July 22nd, 2008
Man there’s good stuff on the net, and sometimes I even get a moment to read it!
- Jamie Rumbelow‘s, got a good start to a series of CodeIgniter articles with his first part of The Guide to CI Databases.
- From the “D’uh, why didn’t I think of that!” department comes the excellent (and funny) CleverAndy. You know all those designs you do that your clients pass on for one reason or another? CleverAndy helps you find them homes so they don’t go to the island for misfit toys (or um… whatever the design equivalent is).
- 36 seconds! Fedor Emelianenko… wow. You are a bad, bad man. But seriously… Megadeth?
- Learning ExpressionEngine? Micheal Boyink (he of the mighty pogo) has put together Train -EE just for you. Fantastic resources, including instructor led workshop training. Congrats Mike, this is the way it’s meant to be done!
jQuery sparklines. Looks to sweet to pass on.
Continue reading “Cool Stuff for Cool People”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Javascript, Noteworthy with 3 comments 
June 26th, 2008
Despite mad work going into ExpressionEngine 2 development, we’ve still be heavily focused on keeping our current products the best we can. To that end, today we managed to eek both a new version of CI and EE out the door. While relatively light on new features (there are some nifty ones in there though) the main thrust was a significant improvement to the Input library for both security and performance. To this end, I’d like to publicly express my gratitude to Pascal Kriete (Inparo), whose tireless efforts helped us immensely.
Continue reading “CodeIgniter 1.6.3 & ExpressionEngine 1.6.4 released”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine with 10 comments
May 28th, 2008
I finally made the long discussed flip over to jQuery. It took me about 4 and a half minutes. It should have been a 30 second process, but I had a few lightbox images relationships named incompatibly. Anyhow, all fixed up. I also decided to implement the much talked about Google hosted Javascript library. In a nutshell, Google is hosting some popular Javascript libraries. The idea is that if enough people are using the hosted libraries, then there’s a good chance that your visitor has already locally cached the files, and your page will (give the illusion of) load faster.
As a handy extra, they take care of compressing and minifying for you, and are committed to keeping a library online permanently after it is hosted.
That said, I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it. There are a few things that I think every responsible webmaster has to think about first. Personally, I would only use it as part of an informed company strategy (I could see a savings on a big site like ExpressionEngine.com in terms of bandwidth and perceived load time). But there are still some downsides I just haven’t fully reconciled yet. Let me address the three most relevant ones that I see.
Continue reading “jQuery hosted on Google and some implications for developers”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Javascript with 15 comments
May 26th, 2008
CodeIgniter Directory is aims to become a centralized point to find resources for CodeIgniter, an Open Source PHP framework . You will find here CodeIgniter related blog links, websites, tutorials, applications and libraries or helpers that will help you in your everyday programmer’s life - description stolen blatantly and unapologetically from their about page ;)
Continue reading “Quick Link: CodeIgniter Directory”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Quick Links with 3 comments
May 20th, 2008
EllisLab.com got a bit of an over-hauling yesterday by Rick. The new site is much more spacious and clean, and well… sexier. Now normally a site redesign would be a one line entry, or possibly no entry at all, but this new site brings something very, very cool with it. It features what I consider (without overstatement) to be the greatest company profile pages of all time. Each of the EllisLab staff have been masterfully illustrated as a super hero. The results are positively stunning.
Keep reading to see them.
Continue reading “New look for EllisLab.com, and the GREATEST about us page of all time”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Noteworthy, Personal with 19 comments
May 16th, 2008
BambooInvoice user Mikael Johansson has graciously translated the application into Swedish (thanks Mikael!) but also extended the translation to include all of CodeIgniter, so I now very proudly offer the Swedish Language pack for CI 1.6.x.
Continue reading “Swedish Language Pack for CodeIgniter 1.6”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 3 comments
May 13th, 2008
Yesterday I mentioned that a new release of CodeIgniter was right around the corner. Well, today we made it official and released CodeIgniter 1.6.2.
As always, a lot of work has gone into it. Thirty four (at last count) new features or enhancements are in there, notably including speed and security related code. The File Helper has seen a series of new capabilities added into it, a Compatibility Helper was added for those of you still stuck on PHP4. Also, the Zip library is remarkably faster. Each of those last 2 contributions came from the community (thanks Seppo and StanleyXu) as well as many, many smaller fixes shared by the CI community. CI rocks.
