I offer coding help and advice on several PHP forms for beginners to the language.  One of the common problems they have seems to be date/time stamps and MySQL format and handling.  This seems to be especially relevant to UK coders where our dates take the format dd-mm-yyyy whereas MySQL stores the date in yyyy-mm-dd HH:mm:ss.

PHP is a wonderful language that makes working with dates etc actually very easy.  To resolve the format of date/times from MySQL to a more UK centric format I created a very simple function

function mysql2uk($date) {
      return date('d-m-Y H:i:s',strtotime($date));
} 

So to use it your php page would simply be something like this

<?php

function mysql2uk($date) {
 return date('d-m-Y H:i:s',strtotime($date));
} 

$sql ="select * from table";

$result = mysql_query($sql) or die();

$values = mysql_fetch_row($result);

echo mysql2uk($values['column']);

?>

And as easy as that your date is now in a UK format.

You can edit the format by changing the 'd-m-Y H:i:s" part of the function and to save you having to have the function at the top of everyone of your pages you can put it in an include file and just include that file on your site/pages where you want the function available.

Hope this little snippet helps some.

You can now take a live demo of our B2B CRM system by visiting http://b2b.fcsoftware.co.uk

There are a few things you need to know first though.

• Login details are on the login page for both admin and standard users.
• Email functionality is disabled in the demo.
• User and group editing/adding/deleting is disabled in the demo.
• Document management facilities are disabled in the demo.
• Be aware other users will be able to see any information you put in we highly discourage using real names, email addresses, phone numbers.

This is the B2B product so remember its tailored for businesses selling to other businesses if you target consumers this product isn’t for you but we will have our telesales/B2C product ready soon.

In all cases for the demo it is running the entry or base level package without any additional extras or fancy stuff.

I’ve not been able to find any problems with it yet even attempting to break it.  If it wasn’t for the invite only status I’d have thought this was a full blown 1.0 release.

There are however a few short comings in the client little things that could be improved or features added that aren’t currently added.

Firstly the buttons along the top its navigation effectively is lovely IF you’re using a BB with some kind of scroll wheel on the storm/storm2 they’re horribly small and if – like me – you have large fingers almost impossible to press accurately.

My suggestion for fixing this is left right motion switching.  Just like in BBM running your finger left or right across the screen cycles through the various chats. Can we not have the same for the twitter client?

Last I heard twitter were adding in Location support for tweets and users (http://blog.twitter.com/2009/08/location-location-location.html).  Now I don’t know if this came to pass but if it did then its certainly not supported by the BB client.

I don’t really have a solution to this however Ubertwitter resolves it in an interesting way.  They update the Location field with coordinates and then if you want to look at all users within say a 5 mile radius of yourself then you can do.  Its an interesting feature I’d like to see implemented – especially amusing on drunken nights out to find others making a fool of themselves – perhaps it could also be expanded to define some kind of BB user flag in there so you can perhaps say “show me all BB users within 5miles of me” leading perhaps to impromptu meets of fellow geeks/nerds and many gallons of ale….. Just a thought.

Multiple acount support is none-existant.

I have 2 accounts one for work and one for personal usage I’d like to be able to update them both while I’m out and about without having to log out log in and resync to each account manually.  Perhaps register multiple accounts and have a simple overview screen showing account name, number of new tweets, date of last tweet, number of @’s or DM’s.

Then simply clicking on that accounts icon takes you into what is currently the main page of the app.

Aside from those few things though RIM have done a superb job of the client and I think once its in final release I’ll be switching to using it full time instead of UT.

Being the good friend I am I agreed and 10 minutes later he had his job board.

It recently came about that others may find such a thing useful as well.  To this end I’m posting the Job Board zip file to this blog. Feel free to download it and use it if you want.  There is no license attached to this so do with it what you will.

Word of warning though to those of you that may be expecting an all singing and dancing system – this isn’t it! this is very basic and very simple and served its purpose.  There is no support with these files.

opensource-basic-jobboard

Good Luck

Dave

We’ve upgraded our Stockbroker B2C CRM platform to support trade tracking and commission based payroll for users.  Added more advanced reporting features and fixed a slew of bugs found in the system.

We’ve updated the E-Commerce Package EZ-Shop to version 1.0.1 which fixes a few bugs found since it went open source.  You can download the latest installer pack from the open source section of our website.

We’ve implemented cashback features into the BlueLightCard website a service open for all Emergency Service workers in the UK.

We’ve also began planning and preparation to increase our hosted platform capacity and are currently looking at the feasability of blade’s instead of our current separate rack servers.

All in its been a bit mad around here recently.  We hope normal service will resume soon and are currently looking at other tools we’ve created that would be suitable for the open source world.

http://www.HotScripts.com/?RID=N782379

http://www.scriptdungeon.com/freephpscript/freescripts9142

We think this is a great step in the right direction to help us make more people aware that there are full featured and free alternatives out there to the commercial offerings that are so frequently missold to people.

Available immediately we have made our E-Commerce platform Opensource under the GPLv3 license.

I was going to write an epic blog post about it and our reasonings etc but I don’t think thats really required.

Instead go look at our opensource page and see for yourself. http://im.ly/6d089/

Download it play about with it, improve it, fix it and get in touch we’d love to hear what your doing with the software.

Just remember if you decide to distribute it yourself to leave the link back to FC on the page’s!

A new business lead should be dealt with instantly rather than within 24 hours! The more efficient you are getting in touch with prospects and customers the more likely they will want to do business with you.

At First Contact Software we have over 20 years’ experience of getting the best from companies’ websites. We offer a free Audit of your Web Site and its content including any of these related business applications:

* Lead Management
* CRM Solutions
* Document Management
* E-Commerce
* Email Marketing
* Asset Tracking
* Bespoke Solutions
* Business Analysis

• Bulk import of contacts email address/firstname/surname
• Single addition of contacts
• Multiple campaign management each campaign handling its own set of leads from the central pool
• Scheduled sending
• Create store and edit email templates & attachments to be used repeatedly within campaigns.
• Email image storage and distribution for using images embedded within emails without users having to rely on having their own web server for image hosting.
• Creation of tracking links for click through tracking etc.
• Tracking and reporting on a per campaign basis on mails sent, mails bounced, mails delivered, mails opened and links clicked through.
• Potential to tie into the FC CRM systems for both email lists and action tracking ie: receiver clicks a link goes to link website but is then  transparently also added to your companies FC CRM and assigned as a new lead with notes detailing what actions they took from email and which campaign they were a part of.
• Timed resends ie: schedule a newsletter to go out once a month all you have to do is edit the newsletter content template each time.
• Pre-send spam checking and weighting – before you waste your send have your email content checked for likely hood of being caught by spam filters.
• Pay as you go system. You have your system and contacts for life and you only pay when you actually send an email.

Now there’s a few other smaller things that go with the above but there’s also a few potential other features I’m thinking about putting into this outside of the initial remit of “email marketing”.

SMS Marketing – Ability to schedule and send bulk SMS’s just as you do with the emails above but instead with text messages.

Twitter Marketing – I’ve been playing with the twitter API and as part of this suite I’ve also considered building in a twitter manager. Handles multiple accounts, schedule timed broadcasts to accounts, pre-set templates the whole lot.  I’m thinking this is perhaps a phase 3 system but its something that I’m keeping in the back of my mind as a value added service if you like.

Think thats about it I’m sure more idea’s will come to me over time or if you have any suggestions all are welcome.

http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/New-Social-Media-Not-Helping-Sales-53368.aspx

Again this seems to negate the amount of benefit gained from a “SocialCRM”