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Tag: coding

  • Elegant Use of the PHP Reflection API

    Zend Developer Zone has a nice tutorial on how to extend Zend_Controller_Action with function parameters.

    Additionally, the presented code features a nice example of the utility of PHP5’s Reflection API.

  • WordPress is Infinitely Extensible

    The main “Extend” page on WordPress.org states:

    One of the core philosophies of WordPress is to keep the core code as light and fast as possible but to provide a rich framework for the huge community to expand what WordPress can do, limited only by their imagination.

    That’s a statement I’ve heard about countless platforms before, but have often been disappointed to find it to be more of a marketing catch-phrase than anything concrete. Not so with WordPress!

    I’ve been doing research on how to achieve specific goals with yet another plugin project, and the more I look, the easier it gets. Every time I catch myself thinking “hmm, this one’s gonna be tough”, a quick trip to the WP Codex changes my attitude within just a few minutes. Everything is possible.

    Don’t get me wrong, WP is far from the only extensible platform out there and everybody has their personal pet peeves with the code base, but when coupled with amenities such as the wp-hackers mailing list and the wp-plugins dev repo, Matt and Automattic sure made it easy to adopt WordPress as a full featured scaffolding. And that’s coming from a guy who’s usually happy to start his projects from scratch.

  • PHP Québec CodeFest 2.0

    I will be attending the CodeFest2008 hosted in Montreal on January 5th and 6th. This year’s theme will be all about microformats. Here is a link to the Facebook event, if you’re having trouble reaching the official wiki.

    I will be vying to address an hreview project I am getting involved with, unless I’m already done with it by then, in which case I’ll find something Diso related to tackle (if not both).

    Note: the event is not limited to PHP by any stretch, and anyone is welcomed. Join us, it’ll be fun. And as always, it will also be a great opportunity to network with your tech-peers.

  • Filling Up the Break

    I’ll be focusing on Plank until the holidays, but I’m already finding myself filling up my wish list for what I want to tackle during the break. Family first, but there’s always a few hours of the day (err, night) to geek it out.

    So far, here’s what I have down. Posting it here will give me a push to get it done. 🙂

    • New features for WPhone: Viper007Bond, Doug and I are in planning stage for a few nice features we’re trying to deck the upcoming 1.5 version with.
    • Setting myself up with an OpenLDAP sandbox for wpDirAuth: when I left McGill, I also left behind the AD install that was providing me with a testbed for my WordPress/LDAP authentication plugin. I don’t mind flying blind with the code, but it’ll help with support.
    • Write an app with Symfony: I have a small toy project I want to get to, and I’m planning on using this PHP5 framework as a RAD environment.
    • And a few floaters that I haven’t quite officially added to the list yet, like upgrading my site’s theme visually and with data portability in mind, etc.

    Bah, with three kids, it’s not like it was going to be a relaxing vacation anyway.
    Might as well just add to the fun. 😉

  • Release: WPhone 1.4.2: “Thanks!” Edition

    Release early, release often being the FOSS motto, here we are again with a new version of our WPhone mobile WordPress Admin plugin.

    Version 1.4.2 is all about thanking our community, because the main changes are the inclusion of new language packs, which were all gracefully provided by our very much vibrant community of WPhone users all over the World. This now brings us to a total of six languages (English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Russian), with a few more on the way. Not bad for a software that was only released a month and a half ago. 🙂

    So in the spirit of my teammates’ current holiday: Thanks a million to all of you out there who continually help us making this project better and better. Hoping we’ll keep living up to your expectations!

    And on another note, watch for the upcoming 1.5 version. I’m thinking it’ll be a big one on the feature front, especially once we’ll have received our prizes and can develop natively.

  • FaceBookCampMontreal

    One more! Tonight was FaceBookCampMontreal, an unconference for everyone with an interest in building on the Facebook Platform. Once again, great event, great crowd, very interesting subject.

    I’d venture to say that the event was actually a bit late for the developer crowd, since we’ve all drunk the Facebook API Kool-Aid months ago, and most of us have been playing with it publicly or in private sandboxes. On the other hand, the PR crowd was there in full force and was visibly excited by the torrent of opportunities the FB ecosystem truly is.

