developed by Digital Volcano in the UK.

This amazing, free little application has made maintaining this site a lot easier.  From their website:

TextCrawler is a fantastic tool for anyone who works with text files. This cool utility enables you to instantly find and replace words and phrases across multiple files and folders.  It utilises a powerful Regular Expression engine to enable you to create sophisticated searches, perform batch operations, extract text from files and more. It is fast and easy to use, and as powerful as you need it to be.

Some features:

• • Find and Replace across files
  • Fast searching, even on large files.
  • Simple to use interface
  • Flexible search parameters
  • Text Extractor - rip text into a new file
  • Search and replace using Regular Expressions. Create sophisticated searches.
  • Regular Expression test tool
  • Regular Expression library - Save your searches.
  • Create backup files
  • Highlighted search results
  • Export Results
  • Batch find and replace operations

TextCrawler is freeware, but any donations towards future development are gratefully received. If in the future a pay-for version of Textcrawler is released all contributors will receive a full licence!  (I just donated 10 GBP.)

My favorite part of this application is the real-time preview of exactly what your replacement is going to replace.  In the case of regular expressions, it's easy sometimes to accidentally write a "greedy" expression that replaces more than it should, which in this case would be devastating, forcing a restoration from backup.  Essentially this application has allowed me to fulfill the requests of the client nearly as well as if the site was constructed on a modern database or CMS platform.  I look forward to rebuilding this site using modern techniques when and if it makes sense to do so, but for now, I'm glad I have this little application to help ease the pain a bit.  The best things in life are indeed free!

(This blog entry is about PrestaShop, an e-commerce web application for which HaveAByte provides services.  For more information about our offering, please visit our PrestaShop page.)

About a year ago I built shop.haveabyte.com using PrestaShop 1.1.0.5.  The experience was fairly good and at the end I wound up recommending Prestashop to a lot of people.  I had a lot of trouble with the Paypal interface, but I got it to work well enough to allow me to launch the site.  I also do a lot of Magento maintenance and personally I like the back-end interface to PrestaShop much better for smaller projects where you just want to sell a few items, even though PrestaShop is also well designed in some areas to scale very well.

One of our customers, Julie Fogg of ActivePort, who uses our hosted AyaNova solution, and for whom we also built a very nice Joomla website (http://www.activeport.com), has referred a lot of business to HaveAByte.  So, when she came to me saying she wanted to build an ecommerce website for her daughter and wanted it done in just a few days, I jumped at the chance.  It's great to have real-world practice on web applications like this.  It's great to have a real site to be working on when experimenting with software like this - you're just not quite as driven to solve problems when you make an "ABC Test Shop" and just start poking at it randomly.  It was also a great opportunity to repay the favors of all the referrals from Julie!

So her daughter, Olivia, came up with BananaFoot.net, Julie registered it and I hooked it into the server.  I downloaded and installed PrestaShop 1.2.0.5 and set file permissions.  Just like that, less than 30 minutes later, we're up and running.

Julie bought a nice template from http://www.prestashopthemes.net/pres-4 and it took just a few minutes to install.  The template had just 3 original PhotoShop PSDs for the main logo and homepage images which didn't take too long to tweak with an image of Olivia and modify the text a bit.  And just like that, within an hour or so, we have this:

The top menu and footer were pretty easy to edit, just some .TPL files full of HTML in the theme folders.  Some of the pages are powered by PrestaShop's CMS (Content Management System) feature, which provides a simple in-browser editor for making pages such as About Us, Olivia's Photo Gallery, and so on.

The Back Office interface makes adding items and categories a snap.  After just a few minutes of instruction over Skype, Julie was able to take over this part of it while I worked on some of the other back-end configuration details.

The Shipping setup is a little odd, but once you figure it out, it suddenly makes sense.  You create carriers and price ranges, then map them together, then price the carriers.  It feels a bit convoluted and as if you're working backwards but once it's set up it works well enough.

The sample data included provided tons of countries and zones, and if you plan to ship internationally, it's a great setup.  When you only want to ship in the US, it takes a little time to disable all of those other countries properly.  Changing the store defaults from French to English (PrestaShop is a french-borne application) and changing the currency from Euro to Dollar is simple enough.

Now that everything was ready to go, it's time to sell!  There's a modules page where you enable and disable various modules, and the Payment Methods you wish to support are all modules.  I disabled all of them except Paypal.  The Paypal module's configuration has only a small handful of options, mainly the Paypal address and whether you want to run it in Sandbox mode or not.

This is where things get a little tricky.

After placing an order via Paypal, it returns the user to their account Order History screen, but says there are no orders.  Searching around on the forums seems to indicate that this problem has appeared off and on for many users and no clear explanation is readily available yet.  I've followed all of the instructions in both the Paypal module's help screen as well as the wiki and tried many forum suggestions.

The basic issue is that whether IPN is off or on, the Paypal purchase ends on a page with a form and button to return to BananaFoot.net.  Inspection of the form shows that it's sending a ton of information back to Prestashop by way of the order-confirmation.php file in the root folder.  Unfortunately, when this information reaches this page, order-confirmation.php (or some other dependent sub-script) is throwing away the information, not writing anything to the orders table, and then dumping the user to the history screen - which of course then says that they have not placed any orders.  The order is recieved and processed OK via Paypal, and even with IPN on, Paypal confirms that the IPN data is being sent properly.  But no order history is tracked on Presta's side.

Amazingly, I went back to the HaveAByte Shop and tested it there - same problem, to my surprise.

For now I've decided to create a simple CMS page explaining that the order has been recieved, and redirect the user there from order-confirmation.php.  An ugly hack but it will have to do since the goal is to be online ASAP.

Fortunately, within a day or two of posting to the forums and PrestaShop bug tracker, this page was revealed to me

http://www.prestashop.com/forums/viewthread/17934/P15/third_party_modules/paypal_2_dot_1_beta_module

I will be trying this soon and will update this blog entry with more information as it develops!  If you're looking to set up a PrestaShop using Paypal as the primary payment method, I'd encourage you to study up on these issues.  I haven't tried the Google Checkout module yet but my sense is that it does not have these problems, since most fixes I've seen attempted by the community lie in the Paypal module, though it could be sharing techniques with the Google Checkout module in this area.  Hard to say really.  I'd simply suggest you understand that you may need to place a lot of orders to get it all working just right (having a test item and test shipping both at $0.01 or using a Paypal Sandbox account helps [if you can get one - Paypal has been having issues lately creating sandbox accounts]).