Last week my good friends over at EE_Insider focused on the imminent release of EE 2.0. If you haven’t read it yet, go read it now. They feature articles, interviews, and news, and always with a bit of humour (yes Kenny…. there’s a “u” in that word). They asked me for an interview, but after EECI2009 my wife and I took a few more days to tour around Holland… and l long story short… the interview only got finished right now :)
Go read EE 2 Week Straggler: The Return of Derek Allard! (Interview) for my thoughts on the future of CodeIgniter, the development of EE 2.0, and what it means to unite CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine.
We had sent out a set of interview questions that we weren’t sure we would receive for ExpressionEngine 2 Week. Derek Allard, one of EllisLab’s developers, was on vacation. Since he’d been slaving away for years on EE 2, we gave him a free pass. But Derek is what the kids call a “trooper” and he came back to us this week with the answers! It turned out to be a really great interview, timely due to the discussion and popularity of CodeIgniter and EE, and we got permission from the ‘Lab to post it. So, EE denizens, it’s my pleasure to give you our interview with the great Derek Allard
Back when I first setup this blog, one of the first things I did was setup akismet to catch spam (Sidebar:huge props to Lodewijk “Low” Schutte for his article on setting up Akismet for ExpressionEngine). I just checked today for false positives, which I do every few days. Generally the spam is very easy to spot and I delete it sight unseen, but today I took the time to read the few spam comments that were caught. 8 of them were banal, but the 9th was hilarious.
Now I know that that they often try to decieve filters with Madlib style randomly made up sentences, but this one couldn’t have turned out any better.
Your blog was of armpit awesome again even though it was petrifying for me to flagulate what happened.You turned what could have been a very folderol thing into something side-splitting and positive. Do pick with care! Also you dwell portable radio news programme show.I betrothed you xoxox
And doubly funny is that “folderol” is actually a word.
fol⋅de⋅ral [fol-duh-ral]
–noun
1. mere nonsense; foolish talk or ideas.
2. a trifle; gimcrack; gew-gaw.
Its a sad day when I learn that spammers have a better vocabulary than you do. The good news is that “flagulate” is not a word, and I get to keep holding my head high!
The last night of EECI2009 is coming to an end. What an amazing time I’ve had. I’ve been under a fair amount of stress prepping for it, getting my speech ready, and getting ExpressionEngine 2 ready for release on December 1(!!). But it was all worth it!
Our fearless President Leslie Camacho gave an amazing speech. As he said, the cone of silence has been lifted! Highlights? Pricing details, licensing details and a release date! Exciting times. Punchline? Non-commercial License, $149. Commercial License,$299. Upgrade, $50. Coming (as stated) December 1.
I also had the opportunity to speak. “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants : How Community Shapes Development in EllisLab” went very well. It was recorded, and I’ll share the video here when its made available. In the meantime, here are my slides. I’ll be out of commission for about a week, but when I find more time I’ll post another blog entry summarizing and complementing the presentation for anyone who couldn’t be there.
Edit: the video is now available. EECI2009 Videos and Slides page, or directly on Vimeo.
I met an amazing group of folks, and this time I had a chance to hang out with some real superstars of the community. Everyone is just as awesome as you might think.
The city that hosted us, Leiden, is of course stunning; and our hosts from Whooz! WebMedia (particularly the eminent Robert Eerhart) made us feel welcome and wanted.
And now, I’m off to enjoy a (frankly, well deserved) few days of R & R with my beautiful wife storming around Europe!
In a late-night bout of work, boredom and tiredness crept in. In that magical moment, this seemed incredibly funny. I wish now we’d thought to hashtag it first.
The CodeIgniter manual is almost universally praised by the community*. I’m proud to say that we work very hard on our documentation at EllisLab - in fact as a coder, I’m forced to write the docs for anything I add or change. This means that they are pretty up to date, and reasonably complete. Could things be better? Of course! There’s always room to improve anything, and our docs are no exception.