    So if you need a Facebook application and don’t know where to start, a good first step is to call Plank. :o) We’ll hook you up with a strategy that makes sense for both you and your users/audience.

    I also have my own pipe dreams, but I’m just too busy to take on yet another project right now. Maybe in December…

  • Release: wpDirAuth 1.1

    Thanks to a lot of help from the support and development groups (special thanks to Richard and Adrian), and despite having focused on my upcoming job switch and WPhone in the last month, I finally found some time to release version 1.1 of wpDirAuth, an LDAP authentication plugin for WordPress I also maintain.

    The new version adds support for more directory server configurations and vendors by supporting privileged pre-binding. It also adds a few interface and documentation tweaks, and has been tested under WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.

  • Release: WPhone 1.2.0

    Thanks to Warren Wilansky, owner of the excellent Plank Design, who was kind enough to lend me his iPod Touch for the weekend, we were able to finally view and use WPhone on an actual Apple device and hammer out most of the display glitches our original releases had. Well, that and a whole lot of tweaks and new features, such as some fixes in the bundled iUI Javascript library for which I started submitting patches upstream, etc.

    Sure feels good to not be flying blind anymore! Though I did have to give the iPod back today, which was about as painful as cutting off one of my own fingers… :p

    So, if you had downloaded an earlier version, be sure to try the new 1.2.0 release. Or if you’re into the whole living on the edge thing, checkout the development branch of our Subversion repository, where we’ve already started to add some neat new features after 1.2.0 came out (otherwise known as rapid fire development).

    Now, since our core focus is actually full support for the widest possible array of mobile, lightweight and accessibility devices (smart and non-smart mobile phones, PDAs, micro tablets, screen and braille readers, etc) what I really would like for the next step is to somehow gain access to some of the other targeted devices.

    So if you happen to be in Montreal, have any of the following devices/environments and are interested in helping us out, please drop me a note (comments or wordpress-AT-tekartist-DOT-org) and maybe we can get together for a bit of geeky fun. 🙂

    • Nokia devices running the S60WebKit browser or earlier versions (w/ or w/o JS),
    • Blackberry (any xhtml capable generation),
    • Windows Mobile smart phones or PDAs (EDGE and/or WIFI),
    • Symbian-based devices,
    • Opera Mobile and/or Opera Mini capable devices,
    • Jaws or other accessibility device/software,

    … or anything else that you would like to use WPhone on really.

    Who knows, maybe I’ll luck out at one of the countless tech events organized in Montreal, such as the BarCamps, etc.

  • Release: WPhone 1.0.0

    See, I told you I wasn’t all there today…

    I guess it takes a nasty fever for me to have forgotten to mention that Doug Stewart, Viper007Bond and I have jointly released the first version of WPhone last night, a plugin to bring the WordPress Administration to the world of mobile and accessibility devices.

    The project was, originally, in response to a challenge sent to the wp-hackers mailing list, but our take on it actually goes beyond the original parameters by trying to support full universal access instead.

    We’re now in the debug phase, since we’ve never actually had the chance to preview the souped up iPhone/iPod mode of our interface, but we’re hoping to be in a much better place on this front by the end of the weekend. The lightweight version of the interface, used for all non-WebKit browsers, is a lot more stable and seems to work like a charm on even my feature-deficient Motorola v551 (pre-RAZR, less RAM, about the same browser).

  • Release: Moostick 1.0

    Moostick is my take on a Mootools-powered, unobtrusive, Javascript news ticker library.

    Moostick will take in any type of <li> container (<ul>, <ol>…) and turn it into an animated news ticker, fading between each entry at a set interval.

    This project is an experiment in mootoology. Quite arguably over-engineered for its core purpose, I use it to hone my MooTools skills while trying to still provide a fun and stable tool for others to use.

    The unobtrusiveness aspect of the project is key in keeping the content accessible when pages are loaded without Javascript and/or CSS, whether by users or machines, and is one of Moostick’s top goals.

    See the project page for more information.