Morning Caffeine

I just stumbled upon this nice tool for all of the people who are not familiar with with html and css and are still interested in customizing their own WordPress theme and would like to change it a little bit and don’t want to use any of the existing. I must admit that I haven’t tested it completely, but it looks like it can be very handy. It even comes with widget support.

Check it out: WordPress Theme Generator.

I already wrote short tutorial for beginners which covers installation and some common usage of smarty tags.

Modifiers are basically php functions (custom or predefined) which work with variables, custom functions and strings. That means, you can actually call php functions as modifiers. Applying a modifier is very easy, all you need to specify the value followed by pipe and the modifier name. Some of the modifiers can be called with additional parameters. For example:

Even though Smarty covers lots of very useful modifiers, sometimes, you will have a need for new one.

Let’s write a simple modifier which will be applied to strings and will replace smilies shortcuts with actual images.

Create a file named: modifier.grins.php and place it within your Smarty dir in /libs/plugins/

If you open any existing modifier, you will see a phpdocumentor compatible comment which describes modifier. It is recommendable that you use the same when writing your own ones.

For replacing smilie shortcuts with actual images, I will use simple str_replace php function, so the result would be:

What you have probably noticed is function name, which has to follow the pattern of smarty(underscore)modifier(underscore)chosenName, where chosenName will be used to call your modifier.

To apply this modifier we can create example-smilies.php page with:

and example-smilies.tpl.htm page and place it in templates dir:

Html code result will be:

Very simple.
I have updated .zip file which contains example from previous tutorial with those described here, so feel free to download it.

I’ve read an interesting and funny article at drivl.com entitled "The Web Development Clients' 10 Commandments". Even though it’s funny, it’s very sad at the same moment, showing how clients can be hard people to deal with. The funniest commandment was: “Your website shall not: play music, have a (flash) intro, snow, or use the marquee tag.” It just made me laugh out hard, because it is soo true sometimes, even nowadays.

The rest of the commandments are equally funny, however, luckily those are not happening at our company anymore and are all behind us as a bad dream. We’ve learnt from our mistakes. With right project management, almost 100% of them can be avoided. Every business has its own problems and clients who can be very hard at some points. The same is with web development, with a small different that even today, people know so little about Internet, its possibilities and values.

Anyway, go read it and get yourself a good laugh.

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!!

I love plugins and wordpress is pretty much well supported with various plagins. You name it and you’ll find it. Right now, I’m in a hunt for new plugins to try out, and this is the list of which I have active at the moment:

1. Ask me plugin – of course, Do I have to say more?
2. Exec-PHP – I wouldn’t use this one if Ask me plugin doesn’t require it. Hopefully, we should be able to disable it, one ask me is rewritten to not use it.
3. Get Recent Comments – This one does what it says - I use it for my second column in the footer.
4. Recent Posts – Same as above – I use it for my first column in footer.
5. Feedburner Feed Replacement – this one I use for forwarding all feed traffic to feedburner. This way you get a better picture of how much subscribers to your feed you have.
6. iG:Syntax Hiliter – One of the best syntax highlighter plugins I have seen. (Yesterday I realized that an online friend of an online friend has a friend who is the author of this plugin. That just proves how world is a small place.). One thing I noticed with this plugin is that its setting are restored to default each time you activate another plugin.
7. Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form – This one I use for my Contact page. Very nice form with a spam protection. Like their authors say: A marriage of communication and peace-of-mind.
8. Custom Smileys – I love custom smilies. I guess you can tell from my posts.
9. Akismet – A spam protection for post comments. So far, it works great for me.
10. Tiger Style Administration - one more great plugin from orderedlist.com and Steve Smith. It gives you new design to your Wordpress administration.
11. Hello Dolly – I have no idea why I activated this plugin, but it’s kind of cool. It displays random lyrics from Louis Armstrong's song "Hello Dolly".

So far, this is it. If you have some cool plugins to recommend, please do, I will be happy to check them out.

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.

Again, Egor came to rescue me and we fixed all issues that are left and the result is that my blog looks all the same across following browsers: FireFox, IE6, IE7, Safari and Netscape. It was an extremely easy fix to bring back background image to the main wrap div. It seems that IE7 understands min-height property, while IE6 just ignores it but displays the background image anyway, so the result is:

As simple as that. Thanks again E!

I installed Internet Explorer 7 yesterday and discovered that reading my blog in it was impossible. At least first post wasn't visible as footer was overlapping it. I presumed it has something to do with not clearing divs in a good manner, but I'm just CSS beginner and still haven't became efficient at debugging so I asked my friend Egor to help me out. Just after few minutes of looking into the code he found out what the problem was.

Basically, I have a wrap div which holds centered content between header and footer and it had images as a background. Actually is just has small image which shows gradient effect after the header (it's almost invisible, I know!) and for some strange reason I set height for it to 36px like this: