Archive for category Web
Enable Xdebug HTML Output
I recently updated to Ubuntu 10.04 which includes PHP-5.3 by default. Ever since that upgrade I’ve had trouble with Xdebug not displaying HTML in its output: instead it would output human-readable text which becomes quite unreadable when rendered in the browser without <pre> tags.
Turns out when PHP was upgraded, the php.ini file was replaced, and in the new version, it has the production value for html_errors which is Off. Once I set html_errors=On in /etc/php5/apache, colourful HTML-formatted output was producted by Xdebug.
For the Curious reader, I’m using the following xdebug configuration file, which I’ve located in /etc/php5/conf.d/xdebug.ini to prevent any php.ini changes from overwriting my Xdebug directives. Please note that this is a slightly modified version of the default xdebug configuration included in wamp, which I find to be quite nice:
zend_extension="/usr/lib/php5/20090626/xdebug.so" xdebug.remote_enable=1 xdebug.remote_host="127.0.0.1" xdebug.remote_port=9000 xdebug.remote_handler="dbgp" xdebug.remote_mode=req xdebug.profiler_enable=1 xdebug.profiler_output_dir="/tmp/xprofile/" xdebug.collect_params=On xdebug.show_local_vars=On
WordPress Plugin: Save FTP Information
When WordPress cannot directly access the filesystem to do plugin updates / installs, it falls back to using FTP to preform the changes. However, this commonly requires the user to enter their FTP information on each change. I have created a wordpress plugin that will permanently save the FTP information without the need to edit the wp-config.php file.
Check it out Here
Fakemail for Developers
The other day when I was setting up email notifications for a Zend Framework application, I stumbled across Fakemail.
From the developers website:
fakemail is a fake mail server that captures emails as files for acceptance testing. This avoids the excessive configuration of setting up a real mail server and trying to extract mail queue content.
I am quite impressed with this handy little script (written in both Python and Perl), as it works exactly as advertised: taking out the time required to properly configure a SMTP server and saving the hassle of having dozens of test messages showered across inboxes. Instead of forwarding emails on to their recipients, it simply saves a raw copy of the email to the specified directory.
The script has a windows installer that bundles the script with python and will run on all flavors of Linux and Unix assuming that they have perl or python installed.
To configure Zend_Mail use fakemail place the following in your bootstrapper or common config file:
[php]Zend_Mail::setDefaultTransport(new Zend_Mail_Transport_Smtp(‘localhost’,array(
‘port’ => 10025
)));[/php]
The ‘localhost’ variable is the address of the computer that fakemail is running on (likely the local machine). The port number is the port that is specified when fakemail is run on the command line.
For more information about fakemail, binaries, and a usage guide. Visit the developers website at Sourceforce: http://www.lastcraft.com/fakemail.php
Cache-Control with Zend Framework
Today I was optimizing a site that uses heavy PHP and Ajax. I wanted to reduce the amount of data that was being sent from the server. To put this in perspective, if there were no cache hits in a page load there would be a total of 755 KB pulled down over 123 requests.
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Zend JSON-RPC with Dojo Howto
I have been using the Dojo toolkit as my Javascript library of choice since back in early 2006 when it was still around version 0.4. Since then, the project has made tremendous strides including the release of version 1.0 and 1.1 with 1.2 on the way. At the beginning of 2008 I started using the Zend Framework to build MVC PHP applications and, with the release of 1.5, it has become my PHP framework of choice.
To my delight, the Zend Framework and Dojo have recently announced a partnership which will lead to tighter integration of these two great open source frameworks.
One of the most exciting additions to the Zend Framework is the Zend_Json_Server support for JSON-RPC. I have been using JSON-RPC with Dojo for quite some time and, up until now, it has been challenging to find a design pattern that plays nice with the Model View Controller implementation in the Zend Framework. However, with the addition of the Zend_Json_Server this is no longer the case. Read the rest of this entry »