I promised for weeks to some users to release a new version of ab_booking. Only a few seconds ago, I did it!

New revision 0.5.0 is online in TER (TYPO3 Extension Repository) and on forge.typo3.org.

There are some tiny bugfixes and several new features, I am using on my site. Now it's p ossible to make prices depending on the duration of the booking.

For example you could enter rates for a double as follows:

• 1 night: 90 € + 10 € for room cleaning
• 2 nights: 2x90€ but no extra charge room cleaning
• 3 nights: 3x80€
• 7 nights: 7x(90€-20%)

You can achieve this by entering the following code into the price database field:

90,D:3:80,D:7:20%

Read (comma separated):  It costs 90 per night. A discount ("D") is offered after 3 nights and the new price is 80. Another discount ("D") is vallid after 7 days and you pay 90 minus 20%. And so on...

The same with the room cleaning. If you want only an extra charge for people comming one night, you enter in single component:

10,D:2:-1

Read: It costs 10 per stay. A discount ("D") is valid after 2 days and the price is removed (-1). You could of course write as well:

10,D:2:5,D:7:-1

In this case the customers pay 10 for one night, 5 for 2-6 nights and no extra charge for more than 7 nights.

Or you can offer optionally breakfast and the customer may deselect it or not.

7,D:3:10%,O

Read: It costs 7 per person. A discount of 10% is applied after 3 nights. The customer may deselect this option ("O").

With 0.5.0 you may also influence the minimum stay for the customer. E.g. if you like to set a minimum stay of 3 nights for bookings more than 8 weeks in the future you can set:

3,W:8:2,W:1:1 

Read: The minium stay is three nights. 8 weeks before booking start it is reduced to 2 nights. And in the last week before arrival it is set to 1 night.

There is an other view which is quite useful in my case: a check-in overview. Now you can put on an internal page a view with the coming arrivals and depatures for the next 4 days (sorry, not configurable at the moment). And you have a simple calendar field to jump to any date in the past and future!

Now ab_booking is much more flexible but for sure still not flexible enough for everybody. Please feel free to test ab_booking at ab_booking.bigga.de and to install it to your TYPO3 website.

PACKT publishing, September 2011

BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing Beginner’s Guide!

I received a copy of this book one month ago. Due to other projects, I couldn't start reading immediately.

Vivek Ramachandran wrote this book.  Vivek is a security researcher originally from India who seems to be good known on all security conferences.

The book is not too big (about 200 pages) and you find many screenshots of terminal outputs. And you will need these screenshots because they explain many things even better than a long description.

Why BackTrack Linux? The author writes his motiviation in the preface. BackTrack is a distribution with lots of security utils already on board. I tried it with Debian stable because this was already installedon my laptop. This works too, but you have to download and build several tools by your own.

I read the book like a thriller! Every chapter has several sections where you get step by step deeper into the wireless analytics. I knew most basics before. But didn't know how easy it is to crack a WEP-encrypted network. And I learned that hidden ESSIDs help absolutely nothing!

It's good to know the handling of wireless on the linux console and to understand basics of the protocoll. But if you don't: you learn it quite fast with the book howto bring up your wireless interface with iwconfig, wpa_supplicant and co.

But It's not only reading. It's practical beginner's guide. It makes fun to follow the steps described. And I was happy to fail to crack my WPA2-protected network with the dictionary attack.

There is a sample chapter online about the advanced WLAN attacks. There you can enjoy the screenshots even in color :-)

In the last chapters you start working on RADIUS networks. This complex topic is made a little easier with BackTrack Linux because there is already a preconfigured freeradios-server installed.

This week, I converted my first TYPO3 project from "tt_news" to the new "news" extension by Georg Ringer.

"news" is written from scratch for TYPO3 4.5 and higher using Extbase and Fluid. It is not compatible with the old and not maintained tt_news extension which is used very often.

But I was happy to see an "News Import" filter for the tt_news news articles and categories. In my case only the relation between news and categories got lost. It was not worth digging into this error because I only have 20 news on this system.

The "News Import" in the Web-section is only visible if you activate "Show import module [showImporter]" in the Extension Manager for news.

news is much easier than tt_news. There is only one list view which does everything you need: show a list of multiple images, show only latest, show archived, show only one category. The second view is the detailed view. And the third and last one a view called "Date Menu". Don't know what it is good for.

There are only a few settings I've done in my template:

page.headerData.500 = TEXT
page.headerData.500.value = <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS-Feed" href="http://www.weltcafe-dresden.de/weltcafe/termine/feed.rss" /> 

plugin.tx_news.settings.displayDummyIfNoMedia = 0
plugin.tx_news.settings.defaultDetailPid = 61
plugin.tx_news.settings.facebookLocale = de_DE
plugin.tx_news.settings.list.rss.channel.language = de_DE
plugin.tx_news.settings.list.rss.channel.link = http://www.weltcafe-dresden.de/weltcafe/termine/feed.rss
plugin.tx_news.settings.list.rss.channel.title = Weltcafe Termine

To get RSS running, I added in the same template like described in the wiki:

[globalVar = TSFE:type = 9818]
 lib.stdheader >
 tt_content.stdWrap.innerWrap >
 tt_content.stdWrap.wrap >
 styles.content.get.stdWrap >

 pageNewsRSS = PAGE
 pageNewsRSS.typeNum = 9818
 pageNewsRSS.10 < styles.content.get
 pageNewsRSS.10.select.where = colPos=0 AND list_type = "news_pi1" 
 pageNewsRSS.10.select {
 orderBy = sorting ASC
 max = 1
 }
 
 config {
 # deactivate Standard-Header
 disableAllHeaderCode = 1
 # no xhtml tags
 xhtml_cleaning = none
 admPanel = 0
 metaCharset = utf-8
 # define charset
 additionalHeaders = Content-Type:text/xml;charset=utf-8
 disablePrefixComment = 1
 baseURL = http://www.weltcafe-dresden/
 absRefPrefix = http://www.weltcafe-dresden/
 }
 
 # set the format 
 plugin.tx_news.settings.format = xml
[global] 

And last, I added the following lines to my realurl config to get the same urls than before. In this way, my visitors get the right article.

• First, make a nice name for the RSS feed:

'fileName' => array(      
             'defaultToHTMLsuffixOnPrev' => 0,      
             'acceptHTMLsuffix' => 1,      
             'index' => array(          
                     'feed.rss' => array(              
                                 'keyValues' => array(                  
                                                'type' => 9818,)
                     ),      
            ), 
 ),

• Second, make speaking URLs for the news article itself

'postVarSets' =>    array (      
      '_DEFAULT' =>  array ( 
             'article' => array( 
                    array( 'GETvar' => 'tx_news_pi1[controller]', 
                             'valueMap' => array( 'nieuws' => '', ), 
                             'noMatch' => 'bypass', ), 
                    array( 'GETvar' => 'tx_news_pi1[action]', 
                             'valueMap' => array( 'detail' => '', ), 
                             'noMatch' => 'bypass', ), 
                    array( 'GETvar' => 'tx_news_pi1[news]', 
                             'lookUpTable' => array( 'table' => 'tx_news_domain_model_news', 
                                    'id_field' => 'uid', 'alias_field' => 'title', 
                                    'addWhereClause' => ' AND NOT deleted', 
                                    'useUniqueCache' => 1, 
                                    'useUniqueCache_conf' => array( 'strtolower' => 1, 
                                                                         'spaceCharacter' => '-', ), 
                      ), 
             ), 
    ), 
[...]