WhatsApp Messaging from Web

By on June 16, 2014

If you need to send WhatsApp message to your friend from Web, you need to find unofficial API as WhatsApp till date do not provide them, and do not allow bulk messaging as well. But in one of my project, I need to send message on whatsapp, for those who subscribe on website to recieve those about our service updates.

So, I use WhatsApi (https://github.com/venomous0x/WhatsAPI), simply because it was most recommended API I found. I didn’t even try any other API code, as it works like charm for me. It has AjaxDemo folder in there, with 3 files. Anyone can easily learn the coding from it. So, I don’t go in much of coding part in this article. But here is basic steps with some code.

To start with,

  • You will need a Mobile number that will be used to send messages. Make sure that you can recieve SMS on this mobile phone to verify the Whatsapp account.
  • Once you have your phone ready, download WART (https://github.com/shirioko/WART) which provide a simple EXE, to enter your phone and get a Password for API. Remember Whatsapp send password once every 30 minute, so if you want to get new password you have to wait 30 minutes.
  • Now, that you have WhatsAPP mobile phone and password, simply try this code.

 

require_once 'whatsprot.class.php';
$username = "11111111111"; //Mobile Phone prefixed with country code so for india it will be 91xxxxxxxx
$password = "somepasswordstring";
 
$w = new WhatsProt($username, 0, "WhatsApp Messaging", true); //Name your application by replacing "WhatsApp Messaging"
$w->connect();
$w->loginWithPassword($password);
 
$target = '912222222222'; //Target Phone,reciever phone
$message = 'Your message comes here';
 
$w->SendPresenceSubscription($target); //Let us first send presence to user
$w->sendMessage($target,$message ); // Send Message

 

Yes, it was that simple. You can send Image and Video as well, but I am not going to explain them here, though to send Media you need to call ‘$w->pollMessages()’ otherwise your message won’t be sent.

Note: all Phone must prefix the country code or it won’t send messages. To send media, you can either give Physical path or a URL to media resource.

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How to Programmatically Add Multi Language Post in WordPress and WPML

By on April 11, 2014

I recently need to create wordpress post programmatically. It is so easy with wp_insert_post. However, the twist is how to add it using WPML for multi language support. WPML is nice plugin, but I didn’t find straight forward answer to it. Than I found a nice article from Ionuț Staicu, that does what I need. And it is the most popular article I found and seems like only solution people have. Article can be read in http://www.iamntz.com/3424/frontend-developer/programmatically-insert-posts-in-wordpress-and-set-language-for-wpml-plugin/. Though it doesn’t seems to solve my problem.

I email Ionuț Staicu, and to my surprise the nice guy email me back in couple of hour, and give me few suggestion and even his code snippet. I really love reading his code. On trying that code I found that he copy WPML API wpml_add_translateable_content function in his code and comment out the Check for duplicate addition of same content.

Doing so make my code work, but I was not satisfied. Sorry Ionuț Staicu, that doesn’t make me happy. Reason was simple. A company running such plugin cannot make such silly mistake. I trust WPML developer, they are of course better than me to realise what they are putting as check. 

So, what is wrong in my code? Well the answer was simple. WPML hook wp_insert_post to run “add_translate”. So, you don’t have to call it. However to add multiple language you need to call “wp_insert_post” for all language you want to add the code. This is easy..huh? no it is not easy. WPML call add_translate, but didn’t link them. I am not sure if they have any “insert” meta field that does the link. But there is no clearer way I found. So, I go back to add_translateable function and found that they have nothing but only

$sitepress->set_element_language_details(...);

other than checks. So, what does this function do. Simple, it change/add the Translation into database. So, all I have to do is, I need to update the Secondary language with the transalation id [3rd parameter of set_element_language_details ] to my default translation ID. Sound complex, no worries just read code below:

$_POST['icl_post_language'] = $language_code = 'he';  //Setting hebrew post. Ionuț Staicu suggest to have $_POST set. I follow him
$newPostID = wp_insert_post( $PostDATA );	//See wp_insert_post for details		
 
$trigid = wpml_get_content_trid('post_property', $newPostID); // Find Transalation ID function from WPML API. 
 
