For the last few weeks, I’ve been emailing and messaging Darshana at Packt Publishing, [...]]]> I’m happy this week. Last week, I spent some time and organised myself a bit more. In work, things are going smoothly – managed to get over a tricky piece of work and the rest is simply a list of small tasks.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been emailing and messaging Darshana at Packt Publishing, about writing a second book (jQuery 1.3 with PHP is going very well – list of reviews).

I initially wanted to write about file management, to explain how KFM works, and to help force me to improve on it. But there’s just not enough of an interested market in that – it’s too specialised.

So instead, I’ll be writing about CMS design using PHP and jQuery.

We (webworks.ie) have a CMS engine which we’ve written and improved for the last 6 or so years. We’ve open-sourced it a number of times, but never managed to generate much interest in it. We never had the time to spend on publicising it.

The book will not be specifically about that engine, but rather about the concepts that went into creating it – how a CMS works, how to manage plugins, administration, user management, and all the other little bits and pieces that every PHP developer needs to eventually address.

By way of explanation, I will be demonstrating various parts of our CMS, and explaining how and why it was built that way. I will be closely examining the other major CMSes as well, and giving alternative methods where good ones exist.

The proposed chapter list is:

1. Introduction
2. CMS core design
3. User management and access control
4. Page creation and Navigation
5. Template Management
6. Plugins
7. Form creation
8. Image Gallery
9. Panels
10. Search and Polls
11. RSS and News
12. Online Store
13. Products

I’m really excited about this project!

Less short: I’m trying to get work out the door, get a good run at some personal projects, pass grade 2 piano, get organised, and generally improve my lot.

None of this is working. I think the “get organised” bit is the most important, as it will help the [...]]]> Short run-down of what I’m doing lately: nothing.

Less short: I’m trying to get work out the door, get a good run at some personal projects, pass grade 2 piano, get organised, and generally improve my lot.

None of this is working. I think the “get organised” bit is the most important, as it will help the rest of it fall into place.

I usually only post about web-development-related topics here, as that’s the only subject where I feel I can contribute something new and interesting, so I tend to not talk about other stuff. But sometimes, rattling off the current state of the head is good for clearing it.

In work, I can’t really complain – we have a number of largish projects which are slowly creeping towards completion. The hardest thing about them is getting information from the clients, and then a week or two later being told that half the information is not required. I guess my main complaint at work is the inexorably slow completion rate.

On the personal projects side:

There are still a number of small bugs in KFM 1.4, and either I don’t have the time to get to them, or there is no enough information to recreate the bug and the submitter doesn’t give me access to their copy so I can’t see it from their side.

KFM 2 has been halted for a while – the idea is huge, but I simply don’t have the time, and no-one is clambering for it. I’ll get to it when I have time, but I might have to approach it by evolving KFM 1.x into meeting what I wanted, instead of the original goal of building KFM 2 from scratch.

I started a new project, OddJobs4Locals two weeks back, and got a good two-day run at it, then time got ahead of me again. I think this will be a good one, when I can complete it. Useful for students, people with a little spare time, or simply people that just want to make a little extra cash. Not yet working, but it will be soon, I hope… This is doubly interesting to me, as it is done purely through AJAX, so it will be easy to do a smart-phone client or a desktop client when the time comes.

I’m in the back/forth stage of working with Packt publishing to see if they want me to do a second book (the first one has no bad reviews at all). We’ve mostly agreed on a table of contents, and I’m just trying to get the time to combine a few of the smaller chapters together.

On the piano, I’ve been ready for the grade 2 exam since November, and am still waiting to see if there will be an exam near me any time soon – I hate the effort that goes into travelling (I have a family, and no car). I was hoping to do a grade every 6 months. It looks like this might not be possible, despite me being ready for it… The tunes I’m doing for it are Beethoven’s Sonatina in G Major, a waltz by Bela Bartok, and Boys And Girls Come Out To Samba, by Terence Greaves – by the way, I don’t like those videos; there are no dynamics in any of them, and I can hear a number of mistakes as well. No video apparently of the Terence Greaves one.

