In a new article on the Personal Democracy site Nancy Scola looks at the recent change of the Whitehouse.gov website over to use the Drupal content management system.
After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.
The change was made so the site could be both more effect and easier to maintain with the added benefit of being built on a well-developed and supported Open Source platform. Nancy also suggests that a more towards Open Source like this could help things lean towards more openness in the general democracy.
In a recent post to The Bakery (the CakePHP resource) Jonathan Hendler has created a simple A/B test helper using the CakePHP framework and jQuery.
Knowing what is driving the user experience is key to the success of an application. Subtle changes in the interface can cause dramatic shifts in user behavior. Here, A/B tests display two (or more) language choices or color choices to a user (any HTML). Metrics are measured in two ways – 1) did the user click on the button at all and 2) how long did it take them to find it from the moment the page has started loading?
The helper tracks the user through the site and adds the results to a testing table (abtests). The code is included – model, component, controller, helper class and the jquery code to make it all work together. A few usage examples are also thrown in near the end.
In this new post to his blog Adam Harvey shares his opinion on unmoderated notes dropped directly into the PHP manual – “they’re bad, mkay?”
I’ve had a couple of whinges on IRC lately about why I’m not thrilled with having user notes in their current form in the PHP manual; we get entirely too many questions in ##php from people who’ve copied code out of a note and are then annoyed when it turns out the code is wrong, broken, horrible, or all of the above.
His gives an example (one of many currently in the manual) that shows a round-about way of getting a date string that could be done better in a single “format()” function call on a DateTime object.
I don’t know what the answer is – moderation has its own problems to do with workload, as PEAR can attest – but a system that’s letting that go up as recommended practice (and stay up for a month) has to be looked at.
Brandon Savage has posted the answers to some questions that were raised by a previous post of his on object-oriented development and some best practices. In this new post, he answers the questions:
- “Often times when a developer gives each object only one responsibility, they tightly couple objects together.” Can you explain?
- I do not know about dependency injection ‘” do you have any links that do not require subscription?
- Can you please explain ‘one object ‘” one job’ concept?
Each question is answered, sometimes with code included, to help resolve any confusion about how to correct use object oriented practices in your applications.
Patrick Allaert has put together a shell command that can take your PHP4 code and replace its current constructors with PHP5-formatted ones.
It assumes your classes are always declared with the class keyword starting at the beginning of the line and that your files have the .php extension.
It uses a regular expression in a perl command to search through the current directory and look for the “.php” files to replace the “function ClassName” sort of thing with a “function __construct”.
On the WebReference.com site there’s a review recently posted about a PHP-based content management system – a system targeted more towards creating social networking sites than just generic content management.
This CMS has everything a developer needs to create a top of the line social networking site with all the features that users have come to expect from sites like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. [...] Understand that, unlike Elgg, Drupal, Joomla and Dolphin, phpFox is not Open Source (although it is written in PHP). It sells for $300 for a full license, which includes 6 months of free upgrades and support, or you can purchase a monthly license for $39.95, which includes free upgrades and support for each month that is purchased. While $300 may seem like a lot when there are other social networking software packages available for free, as they say, you get what you pay for.
The reviewer goes on to talk about the installation of the software, modules included, core features and some of the more updated, included features like a marketplace module, profile photo cropping, spam filtering, privacy settings for each user and a video module.
Carsten Lucke has posted about the release of the third edition of O’Reilly’s “PHP5 Cookbook” (“PHP5 Kochbuch”) German edition:
The book is published by O’Reilly ‘” written by David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg, Stephan Schmidt, Ulrich Speidel, Carsten Lucke and Matthias Brusdeylins. The German PHP 5 cookbook in a new and completely revised 3rd edition with information on the new PHP 5.3. Collected knowledge of American and German PHP experts. It contains hundreds of well-approved “recipes” including explanations of the new PHP features.
Carsten and Matthias Brusdeylins reworked the third edition and revised quite a bit of it for this new release (including adding some PHP 5.3 examples). The book comes in at a hefty 879 pages and more information can be found on the O’Reilly website.
Carsten Lucke has posted about the release of the third edition of O’Reilly’s “PHP5 Cookbook” (“PHP5 Kochbuch”) German edition:
The book is published by O’Reilly – written by David Sklar, Adam Trachtenberg, Stephan Schmidt, Ulrich Speidel, Carsten Lucke and Matthias Brusdeylins. The German PHP 5 cookbook in a new and completely revised 3rd edition with information on the new PHP 5.3. Collected knowledge of American and German PHP experts. It contains hundreds of well-approved “recipes” including explanations of the new PHP features.
Carsten and Matthias Brusdeylins reworked the third edition and revised quite a bit of it for this new release (including adding some PHP 5.3 examples). The book comes in at a hefty 879 pages and more information can be found on the O’Reilly website.
In a new tutorial posted on his blog today Giorgio Sironi looks at the Zend_Auth component of the Zend Framework and how to create a simple login authentication method with it.
Zend_Auth is the component of the Zend Framework which provides a standard authentication mechanism for web applications users. It has few dependencies (on Zend_Loader and on Zend_Session for default persistence of the authentication) and, as other framework components, will let you concentrate on the user experience instead of worrying about boilerplate code.
He talks about how Zend_Auth handles properties internally and how it can make it easier to build out those redundant bits of so many applications you’ve worked with. He also includes a custom adapter that can directly use PDO to connect to the database and grab the login information it needs (to remove a dependency on Zend_Db).