Pressing F5 » Development

NetBeans, Apache, PHP, XDebug and Symfony on Mac OSX… easy!

Ben Haines — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 20:28:28 +0000

Six months ago I tried to get Apache, PHP, MySQL and Symfony on my Mac OSX build, so that I could avoid using a CentOS based dev environment I was running in VMWare Fusion. After weeks of struggling with compiling apache, php and mysql I gave up and stuck with CentOS Linux.

Today I stumbled across the following two tutorials as a result of switching to the NetBeans IDE for my php development work. In short, using the free version of MAMP and by following the steps described in the second tutorial you can be up and running with Symfony dev environment on your Mac. ;)

How to install MAMP, XDebug and configure both with NetBeans IDE – http://www.netbeans.org/
How to install Symfony on Mac OSX with the help of MAMP – http://www.tech-recipes.com/

Happy coding!

Symfony Checklist – what to check before your application goes live

Ben Haines — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:45:41 +0000

Fabien tweeted about this moments ago. The generous folks at UI Studio have put together a helpful checklist that every symfony developer should work through before launching an application.

Checks include:

Custom 404 and other error/maintenance pages
Security related
PHP configuration
User experience

Check it out at http://symfony-check.org

Running fabForce DBDesigner4 in Linux Fedora 8 (and probably Fedora 9)

Ben Haines — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 12:16:51 +0000

I’m posting this hoping that is will save somebody several wasted hours of effort.

Do not use the original DBDesigner4 download available on the fabForce.net website. Instead download the dbdesigner-fork package from here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbdesigner-fork/

Once you have unpacked it. Edit the bin/startdbd_using_kernel2.6 script and remove the assume kernel 2.4.1 text:

Original file contents: LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./Linuxlib/ ./DBDesignerFork

Edited contents: LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./Linuxlib/ ./DBDesignerFork

Save it and run it. It should all work as expected on Linux Fedora 8 or indeed any other modern distribution like Ubuntu, etc.

How to use NuSoap with PHP 5

Ben Haines — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 09:24:40 +0000

Seems by just renaming the soapclient class and constructor you can ‘patch’ NuSoap to work with PHP5.

I’ve renamed the constructor and the class to soap_client and it all works.

Thanks to Vivek Jishtu for the original tip.

http://vivekjishtu.blogspot.com

Technorati Tags: php5, nusoap, SOAP, php, web development

Drupal 5.0 released

Ben Haines — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 13:25:54 +0000

The good guys at drupal.org have released version 5.0 of this amazing php/mysql CMS.

Drupal.org

Technorati Tags: drupal, drupal 5.0, CMS, php, mysql

Andrew Rowson – the funny developer

Ben Haines — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 16:42:39 +0000

According to him some of the code in PSPlant works like this:

“instead of telling me something, go over there, build a phone, write to me with instructions on how to build another phone, and then I’ll call you”

Offline / download (downloadable) / PDF Drupal API reference

Ben Haines — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 12:11:26 +0000

I’ve been looking for an offline or pdf version of the Drupal API found here: http://api.drupal.org/

In the end I gave up and followed the advice of a fellow Drupal developer and created an offline copy of the Drupal docs using Httrack: http://www.httrack.com/.

Please remember to only use this occasionally as you are effectively hammering Drupal’s servers.

Technorati Tags: Drupal API, Drupal, Httrack

Switching from Symfony to Drupal

Ben Haines — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 12:07:47 +0000

I’ve taken the decision to switch from Symfony to Drupal for my latest personal project.

Although Symfony seemed really promising at first I found myself constantly fighting against quirks here and there that slowed down development. I’m not saying its not a good PHP MVC framework to build your next web project with. It just wasn’t suitable for something I needed up and running quickely.

So on to Drupal… I’ll blog as I go along. One thing I can say it the amazing documentation thats maintained by the Drupal user community. Its very complete and detailed making my life an awful lot easier :)

Technorati Tags: Symfony, Drupal

Starting a wordpress blog? Make sure you get the top plugins!

Ben Haines — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 14:17:47 +0000

Thanks to Digg.com I stumbled across this blog entry on the theblogjoint.com. It list some of the best wordpress plugins around.

Personally I’ve replaced my adsense plugin as a consequence and haven’t looked back. Adsense Deluxe offers amazing flexibility whilst being very easy to integrate.

A few others I want to try are:

wp-notable – social bookmarking automated :)
Exec-PHP – for executing php code within a post… potentially very helpful

Technorati Tags: wordpress, plugins, adsense, adsense deluxe

Excellent collection of AdSense alternatives – a must for bloggers and webmaster

Ben Haines — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 18:06:31 +0000

Through Digg.com I found this great blog entry on AdSense alternatives.

If Google AdSense is making you enough money or fancy something different check out some of these alternate advertising providers.

I’ll be trying a few over the next few months and will report back on how successful they’ve been.

http://www.econsultant.com/

Technorati Tags: adsense, google, adsense alternatives, adbite, earn money, advertising