mrclay.rg

An ElggCollection entity would store an ordered set of integers optimized for filtering and/or ordering SQL queries of entities, annotations, or other tables with integer primary keys.

Valid HTML markup involves several different contexts and escaping rules, yet many APIs give no precise indication of which context their string return values are escaped for, or how strings should be escaped before being passed in (let’s not even get into character encoding). Most programming languages only have a single String type, so there’s [...]

RotURL is a simple substitution cipher for encoding/obscuring URLs embedded in other URLs (e.g. in a querystring). Also, common chars that need to be escaped (:/?=&%#) are mapped to infrequently used capital letters, so this generally yields shorter querystrings, too. /**  * Rot35 with URL/urlencode-friendly mappings. To avoid increasing size during * urlencode(), commonly encoded [...]

For those cases where you have to work on remote code, NetBeans‘ remote project functionality seems to put it ahead of other PHP IDEs. It pulls down a tree of files and uploads files that you save. Having a local copy allows it to offer its full code comprehension, auto-complete, and great rename refactoring for “remote” [...]

Where Netbeans can’t guess the type/existence of a local variable, you can tell it in a multiline comment: /* @var $varName TypeName */ After this comment (and as long as TypeName is defined in your project/project’s include path), when you start to type $varName, Netbeans will offer to autocomplete it, and will offer TypeName method/property suggestions. [...]

xdebug-211-xampp-osx.tgz contains a freshly compiled xdebug 2.1.1 module for XAMPP OSX, using this tutorial as a guide. The archive contains step-by-step install instructions w/ bash commands. Happy debugging with fewer bugs.

Update 2011-06-23: All the essential components of Shibalike are complete and the project is hosted on Github. This is currently blueprint-ware, but I’m excited about it. A co-worker and I have laid out a design for a flexible system that can emulate a working Apache/PHP Shibboleth stack, without requiring any outside resources (e.g. an IdP, [...]

WordPress 3 introduced native navigation menus, usually created via the wp_nav_menu theme function and the built-in Custom Menu widget.  If you have a menu with a deep hierarchy, you may want to display only the active branch and the submenu directly below the active item (given class “current-menu-item” by WordPress). You can see this menu [...]

Zend Framework has functionality to send messages to the Firebug console (via Firefox’s FirePHP addon), but if you’re not using the ZF front controller, the API is a bit of a pain. Besides your instance of Zend_Log, you must keep track of a few additional objects just to manually flush the headers after all your [...]

Zend Navigation has a menu helper class that can output a basic nested UL menu. You can set id/class attributes on the A elements, and it adds an “active” classname to A elements in the active branch, but customizing the markup beyond that gets complicated.

Most PHP micro-frameworks I’ve reviewed have some major cons: incomplete namespacing of functions/classes/global vars; doing too much/little; being under-tested; and the worst: forcing a unique (and usually under-documented) code structure that will make it difficult to “graduate” an app into a more full-featured framework. It also seems silly to rely on “micro-optimized” code if performance [...]

Minify 2.1.4 is approaching release and will have several long-awaited features and hopefully easier configuration. Looking towards version 2.2/3(?), I recently committed the beginnings of a complete refactoring of the Minify API. The goal is to have a more flexible and extensible design that can include plugins like LESS and maybe handle @imports on the [...]

[This proposal has been superseded with ElggCollection.] As of Elgg 1.7.4 there’s no way to specify a specific list or ordering of entities for use in an elgg_get_entities query. E.g. one might want to implement: A “featured items” list for a group or user widget. On a group page this could be implemented in “left” [...]

A couple years ago I put together a class for UTF-8 strings, kind of a smart wrapper around Harry Fuecks’s phputf8 string functions. All Utf8String objects—if I’m not missing bugs!—are guaranteed to house valid UTF-8 strings. The factory, make(), enforces UTF-8 validity, stripping non-UTF-8 bytes (default) or replacing them with Utf8String::$replacement (? by default). $str [...]

Great article on the misunderstood scope of the “Model” in the Model-View-Controller architecture. The takehome: Models are commonly thought of as wrappers for database access/stored objects, but application state and business logic need to go in them, too. Otherwise you get bloated controller and/or views that clumsily try to take care of these concerns. Earlier [...]

When I worked in the HPNP building, friends and I frequented the Shands cafeteria. Their painful menu page drove me to hack together a nicer version with accompanying RSS feed. It still works!

Reason this might be useful. /* * Remove all _shibstate cookies if there are too many of them. This usually * occurs due to Firefox session restores. Unfortunately we don’t know which is * the active state cookie, so we have to delete them all, but this is a lessor * crime than locking the [...]

Google is offering programmers their own personal sandbox application—called Jarlsburg—and hints of how to exploit the common vulnerabilities purposefully left in it. Although Google is basically walking folks through how to attack apps, publicizing this info is a necessary evil in order to build safer programmers. We have to start thinking of each line of [...]

At my new job, we maintain a site powered by Elgg, the PHP-based social networking platform. I’m enjoying getting to know the system and the development community, but my biggest criticisms are related to plugins. On the basis of “keeping the core light”, almost all functionality is outsourced to plugins, and you’ll need lots of [...]

May this save you pain.