As for organisation… well I guess I’d better start working with Mantis again.

My lot will have to wait – I’ve a load of work to get done before it can improve.

Meh. Depression taking hold again.

competition page

All you need to do is leave a comment explaining how you intend to use jQuery in your next project.

If you want to see reviews of the book, I’m maintaining a list of reviews here.

Anything wrong with that? Yes – it’s blasphemous, to just about every religion on Earth which is not Christian.

And so, Dermot Ahern, in his infinite wisdom, has just made the central tenet of [...]]]> “Jesus is the only son of God, and if you don’t follow him, you will not be getting through the gates into Heaven”.

Anything wrong with that? Yes – it’s blasphemous, to just about every religion on Earth which is not Christian.

And so, Dermot Ahern, in his infinite wisdom, has just made the central tenet of the religion of one third of the entire planet illegal.

Well done, sir. Fucking genius idea, that.

How about this one then – “Jesus is not the son of God”. Now I’m blaspheming against Christianity.

There’s absolutely no way to win against this except to be completely silent and never discuss what you believe with anyone at all. And that means it wasn’t just Christianity that the idiot has made illegal to speak about, but all religions.

By the way, I’m an atheist. I believe in thinking about what is “true”, and in discussing it with people that are interested, and in not pushing my own beliefs on others.

I hear the door knocking – the thought police are here to take me away. Pray for me…

To do this, first create the element:

Notice [...]]]> As a response to a reported bug where Chrome was taking ages to load up a flash multiple-file uploader, I’ve updated KFM to use HTML5’s multiple-file input box where possible.

To do this, first create the element:

  var input=document.createElement('input');
  input.type='file'; // use old-style JavaScript method to make sure all browsers respect it
  input.name='kfm_file';

Notice that we’re not using setAttribute to set the type and name – that’s a DOM method which works in most browsers but not (of course…) in Internet Explorer 6, where it has bugs.

And now, we tell the input to use the multiple-upload method. We use .setAttribute in this case because we only expect newer browsers to succeed with it.

  input.setAttribute('multiple','multiple');
  if(input.multiple)input.name='kfm_file[]';

In the second line, we check to see if the element is now marked as a multiple-uploader (most current browsers will not succeed in this), and if it does, then rename the input element by adding a [] to the end. If this is not done, then the server will only see the first file which is uploaded.

That’s the client-side done. This will only be visible in newer browsers such as Chrome, Safari 4, Firefox 3.6. I expect Internet Explorer will eventually catch up by 2020 or so.

If you’re doing this in pure HTML, then I suppose this would be good enough for you:

<input type="file" multiple="multiple" name="file[]" />

In this case, you must put the [] in the name in all cases.

On the server-side, you need to write your upload receiver to expect either a single element, or an array.

For some really goddamned stupid reason, when multiple files are uploaded to PHP, the results are interlaced in a really crappy and awkward manner (I don’t like it).

Instead of something logical and easy to use, like this:

array(
  [0] => array(
    'name' => 'file1.txt',
    'tmp_name' => '/tmp/abcdef'
    ....
  ),
  [1] => array(
    'name' => 'file2.txt',
    'tmp_name' => '/tmp/ghijkl'
    ....
  )
);

You get this…

array(
  'name' => array(
    [0] => 'file1.txt',
    [1] => 'file2.txt'
  ),
  'tmp_name' => array(
    [0] => '/tmp/abcdef',
    [1] => '/tmp/ghijkl'
  ),
  ...
);

While that looks at first glance to be easy to use, it’s not. You can’t do a simple “foreach($_FILES['kfm_file'] as $file)” and expect the above to be usable at all…

So, the first thing I do, is to check for the $_FILES['kfm_file'], and convert it into the first form above, which is very easy to work with:

$files=array();
$fdata=$_FILES['kfm_file'];
if(is_array($fdata['name'])){
 for($i=0;$i<count($fdata['name']);++$i){
  $files[]=array(
   'name'    =>$fdata['name'][$i],
   'tmp_name'=>$fdata['tmp_name'][$i],
  );
 }
}
else $files[]=$fdata;

In my own case, I’m only interested in the name and tmp_name variables, so that’s all I set up.

