php

I'm always surprised at what horrible things web developers can actually do in their work just to use AJAX stuff. I won't hurt anyone because there would be many useless deaths, but guys... use your head! A user wants interfaces to look nice, but not to hide the whole screen while reloading a single block (where's the point of using AJAX?), and they don't want to have to click on every single element to extend it just to be able to see data, either.

In a recent meeting with the Dokeos 2.0 team, I realized that sometimes things are not quite evident. One of these cases that can only be understood with experience is that there's no use in allowing a user to upload files and keep the true filenames on the server's disk. In fact, it is quite a bigger problem to do that instead of changing the filenames and storing files as hashes.

Reason 1: Avoid security issues

When uploading a file to the server, you will have filters in place (won't you?).

A long time ago, I developed a loginshare script for a customer, that I think can now be shared with the community. I don't know much about LoginShare, and the truth is that their forum doesn't tell me much either, but based on a similar script, I developed the following script to use Dokeos 1.8.5 with it. Just in case it would be useful to anyone... (it certainly will be more useful this way than abandoned in one of my directories).

I just commited to the Dokeos SVN a little feature to allow for the inclusion of your RSS feed in your profile.

In this article, Stas Malyshev describes the internationalization extension and mentions it's been included in the PHP 5.3 core. It is an extensive article with plenty of examples to explain every component of Internationalization: Locale, Collator, Number formatter, Date formatter, Message formatter, Normalizer, Grapheme and Internation Domain Names. Pretty useful. Storing it for later (when Dokeos will require 5.3 by default, or the installation of the extension in 5.2)

One method to know if the script being executed has been started through cli, apache or any other API is to use PHP_SAPI:

if (PHP_SAPI != 'cli') { ... }

will ensure that the script is executed in a command-line context before doing what's inside the brackets.

A brief summary of the things that might change (slightly) the way we develop in PHP to use features from the new version. In particular, fileinfo would be great to start detecting character encodings and viruses... http://phparch.com/main/news/view/8/GOTO_in_PHP_5_3__is_it_Really_That_Evil_

In a particular context, it happened to me to have to reproduce a cache cleaner feature for Drupal 5 without installing the Devel module. Although this article doesn't create anything new, I thought it might be worth explaining in case this would help someone someday. The idea is to re-use the code from the devel module and put it into another module for re-use without having the weight corresponding to a new module installation. The code from the devel module (devel.module) looks like this:

/** * Implementation of hook_menu(). */ function devel_menu($may_cache) { $items = array

Just a quick link to a few sites that I want to remember in a few days time, when I'll try to get more information about the differences between PHPUnit and SimpleTest. http://phpundercontrol.org/about.html http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_CodeSniffer http://maphpia.com/impacto-estimable-gracias-a-unit-testing/ (in Spanish)

This is a quick report on my first trial as a local group coach for the PHP TestFest 2009 for the PHP Perú group. Assistance: 20 people (all more or less PHP developers, some very fresh) Preparation time: about 6 hours of readings, downloading, slides preparation, etc Teaching time: 2 x 1/2h.