What I’d like to focus on here is how to go about improving the docs, and one approach to giving your suggestion the best possible chance of getting included.
Last year I had the chance to speak at the very first ever Annual ExpressionEngine Roadshow. I had a blast, I met a bunch of really cool people, and it was a great experience both as an EE dev, and as an EE fan.
Now in the second year – and second city (Seattle) – the ExpressionEngine Roadshow is coming up again. Its a conference designed to bring ExpressionEngine users and developers together offline. The conference offers something for everyone, newcomers included, but also provides in-depth development tips for advanced developers. So far, the day will include 6 excellent, varied sessions on ExpressionEngine with breakfast before the event, and a great party and networking event after.
If you have the chance to go, I strongly recommend you get down there. You’ll learn tips, techniques and development expertise from others who have been using ExpressionEngine for years, plus meet people in the EE community. From EllisLab this year, Rick Ellis, Leslie Camacho, and Lisa Wess will all be there; as well as Ryan Irelan (of EE Insider and Airbag Industries) coming, and they’re working on several other big names.
Friday, October 02, 2009
Seattle, WA
For full information hit up the ExpressionEngine Roadshow site.
If you’re building a distributed application one of the luxuries you lack is knowing exactly how the server that will be hosting your application is configured. One common obstacle I encounter is lack of JSON support (JSON is only natively available to PHP since version 5 version 5.2, and even then is not uniformly available on servers). Here’s how I code around this situation; firstly, if the server does support JSON, then I don’t want to mess with it, but if it lacks support for JSON, then we need to define the JSON functions so it can use them externally. There are 2 JSON functions that we want to re-create - json_decode(), and json_encode().
Often times these types of things are set using configuration variables (in CodeIgniter, the $config array), but a configuration variable in this case is not really desirable, as a server may get the ability afterwards, or the person implementing it may not set the variable correctly. What I do in order to ensure the system will guess correctly is simply use PHP’s native function_exists() function to determine if the server can handle JSON. If it cannot, then I re-implement all the functions using the PEAR Json_services file, which I implement as a CodeIgniter library.
// Not all servers will have json_decode() available but those that do should
// use it, and we'll fall back to another solution for those who don't.
if ( ! function_exists('json_decode'))
{
$this->load->library('Services_json');
}
The library is available from the Pear repository and will work in any environment that CodeIgniter itself works in, simply drop it into your libraries folder.
function codeigniter_controller ()
{
if ( ! function_exists('json_decode'))
{
$this->load->library('Services_json');
}
$json = '{"a":1,"b":2,"c":3,"d":4,"e":5}';
$vars['json'] = json_decode($json);
$this->load->view('view', $vars);
}
I’ve used this technique successfully now across several CodeIgniter projects.
I’m very pleased to announce I’ll be joining Leslie Camacho, Simon Collison, Veerle Pieters and a host of other brilliant minds at the the first ExpressionEngine & CodeIgniter Conference in Leiden (Netherlands) at the end of October.
What doubly excites me about the entire conference (well… aside from the whole European vacation thing) is that they are specifically focusing on both of my favourite tools, not only EE or only CI, but both. The topics are balanced, the conference is very well organized so far… this will be a pleasure.
If you don’t already have plans, why not take a few extra days and make a vacation of it; and join us for several days of nerding out.
When I was building BambooInvoice, I wanted to have the ability to export invoices as PDFs. There are a number of excellent PHP based solutions for this, but Bamboo was unique in that it was a distributed application. I wouldn’t have control over the servers it was being installed onto. This meant I needed a PDF conversion library that didn’t rely on certain server libraries being present. I was also limited in that I wanted BambooInvoice to be released under an Open Source license.
DOMPDF was perfect for what I needed, and today the project changed hands, and is once again being actively developed at http://code.google.com/p/dompdf/. I’m very excited for the future of this excellent project.
Read the full post for details.
I’m proud to release BambooInvoice 0.8.9 today. Its mostly a maintenance release, but there are some tasty new features as always.