Now you can do a foreach on $files and treat them all individually.

foreach($files as $file){
  // uploaded location of file is $file['tmp_name']
  // original filename of file is $file['file']
}

If you want to see this in KFM, have a look at the nightly-updated demo tomorrow, or download from SVN right now.

oh – and buy my book!

I came across NovelRank a few weeks ago, which keeps track of your Amazon SalesRank and uses the fluctuations in the value to try figure out when a sale happens.

At first I [...]]]> Because it’s difficult to know exactly how well my book is doing, I went looking for online apps that might be able to help.

I came across NovelRank a few weeks ago, which keeps track of your Amazon SalesRank and uses the fluctuations in the value to try figure out when a sale happens.

At first I was a bit disappointed, as my own ratings should not many sales going on, but I realised that this was because there were no reviews out there so people a) didn’t know about the book, and b) didn’t know if it was worth buying.

Since the reviews have started coming in, sales have picked up, as can be seen in the NovelRank graph for my book.

I like this application – it’s a simple idea, and the author has made it freely available (I assume he makes money from affiliate links).

Want to see it in action? Buy JQuery 1.3 with PHP and then view NovelRank graph for my book the graph a few hours later to see your very own blip appear on it.

It’s interesting to see that the book is not selling at all in Canada. What’s wrong with you Canadians??

On a very related note, I’m in talks with Packt to produce another book. More on this later when details are more concrete.

Christmas is coming, as most of us (especially parents and people that have wallets) know, so it’s time for ye all to dig deep and buy the perfect gift for that favourite web developer in your life.

Not knowing what that perfect gift could possibly be, I’ll recommend instead that you invest in a copy of [...]]]>

Christmas is coming, as most of us (especially parents and people that have wallets) know, so it’s time for ye all to dig deep and buy the perfect gift for that favourite web developer in your life.

Not knowing what that perfect gift could possibly be, I’ll recommend instead that you invest in a copy of my book, JQuery 1.3 with PHP.

Reviews are just starting to come in. I only know of two on-line ones so far, my favourite of which is this one:

The author does a great job of introducing complicated theories and breaking them down into manageable steps, whilst always taking very thorough considerations for applying jQuery knowledge into CMS ’s and web applications.

I noticed that the same reviewer posted this on Twitter: thoroughly impressed with reading jQuery 1.3 with PHP. writing a review on it, will be available soon!

The other one that I’m aware of is more of a list of notes than a review. The only thing he says in general about the book is “Overall a good book.”

There are a few minor criticisms in the second review that I don’t agree with – that I didn’t use inline functions in all cases, didn’t use Google’s functions to load jQuery from its CDN, and used document.getElementById in some cases instead of using jQuery’s $ function.

My reaction to those points are: inline functions are explained later in the book as I didn’t want to throw the reader head-first into understanding them, there’s no point in loading three libraries (google, jquery and jquery-ui) when you only need jquery and jquery-ui, and for the purposes of getting an element by its ID, document.getElementByID is much quicker than $.

I think the real problem with my decisions with the above points is that, after having had them pointed out as mistakes, I feel I should really have explained more clearly in the book why I chose to do things in those ways in the first place. Well, that’s something for edition 2

So far, though, the reactions are positive, and I hope this continues – there haven’t been any “this is crap” reviews so far, which is good.

I know of a few other people that are writing reviews, and can’t wait to see them. So reviewers, please do criticise it – it makes the end-product better.

And christmas shoppers, it’s a great book

No new code today, but I can describe the recent work on php.ie (I’m the secretary of the Irish [...]]]> It’s been a while since I wrote anything vaguely technical. I guess it’s because I like to write only when there’s something new to say, and usually only if I have some new code to give away.

