Development

I just solved an issue that had me waking up in the middle of the night for weeks (just pushing it a bit) and I have to thank PHP's community and in particular a guy named Brad Proctor for writing a very short but very important comment in the PHP manual, and I quote:

This function is relatively slow (as of PHP 5.3.3) and if you are calling a method with a known number of parameters it is much faster to call it this way: $class->{$method}($param1, $param2);

He mentions

With the Command Line Interpreter for PHP (most of the time called php-cli or php5-cli), you can check if one single file contains syntax errors by simply calling

php5 -l file.php

The problem with that is, if you have many files to check, on the command line you might easily spend your time typing filenames.

If you need to know what your website looks like in a browser that you don't have available (for ethical, financial or other reasons), you can test you website (if public) using http://browsershots.org/ It's a nice service (although a bit limited) for free, and you can get extensions for a reasonnable  fee.  

(Read the update below before starting to copy-paste) To install Xhprof on PHP5.4 on Ubuntu (assuming you've already got PHP5.4 from Andrej or somewhere safe) in order to measure the load of Chamilo 1.10 dev (you need to have a mercurial clone, otherwise the "tests" directory will not exist), follow this procedure (all lines prefixed with # are comments):

cd /tmp
sudo apt-get install php5-dev php-pear
pecl bundle xhprof
cd xhprof

# Here you will have to apply the patch mentioned here: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=61674 to your extension/xhprof.c file (otherwise it won't compile

For one of our developments, Julio found an interesting JQuery library which allows you to change colours on the fly, find the other colours on a colour wheel, "summing up" colours (make yellow + blue = green), etc. Find out more about the xcolor plugin.

Just two valuable links to information about how to avoid other browsers taking into account Mozilla-specific hacks:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS_Reference/Mozilla_Extensions
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/952861/targeting-only-firefox-with-css

Courtesy of Julio Montoya and the authors of the respective pages.

A really good guide on branching is available here: http://stevelosh.com/blog/2009/08/a-guide-to-branching-in-mercurial/ In my case, I wanted to branch a previous version of my code to launch a parallel branch for bug-fixing of the previous release. I used the Chamilo code repository on google code.

If you've been into website development, and in particular website optimization, you probably have stumbled upon that question at least once: what HTTP headers do the different browsers send when the user presses F5 or (even better) CTRL+F5, to make the web server bypass the cache system? Well, the user "some" on Stackoverflow answered that in a very complete way here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/385367/wha

Just as a self reminder, and because I don't fancy too much looking into the Drupal core for debugging, here is a short explanation of how the Drupal 7 bootstrap mechanism works. First of all, a bootstrap mechanism is a mechanism by which you work progressively your way through the full loading of a system, step by step, starting with the loading of simple elements that will allow you to load more complex elements. The Linux system also has a bootstrap mechanism (as do most OSes).