Setting up Two-Factor Authentication in Facebook

Here's a step-by-step outline for the simplest method, using text messages for 2FA. You must have, at minimum, a phone that receives text messages.
I use an Android, so if you're on an iPhone this will differ slightly.
I tried to find a good Youtube video but most were too complicated or were mostly unintelligible.
Steps are similar on a PC, but not the same.
If you implement 2FA on any device the same method will need to be used on all devices where you use Facebook.

For the most part, dealing with PayPal is a pain. But it seems to be ubiquitous and a lot of people expect to be able to use it to pay their invoices.

I encountered a situation recently, in which a very fine Joomla! module on a client's website could not handle accurately calculating the PayPal fees so they could be charged to the customer. In effect this is the same as reversing the charges on a long-distance call in days of yore.

Basically, once the fees are calculated using your percentage + flat fee, the amount passed to PayPal is then used as the basis for their calculations and you will always came up short. I reported it to the extension maker and they promised to put it on their to-do list for a future release. I felt that if I could hand them the formula for making this calculation, then I could expect a much quicker fix, and that has in fact happened.

Finding the solution proved to be much harder than I expected, but I did find it and I'm going to hand it to you in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. I'm not going to describe it, I'm going to give you the working solution, showing both the erroneous and correct calculations. Download it with the links below.

As you should expect, this spreadsheet is offered without warranty or promise or expectation of suitability for any purpose. You are entirely responsible for determining if the calculations are accurate and only proceed after thorough and careful testing. Any errors or miscalculations introduced by any means are an expected hazard when using any spreadsheet. I will not be liable for any errors contained in the spreadsheet, or which result from using the spreadsheet or any formulas or techniques included in the spreadsheet. You must make sure that the fees that PayPal assigns to you are accurate for your situation.

Excel spreadsheet demonstrating PayPal fee calculations

The same Excel spreadsheet, zipped.

Total Votes: 1

Joomla Staging Site Creation

It has always been a pet peeve of mine that it seemed to be very difficult, possibly dangerous and generally obscure as to whether it was possible to create a staging site for testing a new Joomla installation.

There is one Joomla extension that addresses this issue, but seems geared more to being a temporary testing site for updates.

I wanted the following features:

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.

https://youtu.be/lsIA720oAWQ

First, as always, make a backup of your live site and move that backup off the host to a safe place.

Assuming you have a live site named "http://www.yoursite.com" you'll use CPanel to create a subdomain, such as dev.yoursite.com as an example. You're not required to use 'dev', this just an example.

Then you'll use the Softaculous Apps Installer in CPanel to create a new Joomla installation in that directory. You may need to first add your own (www) live site to the Softaculous management panel, which is safe to do.

When you then create your staging site, in the Choose Domain prompt for Softaculous select dev.yoursite.org

This site will reside in the top-level domain file system, not under the public_html directory. Softaculous will manage the downloading and installation of the version of Joomla that you select, and the creation of the SQL database. The prompts are the same prompts you see when you install Joomla on any system.

The correct addresses for front and back end access will be shown when the site is created and may be retrieved in the Softaculous management panel in the Edit Installation Details window at any time. You can provide the public staging url to anybody you wish to see the developing site in action.

If you've been developing a site on another system already you can use Akeeba Kickstarter to move that to the staging site. However, get all of your facts organized and don't allow yourself to be distracted. As you install a Joomla site under Softaculous make sure you record the database name, prefix, user name and password. Make sure you also have that information for the live site, and don't get the two confused. When you run the ANGIE program during the Akeeba Kickstarter procedure, you will overwrite the empty site and SQL database you created with Softaculous. You don't want to clobber your live database when you restore that backup.

To summarize, if you've been playing with a Joomla 4.1 system on your office computer, you can make a backup with Akeeba, create a new 4.1 staging website with Softaculous, and follow the well-documented procedure that Akeeba provides to restore and overwrite that backup over the Softaculous staging site.

Just be deliberate and careful, and have that live site backup before you start!

Softaculous will let you move the dev site to live, after development is completely tested.

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

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.

Page 1 of 6