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Symfony Faux Form Serialization
Recently, I ran into an issue when building a Symfony plugin for Slideshow renderings. When I added the support for multiple libraries, in this case Google Slideshow2 and JQuery Cycle, they had drastically different configuration options. JQuery Cycle allows you to use a list of effects, such as blindX and blindY. These effects are great, and I want the end user to be able to easily select between them. Google Slideshow2 allows the adding of thumbnails and traversing controls. Neither of these settings apply to the other, and this is only two slideshow renderers. What happens when I add another one? Five more? I could create multiple tables for each renderer, such as google_slideshow2_options and jquery_cycle_options. I could also just provide a textarea for key-value pairs (effect=blindX timeout=500) that the user typed in. I did not like either of these options, as the former struck me as over-architecting, and the latter as unusable.
Centresource Releases New Plugins to the Symfony Community
Over the last week, the developers here at CentreSource have published nine plugins for the symfony community. The plugins have been used in several of our internal projects and client web applications, but have been developed on a private repository. We finally decided the plugins were properly documented and tested. These plugins can be found here.
1) csDoctrineActAsAttachablePlugin - associates various uploads with multiple models, and includes an AJAX uploading client interface.
2) csDoctrineActAsCategorizablePlugin - associates models into nestable categories and category groups.
3) csDoctrineActAsGeolocatablePlugin - integrate your model with the Google Maps API to pull in geocodes based on record fields. Supports radius and proximity searches.
Apple xServe: dscl, dsimport and web services aka fun!
So, recently here at CentreSource we’ve been working on a project which is using the brand spanking new xServe from Apple. First, let me say the server is pretty slick, but like any other software it has issues. The reason we went with the xServe was because we needed the ability to have web applications which have central authentication and calendaring data. Open Directory, CalDAV, PHP, Apache, and MySQL are just ready to go with xServe, so it made sense!Our usage is that we have these web applications on the net which will use the PHP LDAP Functions to authenticate our users on Open Directory from our PHP web applications, we also communicate to Open Directory whenever adding or changing users passwords to keep things up-to-date. To accomplish this I have written a small web service which lives on the xServe and runs under Apache and PHP. This code talks to Open Directory via the dscl and dsimport command line utilities provided by Apple. I use dsimport for adding the initial working records, and I then use dscl to change passwords. So essentially this web service is just a web service wrapped around those two commands.
DrupalCon 2008: Popular Science Magazine Case Study
The folks at pingVision have posted their case study for the Popular Science Magazine website on drupal.org.
I attended this session and left it feeling very inspired. It was amazing to see what this small crew did with such a behemoth of a site. Just the thought of having to migrate a 1.66GB Oracle DB into a Drupal site makes me sweat. All things considered, I felt like this was probably the best session I attended at DrupalCon 2008. It wasn’t the nerdiest, or the geekiest, and it didn’t have lots of slides of code…but for our line of work, it was incredibly valuable. Not only did they go into the “nuts-n-bolts” of how they built the site, they also touched on the project management side, and also managing client expectations with such a large project.
More DrupalCon Slides!
Addison Berry from Lullabot has posted the slides from his DrupalCon 2008 presentation: Contributing to Drupal: A guide for everyone.
Woot!
John VanDyk - DrupalCon 2008 Triggers and Actions and Hooks, Oh My!
John VanDyk, author of Pro Drupal Development, and longtime Drupal developer/guru, has posted the slides and video of the presentation he gave at DrupalCon on triggers and actions. It was great presentation from one of Drupal’s founding fathers. Though centered around Drupal 6, many of the basic principals can be applied to Drupal 5’s Actions module. There is also word of backporting Triggers to Drupal 5!
If you missed the Boston DrupalCon 2008, don’t miss out on this wonderful session.
Files can be downloaded here…
Ellie’s Run for Africa
At CentreSource, we do everything we can to stay connected to the community around us. Recently, a great opportunity arose for us to donate our time to work with Ellie’s Run for Africa (ERFA), a 5k Race and Family Fun day that is taking place in Nashville at the end of June, that has an amazing story behind it.
Dangers of a Bad Website
In the early years, some could argue that having a website, albeit bad, was still superior to not having one at all. Websites were not the ‘norm’ and having one proved that your firm was unique and cutting edge. Fast forward 10 years and this is no longer the case – every business and organization is expected to have a website. But times are changing again! It is no longer acceptable to simply have a website. Now organizations are at risk to the dangers of a bad website.
Setting Client Expectations through Mock-Up Design
One of CentreSource’s strongest areas is custom application development. We’ve worked with a number of fantastic clients who have asked us to create a variety of applications including ones to handle franchise management, online book trading, and qualitative research. With each of these, as well as a number of other development projects that we’ve worked on, we have had to figure out the appropriate times and methods to present a mock-up design of our work-in-progress to our clients.
Extreme Website Makeover
Those of you who read our newsletter know that for this Holiday season, CentreSource had a contest to find the website in the greatest need for a makeover. Companies were able to nominate their websites, which were then filtered by the CentreSource staff down to the 10 Top Worst Websites. Finally, the finalists were asked to launch their own grassroots campaigns and get their family, friends, and coworkers to vote for their site to win the grand prize.
In the end, forAWE.com beat out the Houston County Area Chamber of Commerce by a margin of 519 to 490 votes.