No new code today, but I can describe the recent work on php.ie (I’m the secretary of the Irish PHP Users’ Group).

So firstly, it was basically a static/brochure site for about a year, until we installed WebME (written by me!) as the CMS and created a skin for it so there’s only a tiny design difference. If you want to try out WebME, then download the SVN version from the google code site, or create a test site here (uses a really old version of WebME – you’re better off using the SVN version).

Then, I started rewriting the right panel. Beforehand, it displayed recent twitter messages, but they’re not often put out so it was a bit of a wasted space.

The panel now uses a WebME widget which displays recent Twitter messages, emails from the mailing list, and posts from the forum.

Over the next few days, I’ll be adding a new News section to the site, and the message widget will be able to show new articles from planet php.ie and new jobs from the jobs page.

I’m currently reading through Ken’s linux.ie todo list to see what I can appropriate for php.ie for its ongoing development.

Big thanks go to Michele and the team at blacknight for hosting the site.

Oh! Just a reminder, buy my book! JQuery 1.3 with PHP – hasn’t been reviewed by anyone yet, as far as I know, but my own opinion is that it is worth having on your shelf if you are a PHP developer that wants to step into jQuery.

Bronwyn and myself went to the Barbican, London, on Saturday to watch Graham Coxon perform.

We both enjoyed the event. Bronwyn was excited to meet friends she had only spoken to online. Well, she’s been excited for the whole of the last week, but it’s all related!

London is big.

The weather was ok for the Friday and [...]]]>

Bronwyn and myself went to the Barbican, London, on Saturday to watch Graham Coxon perform.

We both enjoyed the event. Bronwyn was excited to meet friends she had only spoken to online. Well, she’s been excited for the whole of the last week, but it’s all related!

London is big.

The weather was ok for the Friday and Saturday while we were wandering around taking in sights and sounds. We visited the National Gallery, and were handed a sheet saying a candle-lit baroque concert would be happening later, but it clashed with our previous plans.

Arrived at the Barbican. Bronwyn didn’t see any of her friends. We said we’d meet up around the bar, so that’s where we went, and sat opposite it.

We were there about five minutes when I spotted a huge amazing monstrosity of a drum-machine, Felix’s Machines. You have to see the videos of that thing!

As I stood there, Simon from Resigned (also the admin of the Graham Coxon forum) noticed me and waved to get my attention – ah, that’s where they are! We joined a group of Coxon fans.

We had two hours, so we gently infused ourselves thanks to the bar, with some opting for chips and complaining that you shouldn’t need to buy fish&chips just to get some chips (as a vegetarian, I agree wholeheartedly with this, and not just through a hatred of waste).

The show was to start at 8, so we headed down and got our seats.

Simon had thoughtfully gotten us row G (haha – G for Graham. very good. ahem…), which had a walk-space directly in front of us, meaning we could stretch our legs and walk to the toilets without stepping on people’s heads.

Bronwyn decided a new piece of policy was to be created henceforth: when purchasing tickets, people should be measured for height, and really tall people should be confined to the back of the auditorium.

The band came out and the place became loud with cheers.

The sound engineers didn’t do the best job in the world. The band played brilliantly apart from a few minor hiccups, but some of the sound problems were distracting.

When Graham spoke, it was difficult to hear. I was afraid that his singing would be the same, but when he sings, he crouches close to the microphone, and when he talks, it’s like he’s unaware the mic is there.

Some of the songs were technical, involving a lot of finger-picking. An example is Sorrow’s Army. Graham started out on that one, then Robyn Hitchcock joined in a few bars later. Robyn’s guitar, though, was louder, so it drowned out Graham’s playing. This was pointed out independently to me by Simon later on, so it wasn’t just my ears playing tricks.

There was a feedback problem later on at the beginning of one tune, which was quickly and cheerfully quelled and restarted.

One of the three female singers was very loud at points. I didn’t like that – it was like she was stealing the spotlight.

