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

The British Columbia Lottery Corporation has an unpublished API that they use to pull data down for the flash application on their home page. The Zext PHP API exposes functionality to query the most resent winning numbers from the BCLC website, as well as retrieve current jackpot estimates for the main lotteries in this province.

There have been several tutorials outlining how to autoload Doctrine Models using the Zend_Loader_Autoloader. However, none of these have permitted Zend / PEAR style naming conventions for models. I prefer to use these conventions because, although it makes my model names longer, the “name-spacing” gives a certain degree of organization and order to the application.

Lately I have been writing Service API’s for Zext, my Zend Framework library extension. I plan on publishing some of the more useful ones over the next couple of months on my blog. The first of the series is the Epguides.com API.

First post in a while. I have been busy working on some large application and finishing up my Computing Science Degree. Now that the piece of paper is safely secured above my fireplace, I’ve been trying to find time to do a new post.

I have been building a large application and one of the requirements is to trigger a certain action when an event happens. For example, trigger the sending of an alert email when a database row is updated. Some programmers may be tempted to simply hard-code this functionality into the model class, however this doesn’t give very strict class encapsulation, and can quickly become un-maintainable.

Sometimes when you are building a web application, you want to use different layouts for different parts of the site. For example, in a content management system, you may want one layout for normal users and another, completely different layout for site administrators.

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.

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.

I have several servers which run an assortment of http, svn, ssh, and ftp services. One of the largest annoyances are automated breaking scripts pounding my services. Recently, I have been looking into blacklist.py: a handy python script written by Reto Glauser, which monitors syslog-ng logs looking for possible break-in attempts. The script uses iptables to block future traffic from suspicious IP’s for a specified amount of time.

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.