Pragmatism in today's world
I'm sure everyone else already knows this, but I've recently discovered that Zend_Validate_PostCode doesn't work with UK postcodes unless you first remove the space between the first and second parts. This is due to a bug in the underlying regular expresssions that are provided by CLDR. It's easy enough to add a filter to remove the space, but I'm a little worried that when (and if) it gets fixed, will the fixed version Zend_Validate_PostCode then… continue reading.
I discovered recently that Zend Framework 1's Zend_Date has two operating modes when it comes to format specifiers: iso and php, where iso is the default. When using Zend_Validate_Date in forms, I like to use the php format specifiers as they are what I'm used to and so can easily know what they mean when reviewing code that I wrote months ago. My code looks something like this: $subForm->addElement('text', 'start_date', array( 'filters' => array('StringTrim', 'StripTags'),… continue reading.
I'm delighted to be able to announce that I'm speaking at the PHPBenelux Conference on 28 & 29 January 2011 in Antwerp, Belgium. This is a community run conference organised by the PHPBenelux user group and given the list of speakers, I'm expecting to learn a lot. The full list of talks is on their website and shows that this is going to be a great conference. I'll be giving a talk that will introduce… continue reading.
A good proportion of the projects my company undertakes end up on Windows servers with IIS and SQL Server and hence we use the SqlSrv PHP extension from Microsoft. We don't host any of these projects ourselves and leave it up to the client's IT department. This is the main reason that we use a database abstraction layer, Zend_Db, in our case as we can swap the underlying database out with less hassle. A couple… continue reading.
The PHPNW Conference is an annual conference held in Manchester, now in its 3rd year and again I was invited to speak. The organisation of PHPNW was top-notch as usual with everything running smoothly from my point of view. I'm sure there were a few hectic moments for the organisers though :) The day started with Lorna's keynote on how to improve your skill set as a team. This was a great talk which sparked… continue reading.
I recently received an email asking for my advice about how to handle a form that appears on every page. I want to add a newsletter sign up box to layout.phtml so it will appear on every page. The layout->content() comes from several different action controllers… So how do I handle the newsletter sign up? I thought that the answer is long-winded enough to be worth writing a blog post about. One way to do… continue reading.
Following some discussions with friends who've recently started using OS X, I thought I'd note down some tips and tricks that I've learnt since I moved to Mac. This is in no particular order as it's taken from IRC logs of conversations I've had :) Basics There's one menu bar for all application Closing the last window doesn't exit the application. Use cmd+q or the Quit menu item on the "application name" menu. System Preferences… continue reading.
Vikram Vaswani has written an article on Manipulating Configuration Data with Zend_Config. Zend_Config seemed to meet my needs, so I played with it a little and then deployed it in a couple of projects. It did everything I needed it to, and was easy to integrate with both framework and non-framework PHP projects. It also has a couple of neat features, such as the ability to merge multiple configurations together. Keep reading and I'll give… continue reading.
I've started playing with the development versions of ZF 2.0 and one of the first things I thought I'd do was to port Akrabat_Db_Schema_Manager. It turned out to be reasonably easy. All I needed to do was rework my use of ZF components to use the new ZF2 ones. Whilst I was at it, I also converted it to use namespaces. I also had to reorganise the http://github.com/akrabat/Akrabat library so that I could have ZF1… continue reading.
Note: this article does not refer to the released version of Zend Framework 2!. If you want to play with the development versions of Zend Framework 2.0, then it's handy to be able to create ZF2 projects using the ZendTool command line tool. Rather unhelpfully, ZF2's ZendTool uses the same ini file (~/.zf.ini) as ZF1's Zend_Tool and the same zf.sh script filename, so you can't just put zf2 on to your path and it'll all… continue reading.
