Filtering outgoing email for development
Submitted by richard on August 25, 2010 - 1:42pmYou need to be able to do full testing on your development server but don't want it spewing out emails to your clients.
Luckily sendmail provides a very easy way to do this through the mailertable file
. local:localaccount
Then restart sendmail...
What this does is allow any email to approveddomain.com (in this case most likely your own domain name) through but shuffles all other emails into the localaccount spool
Solar Framework Shorts - Controlling form layout
Submitted by richard on August 16, 2010 - 7:31pmSolars form system is pretty powerful and you realize the full beauty when auto generating forms directly from models but by default it uses a DL/DD/DT list for formatting your labels/inputs.
If your not a fan of that formatting you can do something about it, in my case I prefer the following
'list' => 'div',
'elem' => 'div',
'label' => null,
'value' => null,
);
But you can use any combination you choose.. Enjoy
The Mystery of the Missing MySQL Performance
Submitted by richard on August 5, 2010 - 12:15amYour next big release comes around and you push all the changes out to the website, your PHP files have all been updated, MySQL migrations have been run and all Unit Tests passed in development so you feel things should be good to go!
Solar Framework Shorts - Future release looks promising
Submitted by richard on July 19, 2010 - 9:34pmA lot of cool features are being hatched in branches that should hit trunk in the near future!
Jeff Moore is working on a revamped Auth stack that allows multiple adapters to be run in parallel, This means for example you can run your Facebook login right along side your standard Auth out of the box.
Speaking of Facebook, an Auth module for Facebook will be included in the new Auth stack that uses the official Facebook PHP library so setting up a Facebook login is a breeze.
Solar Framework manual is coming along
Submitted by richard on July 1, 2010 - 12:48pmThe 2 biggest complaints about Solar have been it being in "beta" and lack of good docs.. Well its been out of beta and in release for a few months now so that should no longer be a concern.
As for docs you can find the new and improved manual Here
Granted its not 100% complete yet but it goes a long way to helping you get started with the Solar Framework.
Pivotal Tracker and Subversion
Submitted by richard on May 28, 2010 - 2:14pmThrough one of my clients I got introduced to Pivotal Tracker a agile approach to project management that features the normal things like stories, backlogs and Velocity.
When looking for a project management tool for my own use I ended up settling on http://unfuddle.com which while simplistic has everything a basic project needs on a single site, IE ticket tracking, source control and some sort of document management. The 2 best things about unfuddle would have to be its simple clean design/ease of use and its pricing.
Server build script updated
Submitted by richard on April 30, 2010 - 3:00amThe first upload had some issues specific to the way I normally ran it and lacked any real configuration.. Now it gets its own directory path and allows you to configure the build path as well..
Its based of a Centos 5.4 Server install, PHP 5.3.1 and the latest MariaDB-OurDelta MySQL release
If you find any issues let me know and I will get them fixed right away.. Any features you would like added I would be interested in as well.
http://mtrack.phpjack.com/lab/browse.php/lab/server_setup/trunk
PHP and Centos, a step towards automating your server builds
Submitted by richard on April 25, 2010 - 5:42pmI compile php all the time, I am constantly installing the latest versions on my own servers for various reasons. After doing this the first dozen or so times I started creating little batch files.
It started out with a simple configure script for php so I could remember what modules I installed and easily recompile and has slowly grown beyond that.. For example a default Centos installs a ton of crap RPMS you will never use and I tend to remove them.. If its not on the server it can't be a point of entry for any reason.
Solar Framework Shorts - Using Multiple auth adapters
Submitted by richard on April 6, 2010 - 9:49amSolar has a pretty easy to use Auth bootstrapping system that allows easy setup but by default its restricted to a single Auth method.
What if you want to use multiple methods? OpenID? Facebook Connect? Saml? or one of the other dozen+ solutions that you might use.. What to do? One thing to keep in mind, Auth happens really early in the bootstrapping process so things like SQL may not be available yet unless you specifically loaded it in the config.. Then you need to load the proper auth module and call it as needed..
The below code is a short example so you can see how this might work.
My very first PHP extension reborn
Submitted by richard on March 31, 2010 - 1:38pmBack in 2007 I was playing around with writing PHP extensions I wrote PHP Extenion Creating Quick And Dirty
Things have come a long way in PHP since then and building extensions have changed a little and I am trying to buff my C knowledge so I tackled this task once again..
What came out of it is APGL Advanced PHP Gaming Library which right now doesn't include many functions (ok right now only one function) but hey if you feel this library might be of use to you feel free to contribute