On the far left of the stage, Max Eastley was playing the Arc. At most points in the concert I couldn’t hear anything of what he was doing. Only in quiet songs with only one or two other instruments.

When the songs got loud, they got very loud. Graham was unintelligible at some points as he tried to sing above the sound of the other instruments.

Apart from these gripes (and they’re minor – Bronwyn doesn’t agree with any of the above points), I enjoyed the concert.

I think the only tune I didn’t like was the ending of Caspian Sea, where the band appeared to get stuck in a rut, repeating the same bar over and over and over.

I liked how the music was not perfectly in-tune or perfectly rhythmic, but was just a little off here and there. This gave the music a more natural and “used” feel, like an old rickety piano which is played when the pianist is surrounded by friends – you feel like he’s playing personally to you and it’s not a surgical procedure.

The concert was basically Graham’s latest album, The Spinning Top, with a few extra old songs played at the end.

One of the things I like about this album is the finger-picking. Graham has recently been trying to increase his finger-picking skills, inspired by his love of old blues and folk. His interest in Nick Drake really shines through in the singing, and Bert Jansch (of Pentangle) in the playing.

In a lot of the songs, there is not just one finger-picking “voice”, but two. This could be seen obviously at the concert where Graham was playing one finger-picking riff and Robyn was playing another, yet they meshed nicely.

Overall, I enjoyed this concert and if he does it again with another album, I’m sure we’ll be going over again.

Bronwyn commented, on seeing the dance-floor, that it was “very like Fibbers, except for the smell”. Fibbers (Parnell st) has a bit of [...]]]> We were sent an invite to come see Resigned play (interesting name – does it mean “gave up”, or “was signed again”? I’ll ask them tomorrow) at the Water Rats Theatre.

Bronwyn commented, on seeing the dance-floor, that it was “very like Fibbers, except for the smell”. Fibbers (Parnell st) has a bit of a reputation – especially among those of us that have been frequenting the place more than 15 years.

I visited the toilet at one point there and can confirm that it out-fibbers’s fibbers. It was rank.

Having said that, the people that were there were eclectic. There were punks, industrials, grungers, rockers – hard to put a label on the place when everyone is so different!

Anyway – back to the band – I enjoyed it. I was expecting some hard punk, as “resigned” is a very serious name, but the music was actually quite interesting and not as harsh as I expected. There were interesting rhythms (listen to their track “Hangover”) that make you feel like you need to dance or at least admire it, and at no point did I feel they were copying anyone.

Their last track was dedicated to “someone in the audience”, and they played “Advert” by Blur. It was aimed at Bronwyn and a few other Coxon fans.

We spoke to Simon, Gary and John. The playing was perfect – no sign of effort from anyone; everything was “to a tee”. For example, while playing some tunes, I noticed Simon fiddling around with his effect pedals /at the same time/ as playing his part. Very cool. Not a beat dropped – I liked it.

John said that there was a bad gig a few weeks back where there wasn’t enough practice beforehand and it all fell apart, but it didn’t show tonight at all. Solid playing, and I’d love to see them play again.

We were handed a CD of their album which they refused to accept payment for, for reasons which agree almost with my own philosophy.

My belief is that people should be paid for what they do. Royalties are a bonus, but should not be considered as “earned”.

As an author of a book, this might fly in the face of reason, but the thing is – I wrote my book because I wanted to, and I enjoyed the act of its creation. Anything afterwards that I get paid is a bonus, but I don’t feel I’ve earned it (Yes, I’m very grateful for it (thank you!!), but I don’t feel I should demand people pay me if they accidently find my words online).

I suggested this to Simon, in the case that musicians should be paid for the gigs they play, and everything else is a bonus.

This appears to be the same model that large bands such as Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead are following recently – basically, it’s all free, but there’s really nothing that compares to seeing it live.

We haven’t gotten to listen to the CD yet, as this laptop does not have a CD drive, but I’m sure Bronwyn will have it on repeat for the next few weeks.

Well done, Resigned, on providing a very good night out, and we’ll talk to you tomorrow before Graham’s gig!