Morning Caffeine

The time has come to learn Ruby on Rails. I’ve been delaying it for few months now, but my new SitePoint book, Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications just arrived and there are no more excuses left.

Installation
In the book, in second chapter author recommends installing Instant Rails for Windows users. As I already had that installed, I’ve decided to install Ruby and RubyGems separately. As being PHP developer, I got used to install Apache, PHP and MySQL all separately as I like to have complete control over them. Configuring Apache sometimes can be tricky if you forget few settings or if you’d like to keep your server files in different places. Same stands for MySQL. I like to keep all MySQL db files and web server files on D partition of my hard drive, just so I don’t need to think about it when formatting C.

Installation of Ruby, RubyGems and Rails is painfully easy. If you do decide to go with Ruby with Windows installer, installation is just few clicks away.
Installation of RubyGems is as easy. It requires from you just to run

Rails installation can be started with

All done!

Yes, it’s THAT easy. (more info (which is not really more info, because you don't need more!!!) can be found at http://rubyonrails.org)

I'm at 51st page of the book and all I did so far is installed everything I need to get started. I'm inpatient to start coding!!

Ask-me plugin, which was released almost a month ago, requires Exec-PHP plugin to be installed (hopefully beta release will make plugin independent, and you won’t need exec-php anymore). However, in my last post, I wanted to show up some php code. Exec-php plugin allows you to put some php code within your post and execute it once the page is loaded. On the other hand, it doesn’t allow you to actually show your code. I went to authors page for the solution and he suggested that instead < and > in opening and closing php tags you use corresponding html entities (<?php ?> to <?php ?>). I tried that, but as I also have Gi:Hiliter plugin (which is very nice for syntax highlighting), it actually showed <?php ?> html entities preventing them to be interpreted.

I figured I should try to hack Exec-php to ignore that single post I wrote, and I did, but my friend Ed actually suggested that I put html comment inside each post which will contain php code which doesn't need to be executed and just change Exec-php the way when it finds out that comment, it will just return the content and not execute the code.

This is the function which I changed:

Works perfectly! All you need to do is to place this:

on the beginning of your post if you'd like to show some php code to your visitors.

Note: I started to write this article a year and a half ago. I finally decided to finish it and create series of posts which will cover some Smarty tips and tricks and writing plugins and modifiers.

THE PROBLEM: PHP and HTML-embedded PHP

As PHP is HTML-embedded scripting language you can easily nest php code inside html and get dynamically generated page. Great, isn’t it? Yes, as long as you know what you are doing. The trouble comes when programmers and designers start to work together on the same project. In that case programmers should try to ‘hide’ their code as much as possible from designer’s eyes, not only because designers doesn’t like to see bunch of weird signs between their HTML, but because they can easily remove a single semicolon and cause parse error in PHP. This result in arguments and blaming who erased what (for solving this you should also consider using code versioning: CVS or Subversion). Let’s see few examples. Continue reading Smarty templates for beginners

We finally made it. So, what it is all about. If you have visited my "About" page, you probably noticed that it is not an ordinary page. It gives visitors an opportunity to ask blog owner a question and see all questions from other visitors. The idea and initial plugin came from my dear friend Sara who wrote it for her personal use. Once I started this blog, I talked her into giving me the script so I can have different About page. After some talking we decided to extend it a little bit and made it public for all people who are willing to have similar About page as we do, but are not able to write code themselves. This turned into hours of hard work and finally, you can see results of it.

So, here it is, first alpha release is now available for you to use it. However, I presume there are some bugs that we are still not aware of, but we do promise we'll keep this plugin evolve and become better.

Plugin should work on both Wordpress 1.5 and 2.0 versions, however there are some requirements for it to run on your blog. Exec-PHP plugin is required. You can download it here. Please make sure you activated it and configured it properly. Some other requirements are:

a. Disable the WYSIWYG rich editor within the user options (at the bottom of the page)
b. Disable "WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically"

Make sure your permalink structure is name based rather than using the post id.

Here are the installation instructions:

1. Download plugin from here
2. Extract archive (you should see 2 files (askme.php and ask-me-readme.txt) on your local drive
3. Upload askme.php into your Wordpress plugin directory
4. Go to your admin control panel and activate the plugin.

Plugin should create a page "Ask me" for you which should be ready for usage. Under the Options/Ask me, you will find few settings you can configure by yourself.

I strongly suggest that you read ask-me-readme.txt

Give it a try, and leave us some feedback. We have more ideas for extending this plugin, but for now, we are hoping to fix all possible bugs we still haven't discovered, but which might be present.

Happy New Year, people! This is our gift for all of you.

It is. The problem I had, mentioned in previous post, was odd and at first I didn’t have a clue where it was coming from. Basically, w3 validator was reporting an error that input field wasn’t within block level element which is required to validate correctly in XHTML 1.0 Strict and XHTML 1.1. I did put input tags between fieldset, but error was still remaining. Form elements on index page were within fieldset and when I checked page source, it looked fine to me, and I couldn’t figure out how come validator reads my page differently. Problem lied at server side and PHP settings. Next thing I checked was phpinfo and realized that I was running PHP 4.4.4 with register_globals, magic_quotes_gpc and session.use_trans_sid set to on!!! /Yes, believe it or not, hosts which leave those setting turned on by default still exist! I’m afraid reason for that are crappy coders which probably request those things./ Apparently, when session.use_trans_sid is set to ON, PHP rewrites the form to add hidden input field with sessionid and it places it just after form tag. There are few solutions to this problem:

1. Turn session.use_trans_sid to off in php.ini or with .htaccess

2. If you have access to php.ini and need session.use_trans_sid to be set to on, you can change url_rewriter.tags = “..., form=fakeentry” to url_rewriter.tags = “..., form=action”. Downside of this method is that you will always have session id as $_GET parameter, even when you defined form method as POST.

I was thinking to override those settings with .htaccess, but I was lazy enough and after all, DreamHost allows you to switch between PHP4 and PHP5 with just one click and I was hoping that PHP5 on their server comes with all those settings turned off. And I was right.