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Entertaining Youtube Videos by Appcelerator from ZendCon 08

Mike Milano — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:27:44 -0700

Yes, I read the Zend Newsletter because usually I find something new in it. This issue was no disappointment as they featured some videos put together by Appcelerator, a sponsor at ZendCon 08. They interviewed attendees in a series of 4 topics: Developers LOVE PHP, PHP Developer Gripes, Developers HATE PHP, and The Best PHP Applications.

Drupal Search : Index All Fields of a CCK Node

Mike Milano — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:04:38 -0700

The Drupal Search API is powerful and pretty intuitive, but finding details on how to do something as simple as enabling searching on fields other than title and body could be a little daunting.

It's actually quite a simple concept. Anything exposed to your node view will be indexed. You can easily accomplish this by editing your content type and setting the Display Fields setting to Plain Text.

Drupal ParaChat Module

Mike Milano — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:04:00 -0700

:: 2008-09-25 update: i've fixed a lot of things since the .0 releases, so make sure you're using the nightly snapshots for the latest code ::

The ParaChat Drupal module embeds a ParaChat applet in your site and automatically logs in users with their Drupal username. There is access control so you can setup which roles you would like to be able to join the chat room. For added security, you can configure ParaChat to validate users from the ParaChat server before allowing them to join.

PHP APC Performance Tests with Apache ab

Mike Milano — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 23:00:31 -0700

Today I ran some quick tests with PHP APC using Apache's ab benchmarking tool. The goal was to see how much of a performance gain I could see between PHP APC disabled, then enabled.

Pro Drupal Development for Drupal 6 is Released

Mike Milano — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:09:24 -0700

Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition has been released for Drupal 6!

While I haven't gone through the second edition yet, the book written for Drupal have has been an incredible resource. It is very well organized, easy to follow along with, and has plenty of code samples to help you on your way.

How to: Namespace in PHP

Mike Milano — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:37:03 -0700

Namespacing has been long awaited to enhance PHP OO development, and it looks like it's finally here. At first, I thought it was going to become available in PHP6, but it has been ported to PHP 5.3.

What is a Namespace?

Namespacing provides you the freedom to name your classes what you want without worrying about any other classes, native to PHP or otherwise, interfering with your names.

PHP foreach value by reference

Mike Milano — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:49:01 -0700

PHP5 added a very subtle yet very handy feature in the foreach Control Structure. It is the ability to access the value in the iteration as a reference to the original array.

The best way to demonstrate this is to establish an objective.

Objective: Write a function to capitalize all elements of an array.

JQuery Sortables with PHP and MySQL

Mike Milano — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:00:02 -0700

This article will show you how to order a server-side list of fruit from a database using drag and drop behavior and then save them back to the database in order.

I recently worked on a project which required an unordered list to be re-ordered and then saved. I wasn't about to make users enter numbers next to each item so I looked toward JQuery's UI library.

Objective: We will display a list of fruit. The user can then drag the fruit and click a button to save the new order in the database.

An alternative to Pathauto

Mike Milano — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:24:42 -0700

Pathauto is an awesome module, but there may be a time when, for one reason or another, don't want or don't need to use it.

custom_url_rewrite is a function (not a hook) available in Drupal which gives you an alternative to configuring custom paths and storing them in the database.

Since this is not a hook, it is suggested you put this in settings.php. You can convert the alias into the source, and vice versa.

Theming the Drupal flashvideo module with swfobject.

Mike Milano — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 23:37:38 -0700

The FlashVideo module is great, but you may want to embed the video with swfobject, so here's one way to do it.

Of course for this to work you're going to need to include swfobject.js in your template. How you do that depends on your theme and is a little beyond the scope of this article.