D-Mack Media Forums

Dear D-Mack

Thank you for making this Component, and now the module. I tried the demo on your website, and it works great! I have couple of questions that I hope that you can help me with. I am testing your extensions on a localhost, Joomla 1.5.4, and I am programming ignorant so pls be patient with me

1. Both Component and Module does not work on my localhost. I have no idea why, esp when it is working and looking great on your demo site. When I click "enter", the whole page refreshes with no new info. When I click "Convert", nothing happens.

2. Are you using the bid or ask price for conversion?

3. How are you making this conversion possible? I don't mean to sound rude, but to use this on a website, I need to know if the information is legally free for usage, if you get what I mean.

4. Is there any way to obtain the conversion as raw data, that can be utilized for computational purposes?


Thank you for your time and patience. I think this is a truly fascinating extension you are doing and I really hope to be able to use.

Best,
Ray

Hi Ray,

Welcome to the Forums!

The component and module both use exchange rates from Yahoo Finance. It utilizes the 'free' csv download information provided directly on the Yahoo Currency Calculator page. As far as I know this is not a problem as long as it is used for non-commercial purposes. For example you should not 'sell' the currency converter.

As of right now - Yahoo only updates the rates once every day - so my statement of up-to-the-minute conversion rates is not quite correct.

I don't quite know what you mean by the Bid or Ask price. The extensions are not meant to reflect a Buy-Sell currency trading scenario. They simply use 1 conversion factor determined by the From currency and the To currency that the user selects. See Yahoo's own currency convereter for more info.

As far as the component and module not working on your local server, I'm guessing that it is because of your local server. Do you have it set up as a 'live' server - i.e. can you access the internet from your live server?

Both the module and component need to have access to the internet each and every time the 'Convert' button is clicked - whenever the button is clicked it will go to the Yahoo Finance website and obtain the conversion value for the 2 currencies selected (essentially, as you hoped, it does download raw data - in a CSV format - which is then parsed and the resulting conversion factor is in fact used for the computation).

Hope that answers your questions.

Let us know how it goes!

Thanks,

D-Mack

Hi D-Mack

Thank you for your prompt and helpful reply.

While testing site on localhost, I have been always been able to access internet from live server too. However, I just tested the module on another dummy site, which is live, and the module works! So I guess either by putting it on a localhost, it does not retrieve information from the internet, or there may be conflicts with other extensions I installed, (which are numerous for testing purposes).

Thanks you for this great mod and your help! Guess you are right about the yahoo change of policy. Was just trying it yesterday and could see practically up to second changes. Now the rate stays the same. But they do correspond to Yahoo Finance rates.

Best,
Ray

No problem at all Ray,

Glad you got it worked out (sort of). If you do find out why your local server, for whatever reason, doesn't 'fetch' the Yahoo exchange rates, please let us know. Others might be interested in a solution too!

Thanks again.

D-Mack

P.S. I'll mark this thread as solved for now...