$_POST['icl_post_language'] = $language_code = 'fr'; // Set another language
$tpropertyid1 = wp_insert_post( $PostDATA ); // Insert French post
$sitepress->set_element_language_details($tpropertyid1, 'post_property', $trigid, $language_code); // Change this post translation ID to Hebrew's post id
 
//Repeating for English post.
$_POST['icl_post_language'] = $language_code = 'en'; 
$tpropertyid2 = wp_insert_post( $PostDATA );
$sitepress->set_element_language_details($tpropertyid2, 'post_property', $trigid, $language_code);

So, that just insert and link all languages you want. I did this in PHP CLI command line, and it works like charm. Hope this help someone. 

 

 

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Javascript Base64 Encode, Decode for UTF-8/unicode string

By on April 3, 2014

Complete article that works for me : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Base64_encoding_and_decoding 

Part where we encode from unicode/utf-8 is

function utf8_to_b64( str ) {
  return window.btoa(unescape(encodeURIComponent( str )));
}
 
function b64_to_utf8( str ) {
  return decodeURIComponent(escape(window.atob( str )));
}
 
// Usage:
utf8_to_b64('✓ à la mode'); // "4pyTIMOgIGxhIG1vZGU="
b64_to_utf8('4pyTIMOgIGxhIG1vZGU='); // "✓ à la mode"

 This is one of most used thing now a days.

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C#: Code to load Object from Database

By on January 3, 2014

It is often when managing old project that do not use ORM coding, we need to load object from database. In such scenarios it is quite boring to code all 30-40 property to load from DB. So, I wrote this simple code which does it quite well for me, the only catch is you need to define object property same as their DB column name. So, here is the quick code for the same.

public void LoadRS(DataRow rs)
    {
        foreach (PropertyInfo propertyInfo in this.GetType().GetProperties())
        {
            try
            {
                if (propertyInfo.CanRead)
                {
                    if (rs.Table.Columns.Contains(propertyInfo.Name))
                    {
 
                        switch (propertyInfo.PropertyType.Name)
                        {
                            case "String":
                                propertyInfo.SetValue(this, Convert.ToString(rs[propertyInfo.Name]), null);
                                break;
                            case "Int64":
                                propertyInfo.SetValue(this, long.Parse(Convert.ToString(rs[propertyInfo.Name])), null);
                                break;
                            case "Int32":
                                propertyInfo.SetValue(this, int.Parse(Convert.ToString(rs[propertyInfo.Name])), null);
                                break;
                            default:
                                propertyInfo.SetValue(this, Convert.ChangeType(Convert.ToString(rs[propertyInfo.Name]), propertyInfo.PropertyType), null);
                                break;
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
            catch { }
        }
    }

  The code use the System.Reflection and then it read the Object property [see this.GetType().GetProperties() in foreach], iterate over properties and then checking if DataRow contain the same name column, if so, it load them. Basically the Default statement in Switch is enough for most cases, but I still leave it as is insight that in future I might need to cast some particular DB field to other field here. Oh, yes that one condition is boolean field. 

There are lot of upgradation coming in my mind as I write this blog entry, but currently no time to upgrade it and will add this function in my class library for future use. 

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Experiment goes wrong

By on January 2, 2014

My blog was recently been taken out. I was experimenting on my Azure server that host the blog and accidently leave a unsecure port open on my server. Result, server was over used by hacker and Azure close me down. That is really nice of them that they did close me, because otherwise I might not know what is going wrong with my hosting as these things are easily ignored.

But I am back and close all issues and hope to continue with more precaution now on.

 

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Installing Redmine 2.3.3 on Ubuntu 13

By on October 26, 2013

Okay, today I install Redmine on Azure hosted Ubuntu 13.04. The steps are easy once I get it done after 2 days of working and finding what is right to do. So, let us start on installation, but a little history first.

