PHP

There was recently a nice posting from PHPDeveloper.org linking to an article by Florian Eibeck, where on his blog he discusses some solutions to these extremely fun situations.

http://blog.thinkphp.de/archives/342-Multilingual-Websites-with-PHP.html

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Disclaimer: These are primarily notes for myself as I get accustomed to CakePHP's (v1.2) authentication and ACL. I've been building a website and wanted to finally make use of CakePHP before I start using it for the library's CMS. A CMS is a large undertaking and I don't want to go into it "cold-turkey", so I came up with some side-project to help me understand the framework a bit better. All in all, it truly is an extremely rapid development tool.

I decided not to go with ExpressionEngine or Drupal simply because I'd still have to take time to learn those systems and make modules or extensions within those languages - and there's no guarantee I'd be able to do what I'd need to do with them. If I build it myself, it would take just about the same amount of time with Cake. Anyway, to continue...

Continue reading "CakePHP Auth Component"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Although I personally detest Wordpress, it does have its uses and the user-interface is well-constructed, making it much easier for non-technical users to use it. Regardless, when it doesn't do quite what you want it to do, extending it can sometimes be really easy (due to the massive number of plugins), or extremely difficult. Most of the time, in my case (recently), it's the latter and not the former.

I was recently given the task to import an unmodified XML dataset into a web-based tool as tabular data, HTML'ified, and allow for visual editing of the information, and they wanted to use Wordpress. I thought, "Okay, that should be easy enough." Well, okay, do I create a plugin to handle the import? I don't really want to learn Wordpress hooks and programming functionality considering I hate the thing...no, I'll just import it directly into the database. I used a diff tool to discover that creating a new draft entry only modifies three database tables anyway, that's easy enough. Got that working, 1-2-3, lickity-split!

But now, we need to let staff have access to modify the tabular data.

Continue reading "Extending the Wordpress Visual Editor"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I sent in a support ticket to php|arch a short while ago inquiring about something related to my purchases, and was expecting someone from sales to get back to me, instead it seems that anything regarding the specific question I had is sent to the person in charge of the training, unnecessarily so in my opinion, but still... Regardless, I got an email back from the trainer, Paul Reinheimer (aka, the really cool PHP guy), telling me how he's currently at php|tek, apologized for the slow response (due to the php|tek conference, sponsored by php|architect, and php|arch being pretty low on in-office staffers)...he also said I should be there.

I somewhat agree, even if I did have presentations and meetings of my own to attend which were pretty important. Alas, I'm now jealous. There are always blogs buzzing over how great the conference was by other PHP developers once it's over. Dancing, eating, prizes, drinking, socializing, networking, brainstorming, and all around geekiness (save the best for last). The trials and tribulations of being "broke" and just starting out in a professional career. Oh well, I do what I love, and love what I do, so I'm still rich. I can at least read about all the cool stuff going on!

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I had five minutes to do something before I decided that I wanted to watch a movie...I'm now putting that off simply to report back on what I got out of my time.

For the background information...I just discovered that the person traditionally in charge of handling my high school's class reunions, is out of the country and could probably care less over handling everything...so we need something up quick and dirty.

Continue reading "I had 5 minutes, and CakePHP."

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski