Design vs. Develop

Podcast Suite 1.5 Beta Released

admin — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 03:09:28 +0000

A beta for Podcast Suite 1.5 is now available. Read the details here.

Reviewing Habari

admin — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 23:30:49 +0000

Yesterday, I decided to install the blogging software Habari on my computer to see what the buzz was about. Overall, I’m impressed with the system and I think it shows a lot of promise for the future. It’s all written in modern PHP 5 (5.2 is the minimum) with PDO so you are not tied to MySQL. Installation was very easy (after I added FollowSymLinks to my .htaccess file). The backend is slick and powered with keyboard shortcuts. Performance seemed fast, but a localhost environment doesn’t really give you a good measure of this so YMMV.

My only complaint about the system is one that I also have with WordPress: the theming system breaks everything into entirely too many pieces. Tags open in one file and close in another. Loops are all over the place. You have to create a class in theme.php to pull in and assign data to the theme. This will certainly difficult for most designers to get their heads around.

I’m definitely a fan of Joomla!’s templating system. While Joomla! is a more general-purpose content management system and Habari is focused on blogging, I think the overall concept could be ported. In Joomla! templates, you have all of the essential markup from to in one file. Within this file, you add named placeholders (bottom, left, right, main, banner, etc…). What goes into these placeholders is determined by the admin of the Joomla! site. This makes it easy for admins to rearrange the elements to suit their desires, while template designers need not touch a line of PHP. In Joomla! templates, desigers can rely on the default core output, then override specific elements only when necessary.

Habari is still in alpha (version 0.6), but it seems to be maturing very quickly. If you’re doing blog sites and are up for something new, definitely give Habari a test. I’m looking forward to the betas and stable copies, but hope that the templating can be simplified drastically.

Are you going to ZendCon? Don’t miss UnCon!

admin — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:11:21 +0000

If you’re heading out to California for ZendCon in a few weeks, don’t miss ZendUnCon. Keith Casey is heading up this unconference, which already has several interesting talks. I’m now kicking myself for not signing up for ZendCon

Calling all wordsmiths who love Podcast Suite!

admin — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:37:50 +0000

Attention Podcast Suite lovers:

Dan Li and I have been polishing the 1.5 version of the Podcast Suite. The UI is more or less complete and you can take a peek at the SVN copy. Are you interested in writing a user’s guide or an FAQ? Contact me or leave a comment below! If you know how to use the current Podcast Suite, documenting this one will be a snap.

Podcast Suite for Joomla! 1.5… coming soon!

admin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:22:36 +0000

A lot of people have been asking “when will there be a copy of Podcast Suite for Joomla! 1.5?” If you’re one of those people, I have some good news for you: we’re close to a beta! You can take a sneak peek at the code here. If you’re handy with SVN, you can also check out a copy and give it a spin. My hope is to get a beta out this month.

Joomla! 1.5 Essential Training, now live!

admin — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:31:59 +0000

Recently, I recorded a Joomla! 1.5 video training series for Lynda.com. As of today, the videos are now live! This video series walks you through installing Joomla!, adding content, creating navigation, and adding extensions. You can sample some of the first videos on the site before subscribing to the Online Training Library.

DC PHP ‘08 Highlights

admin — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:37:42 +0000

Earlier this week, we had the 2008 DC PHP Conference at George Washington University. A lot of new faces showed up this year and we had quite a few speakers from the local community. Here are some of the sessions I found particularly interesting:

Automated Unit Testing. Mike Lively presented PHP Unit, which I will definitely be using the near future. His presentation on Monday morning was very helpful and made Unit Testing seem much more approachable. He had an afternoon session as well with more PHP Unit tricks (like mock objects and database testing) that I’ll have to look into on down the road.

Fed Up of Framework Hype? Tony Bibbs had a lot of straight-talk about how to choose a framework, why you might want one, and when you could stand to roll your own. He brought up the fact that you need to keep is flexible enough so that your highly talented programmers can stay productive, while keeping it consistent enough for less experienced coders.

SPL Iterators. A lot of Eli White’s presentations I’ve previously seen have been about scaling challenges he’s worked on at Digg. He seemed just as excited to talk about beautiful code :). One of his samples was so short and succinct, I ended up tweeting (forgive the 140 character formatting) it.

Security Centered Design. In his own words, Chris Shiflett hijacked a security talk to cover User Experience. However, he did a good job of tying everything back to security; people have certain expectations for how a web application should behave when they’re logged in. He also plugged myVidoop: the secure, passwordless OpenID provider that some friends of mine work for :).

Also, Keith Casey moderated an IDE/text editor panel. He asked a good set of questions and fortunately there was no physical violence, or even shouting.

This was also my first conference where Twitter was out in full force, except when it was down early on Monday morning. You can catch up on most of the tweets here.

Is this too mean?

admin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:59:37 +0000

I think this time everyone brought down Twitter by talking about Amazon.com’s downtime.

Phishing Alert - it’s not just email

admin — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:12:50 +0000

You’ve probably received fraudulent emails from people posing to be a bank wanting you to log in to your account. A few weeks ago, I received a phone call from an automated machine claiming to be my bank with a message for me. It then asked for the last four digits of my social security number; hung up immediately and decided that I would call my bank later.

Today, I received a similar phone call and hung up again. I called my bank right away and they confirmed with the security department that they did not place this phone call. Had I given this information, who knows what would have happened?

REMEMBER: only give personal information when you initiate a phone call with a trusted number. NEVER give your personal information when someone calls you.

JoomlaEXPO ‘08 wrap up

admin — Sun, 18 May 2008 23:38:13 +0000

The first JoomlaEXPO was held this past Friday in Chicago. We had a full house with 251 people attending.

We had three sessions on Joomla! coding (including mine) that each focused on a different aspect of Joomla! programming. My session was on the differences between coding in Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5, highlighting some of my new favorite features. (You can download the PowerPoint slides here.) Azrul then followed up with a full presentation on how to create SEF URLs for your component while avoiding some common SEF URL pitfalls. Steve talked about different framework features and debugging tools, then unveiled his Community ACL component.

I was also able to hear Victor Drover’s session on GPL software business models. He’s currently using a hybrid model where he sells access to his site and also does consulting work. His main point was that chasing down software pirates is a waste of time, so make it a moot point by offering your software under the GPL.

The one thing that struck me about this event was that the third-party developer community was very well represented. However, no one group totally dominated the conference: we a had a good mix of template designers, website producers, system admins, hosts, programmers, and Joomla! users. At the beginning of the event, we were given a set of color-coded stickers to identify ourselves. In a community as diverse as Joomla!’s, this was definitely helpful!

Special thanks goes out to the conference organizers. I know firsthand that putting together an event of this type takes a lot of effort and persistence. This one was very well attended for a first (or even a third) year conference and I’m already looking forward to the next!

UPDATE: Now you can see the presentation below:

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