I see that Bitnami has put quite a few Redmine VM Images on VM depot. But unfortunately all are on older version of Ubuntu. But I still thought I can upgrade them for my use, so I use the latest [Ubuntu 12] based image and try to do ‘do-release-upgrade’ it download lot of things, but in end it fail to update the machine. So, I now opt to use core Linux machine to install what I need. So, I create a VM using Ubuntu 13.04. It was easy as usual. Once the machine is up. I once run do-release-upgrade to install all latest package and there are quite a lot of them. It took around 20-30 minute for my Very small instance of VM to install them.

Once the machine is ready, now we need to install: Apache, MySQL [so I can host not just redmine but couple of my other website as well]. And to extract the latest source of Redmine we also need SVN [package name 'subversion'] on server as well. I usually use svn version only, but you can download zip/tarball as well.

So install is as follow:

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# sudo apt-get install subversion
# sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-passenger
# sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
# sudo apt-get install ruby ruby-dev
# sudo apt-get install imagemagick libmagickwand-dev ruby-rmagick

 Above statements will install subversion, apache, MySQL, ruby and ruby-dev, imagemagick and ruby-rmagick .. they all are prerequesties and you might already gave those. Once this is done..

Download Redmine 2.3.3 from svn using this Redmine Download link http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/Download

Now, we need GEM Bundler to be installed. so

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 # sudo gem install bundler

 Now navigate to Redmine folder, oh you can download redmine in any folder, as long as you are ready to use your <redmine folder>/public as your document root. if not you can use symbolic link of public folder as well in apache. Just thought to tell this now. In next step we will create a Gemfile.local to tell the installer to use rack’ version 1.4.5 as by default it install version 1.5.2 and it doesn’t work for me and I see lot of people had problem with it, so just create a Gemfile.local with one line in it and use your bundler install to do it.

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# cd redmine-2.3 
# sudo cat &gt; Gemfile.local &lt;&lt; "EOF"
gem "rack", "~&gt; 1.4.5"
EOF
# sudo bundle install --without development test mysql
# rake generate_secret_token

 Once you did that it install redmine or rather just built it. We now need a database to store redmine data, so create MySQL database, username and password as you want. Obviously you don’t want to use root username. Once you create that user and database. then go to redmine/config folder, you will find database.yml.example file, copy it as database.yml.example go to production section of MySQL db, enter your login info and change database type t0 mysql2 [it is just new library of MySQL with ruby, you can still use [mysql] but it might give error so better change it.

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production:
  adapter: mysql2
  database: redmine_default
  host: localhost
  username: redmine
  password: some-secure-plain-text-password
  encoding: utf8

Now run following commant to Create Database Table, clear unwanted data and session

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rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production 
rake tmp:cache:clear
rake tmp:sessions:clear

Now, second last step: Creating a virtual Host or defining the DocumentRoot so our apache can use redmine installation. Add following Virtual Host Tag, you can add other information as you like, but keep this as minimum you need. Please change “[" and "]” with “<” and “>” as my editor doesn’t allow me to use them below…

[Virtualhost *:80]
DocumentRoot /usr/local/share/redmine-2.3.0/public
[Directory /usr/local/share/redmine-2.3.0/public]
AllowOverride all
Options -MultiViews
[/Directory]
[/VirtualHost]

Restart Apache

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# sudo service apache2 restart

Now, go to your domain, IP address base url whaterver it is, and login using “admin” as username and password. You are most probably ready to rock. If not you should enable error login using /config/environment/production.rb file and then check what error you might get from Redmine.

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Some Cool WordPress Plugin

By on October 25, 2013

Lately, I got lot of wordpress site, that were not just blog or business website. But they are ecommerce, Restaurant Ordering, Video streaming and much more. Been a developer I always remain engage in making some sort of plugin for them. Though following list of plugin assist me a big time in saving time to do some of works I usually have to do to make some really nasty site in wordpress:

The list is of plugin I usually use, but not restricted to. There are couple more of plugin but currently I am unable to recall them. Meanwhile we also create a small plugin used for very limited set of user:

https://github.com/Vikasumit/wpl [Allow only members to see the complete site].

I have few other plugin coming up, but still not ready to launch them in public as they are not yet finish or are mature products. Love the fact that WordPress plugin development is as cool as working on any other project. Just need some good idea to make it possible.

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