Paired with this release is the introduction of Tags in the Subversion server for version snapshots. CLI geeks, starting with version 1.6.1, you can checkout/export full release versions directly from Subversion.
There aren’t any “earth shattering” changes here, but CodeIgniter should now run smoother, faster, and be more friendly. Also, some groundwork has been laid for some larger changes in the next release.
Continue reading “CodeIgniter 1.6.2 Released”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 5 comments
May 12th, 2008
I just wrote this on the CodeIgniter forums.
There’s been some notable work dropped into CodeIgniter recently. We’re working on finishing up a few things for a 1.6.2 release. A few noteworthy items include enhancements to Active Record, a new compatibility helper to allow the use of several common PHP5 only functions in PHP4 and come enhancements/behavioural changes in unit testing, form, url, directory and download helpers.
There have been several speed and security enhancements as well, in both CI “proper” (and various libraries and helpers), and of course, the usual round of bug fixes and doc changes. In fact the documentation has grown by 2 pages (Reserved names and Common functions).
If you want to leave a note, by all means feel free. I'm closing comments on this post to keep everything in one place (in this case, the CI forums).
Continue reading “CodeIgniter1.6.2 just around the corner”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with no comments
May 04th, 2008
I was thrilled to see that there was an update yesterday to the CodeIgniter Textmate bundle for CI 1.6. If you use Textmate or E-Texteditor (Windows) then download it and give it a shot. Nice work… thanks, I’m using it right now!
A few other little utilities I’ve been getting a lot of use out of recently. The first is the excellent clipboard utility Jumpcut. It keep track of the last 10 (that’s configurable) things that you’ve copied and makes them available to you.
There are also handy keyboard shortcuts to get at it. Normally not super-useful, but I’ve been doing a lot of work that has needed me to copy and paste language keys, and this let’s me buffer up a whole page worth of
$this->lang->line('something');
and paste it all at once. Sure faster then copy > flip page > paste > flip back > copy > flip page > paste > repeat again and again. Its also open sourced under the MIT License.
Another great little tool I’ve discovered recently is for my mouse. I’m one of those guys that needs and uses the 4th and 5th buttons on my mouse. The left I use for copying, and the right for paste (see a pattern here), but in Leopard, those buttons default to… jeez I don’t remember… Expose I think. Reconfiguring them was a bit of a pain. Fortunately, I found the excellent USB Overdrive, which you can use to re-program your mouse buttons. Aside from having what might be the ugliest website I’ve seen this year, the little shareware application has been fantastic, and is well worth plunking down my $20 for it (although to be clear, the downloaded version is 100% functional and remains so).
On the topic, other little known utilities that I love include caffeine (temporarily prevent your computer from sleeping) and AppDelete (gets rid of stray files when deleting a program). That’s hardly an exhaustive list… just 2 little quickies for anyone reading this ;)
Continue reading “CodeIgniter textmate bundle and other stuff that’s saving me time”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Mac with 5 comments
April 04th, 2008
I haven’t written here in a while, and I’m feeling pretty guilty about it. I’ve been focusing all my time on programming, and just haven’t been exploring “interesting” things as much as I usually do, so therefore not much to write about. Anyhow, that’s going to change. In the next little while I’ll be producing a few more video casts focused on CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine. I’m going to start from the perspective of how I set things up, and then expand from there, hopefully spanning a few videos to finish everything off as I need to.
I’m also about a week away from getting to re-visit some of the core functionality of CodeIgniter. We want to reconsider paging, validation, and a few little things here and there. But that doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting still! Since the release of CodeIgniter 1.6.1, there have been 56 updates to the svn. 18 of them were documentation fixes - I often hear criticism along the lines of “I checked the CodeIgniter svn, but its mostly documentation fixes”; and while I know where this is coming from (as developers we want shiny new features), the documentation is among the biggest “features” of the framework. But there were also many important security fixes, enhancements and other nice-ities in there. Check it out (what a clever play on words).
Also, as of right now this second, nobody has been hired into the 2 positions available at EllisLab, and if you’ve been sitting on the fence, get your name in there.
Continue reading “Video-casts coming”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Noteworthy with 2 comments
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