Our publishing system has a fairly large PHP object model, with tons of corresponding library files. Early in the development of the library, we saw huge value in PHP 5’s autoloader. But when we integrated a 3rd party library into our application, we quickly found a limitation when our __autoload() function conflicted with the other […]
Author Archives: priebe
Fuzzy matching city names
Recently, my team was tasked with building a system that would allow users to look up weather forecasts for arbitrary cities in the United States. The system had to allow for misspellings to give the user a forgiving but predictable interface. If the misspelling clearly matched a single city, it would use that city; otherwise […]
Omit the closing php tag
I found this little tidbit in the Zend Framework Programmer’s Reference Guide (in the Coding Standard appendix): For files that contain only PHP code, the closing tag (“?>”) is never permitted. It is not required by PHP. Not including it prevents trailing whitespace from being accidentally injected into the output.
Building a custom CentOS 5 kickstart disc, part 4
Note: this series of articles applies to CentOS 5; for CentOS 6, see this series. Let’s make things really interesting with a postinstall script to do some custom configuration.
Building a custom CentOS 5 kickstart disc, part 3
Note: this series of articles applies to CentOS 5; for CentOS 6, see this series. Now that you’ve compiled your RPMs, you need to build a disk image from which to perform the kickstart.
Building a custom CentOS 5 kickstart disc, part 2
Note: this series of articles applies to CentOS 5; for CentOS 6, see this series. Once you’ve decided which packages you’re going to include in your kickstart disc, it’s time to pull them all together.
Building a custom CentOS 5 kickstart disc, part 1
Note: this series of articles applies to CentOS 5; for CentOS 6, see this series. CentOS (and of course, it’s upstream distro, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) has an extremely powerful, but somewhat poorly documented, tool for rapidly deploying machines and managing their configuration: kickstart. Kickstart lets you build a custom installation that can run hands-free. So […]
The Outsider’s Guide to Joomla 1.5, Part 3
Once I had figured out the basic organization of menus and articles in Joomla, I had one more obstacle to overcome. I was looking at the sample site that was bundled with my installation, and I wanted to know how to control the various elements on my pages other than the articles. For example, the […]
Intelligent Abbreviation of Text (pretty_substr)
Recently, we found that we needed to limit the length of “headline” text on one of our sites for display purposes. The text in question was the title text for classified ads. Our classifieds system was simply truncating the title text at an admin-configured number of characters. This helps us preserve our design, but it […]
The Outsider’s Guide to Joomla 1.5, Part 2
Onward and upward with this nifty little CMS. I hope I wasn’t too negative in my first installment. It’s not that Joomla does things wrong, it’s just that sometimes, things are not as obvious as they could be.