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Website refactoring completed

Sunday, February 7, 2010 6 comments

After over a year working on the refactoring of my website, I'm finally done. The major part was rewriting the entire codebase and making use of the latest and greatest Zend Framework features. At the time of writing, I'm using 1.10.0. Beside all the refactoring, I did also some minor CSS tweaks and added some new features.

I will add some more features in the near future, but I wanted to release the new version as soon as it went stable, which is now. As always, you can check out the source of my website on http://site.svn.dasprids.de/trunk to see how the website is built and to get an idea on how to use some ZF components.

Since the update also messed up the old directory structure, some images and such may not link correctly anymore. I'm going to fix that as soon as possible. If you experience any problem with the new website, please let me know.

A short update …

Thursday, September 24, 2009 0 comments

Hey folks,

I know that I didn't give any sign of live in the last two months, so now I want to give you an update on what's going on.

As I was very busy with my new job and small stuff here and there (and also needed a time-out from all the coding), I didn't move on with any of my projects. As I'm going for two conferences in October (which will be PHPNW and ZendCon), where I'm speaking at atleast one of them, I'm currently in hurry with preparing the talk.

Either after the conferences are over, or if I find some time in between, I'm going to finish some stuff for ZendX_Whois, so that Dolf Schimmel can finish that component. My next two tasks then will be to work on Zend_Ical as well as Zend_Debug_Toolbar, tho I didn't decide yet, which one of them is my primary target. What's also left is Jijawi and the rewrite of my website's code, which both have a lower priority for now.

Beside all those coding stuff, I'm also going to review a book about PHP Team Development written by Samisa Abeysinghe. This book will help readers explore the process of breaking up complex PHP projects into simple sub-parts. It also introduces them to effective team work using MVC, agile development, source control, testing, bug tracking. If you don't want to wait for the review, you can buy it right here:


http://www.packtpub.com

There also another interesting book on that site about Zend Framework 1.8 web application development, which you might want to have a look at:


http://www.packtpub.com

For all of you comming to one of the conferences (or IPC in November), looking forward to meet you. To everyone else, keep watching my blog, there might be some more updates in the near future!

Constant support for Zend_Config_Xml

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 4 comments

Today I added support for constants in Zend_Config_Xml. This new feature will be available in Zend Framework 1.9. It was added via a Zend_Config_Xml specific XML namespace. To give you an easy example of how that may work:

<config xmlns:zf="http://framework.zend.com/xml/zend-config-xml/1.0/">
    <production>
        <includePath><zf:const zf:name="APPLICATION_PATH"/>/library</includePath>
    </production>
</config>


On PHP side, it works like usual:

<?php
define('APPLICATION_PATH', dirname(__FILE__));
$config = new Zend_Config_Xml($xmlString, 'production');

echo $config->includePath; // Prints "/var/www/something/library"


Additionally, the "extends" attribute was also moved to this new namespace, making the NULL namespaced extends attribute deprecated until ZF 2.0, when it will be removed.

Presentation about Zend_ProgressBar and Zend_Tag_Cloud

Thursday, July 16, 2009 0 comments

At the beginning of July, I made a presentation about Zend_ProgressBar and Zend_Tag_Cloud in our local usergroup. As it was filmed, I'm now going to publish it online. Surely, this is all in german, so sorry for all my visitors who can't understand it. You will (hopefully) get an (extended) english version on IPC or PHPNW.

To everyone else who understands german, enjoy the presentation. I have uploaded the slides as well, as the code examples are not very readable on the video.

Video presentation
Slides

Jijawi - The PHP Web Installer

Friday, July 10, 2009 1 comment

A few days ago, I started a small open source project, which came out of my mind a long time ago; Jijawi. Quote from the proiject page:

Jijawi (Jijawi Is Just Another Web Installer) is an easy way to distribute your PHP web application to your users. It comes with a complete modular structure, which allows you to modify the installer as much as you want with the least possible effort. Jijawi supplies you with a System-Check and a MySQL module by default, so you can get the most common installer running in a few minutes.


There is no release available at this time, but will follow pretty soon. You can find out more on the project website: http://jijawi.org.