PHP Developer - August 22nd, 2006
For those anxiously looking forward to Joshua Eichorn’s “Understanding Ajax” book, there’s a note on his blog you’ll want to check out.
The lead story at ComputerWorld.com is an excerpt from my book Understanding AJAX. If you are thinking about buying the book, but needed more information to make a decision nows your chance.
The sample chapter is the first, teaching about the basics of Ajax - how its structured, what it does, even alternatives to it. You can also check out the table of contents and see what other topics are being covered.
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PHP Developer - August 22nd, 2006
Jonathan Snook has a quick tip for PHPers out there using MySQL and looking for an easy way to concatinate a lot of data in your queries.
This is just a quick tip. If you have a bunch of data that you need to concatenate, take a look at MySQL’s GROUP_CONCAT function.
For example, way back when, I wrote about (and subsequently weighting those tags) to an application. It was a very simple approach with each record having a tags field. It was just a simple text field and I stored all the tags with spaces. However, to pull out a list of all tags being used in the system, I returned the tags field from all records, looped through each record, exploding the tags onto an array.
Using the group_concat() function already in MySQL, he was able to reduce looping through his data, splitting on the spaces down to a single line call in SQL telling it to concatinate spaces. He includes the code (just a few lines) to get the job done.
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PHP Developer - August 22nd, 2006
Lukas Smith has posted about some updates for the MDB2 PEAR package he maintains, including many bug fixes and the addition of the SQLite driver.
I got annoyed be seeing the driver fail so many of the unit tests because there is no support for ALTER TABLE in SQLite version 2 that I sat down and wrote up an emulation for it. Maybe someone has use for it.
There is a lot of tricky code in there to properly read the current table layout like fields, indexes and constraints as well as the data which all should be merged with the changes if everything goes as planned. Needless to say its a somewhat risky operation, especially since SQLite does not support transactions for DDL operaitons.
He also talks about some updates he’s made to the LiveUser and LiveUser_Admin packages to correct bugs found there. His next release will be the MDB2_Schema package, with some new DML additions.
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PHP Developer - August 22nd, 2006
Ryan Malesevich continues his series looking at some of the WordPress plugins he’s foun duseful in his development work. This time he looks at a feature to make it easier for people to submit your post to the popular social networking sites of today (such as digg, furl, del.icio.us, etc) - WP-Notable.
What WP-Notable does is it allows you to include icons and links to where users can submit your site to the different websites, 15 of them to be exact. The 15 are: del.icio.us, digg, spurl, wists, simpy, newsvine, blinklist, furl, reddit, fark, blogmarks, yahoo, smarkling, magnolia, and segnalo.
I’ll be honest, most of those I have never heard of, but it can’t hurt to have those options to your visitors who have heard of them and are using it. To see an example of WP-Notable in work, just go to any article and underneath it you’ll see the 15 icons with shortcuts to submit that article to those services.
The installation of the plugin is as simple as uploading and activiating, and Ryan includes a sample usage to integrate into your page.
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Dev Shed - August 22nd, 2006
You know about SourceForge and other open source project repositories. Recently Google took the surprising step of creating its own open source project hosting service. If you want to find out more about what this service can offer you keep reading….
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