melbourne chapter

I am heading off to Italy in a couple of months and picked up a Canon 350D 8 mega-pixel Digital SLR from Michael’s cameras in Melbourne. Will have to say, I am absolutely loving it. I got a 18-55mm Lens and a 75-300mm Lens as well with a 1gb fast compact flash card with an extended 5 year warranty and 2 hour training lesson. Everything about the camera seems great, it is a decent weight, nice and compact and very responsive. The alternative was a Nikon which are nice, but it didn’t have the same feel when you picked it up, it was lighter and a bit larger. It also was only a 6 mega-pixel (probably more than enough), but I liked the fact we can share the memory cards between our small Ixus that we have taken travelling in the past.

Hopefully I will be able to post some photos of what I have been experimenting with if any turn out nice enough. I will buy myseslf a UV filter today, and most likely a second battery and second gb card. I am also interested in trying to pick up a polarizing filter as I love photos down at the beach. The modes that it comes with are great and I have been having a good time playing around with the depth of field shots.

I will muck around with the camera for the next few months and see what I can come up with. I will post some of my experimental shots up here and they should be large/crisp enough to make some nice backdrops for my desktop. I will also have to hunt for this photographer that I found one day that had posted more than 3 years of hi-res experimental work for dual-monitor high res backdrops. They are stunning.

When working with NetPublish Assitant from Portfolio, you can create your own site and modify the base templates, to change general layout etc.

From inside Portfolio,

1. Go to the Netpublish Assistant by going to Catalog -> NetPublish…
2. Right click on a base template that you wish to modify and hit “Duplicate Site”
3. Enter the name for your new set of templates

Once you have done this you will be able to modify NPT (NetPublish Template files) that generate your NP (NetPublish) files. The duplicated source is located by default in your “My Documents\Extensis\Portfolio\NetPublish\User Data\sites\web”, containing only the NPT files and resources to build your NP site.

The NetPublish assistant looks to the NPT files to generate the NP files. NPT uses start and end tags [[ and ]] and substitutes options obtains from the NetPublish assistance, such as site location etc.

NP files use Server Side JavaScript (SSJS) to generate your source. You can not view the site.np source as it has been compiled and is proprietory, so you must work with what you are given. Parts of the SSJS are indicated by the template start and end tags < % and %>.

Providing alternate CSS options

To provide alternate CSS options for your template, simply duplicate the CSS located in the “style sheets” folder in your template NPT source folder. These CSS options are included into the drop down when working inside the NEtPublish Assistant.

Creating additional page template options

NetPublish assistant provides a series of pages with customisations. By default there are options for:

• Collection
• DetailsWeb
• Results
• Search

Inside each of these folders is the various different options that are presented to the user when using the NetPublish assistant. You simply need to duplicate a subfolder and rename it to something appropriate. You can then make your necessary changes to the NPT files inside these subfolders.

Each page template option defines a Page.xml which allows you to change the information that is read in when the NetPublish assistant looks at the template. You can change the naming of your template inside this file to something more appropriate, and also modify the thumbnail previous and various default options associated with the NetPublish assistance screens.

Default Template Configuration

All the default template options are created in the top level for your NPT source in a file called Site.xml. This file allows you to change the name and description and also modify the default selected options when using the NetPublish assistant.

I have really found so many limitations and cumbersome procedures in smarty that I am very motivated to make a move from it, namely one of the biggest drawbacks was the clear lack of XHTML compliancy, meaning that once you start using smarty template files you can forget standards, such as validating with the w3c tidy plugin or using code formatting.

This is where PHPTAL takes a real shine, and with the hint of having PHP5 support on my hosting company I can take the jump into much cleaner more powerful technologies.

PHPTAL is a PHP implementation of ZPT work. To be short, PHPTAL is a XML/XHTML template library for PHP.

While most web developpers continue to use ASP/JSP/PHP tags as the core language of their templates, the Zope community came with a refreshing idea named TAL. The idea was to move presentation actions inside XHTML attributes instead of using plain tags or elements.

Also another fueled comment I found when researching and comparing the templating engine, I found this post

There really is no comparison, PHPTAL is miles ahead, and you only need to just start working with objects to realise how many short-falls Smarty has, and how many nasty hacks you need to do just to get Smarty working with objects. Sure Smarty has support for objects, but it really is very limited.

PHPTAL also has support for wysiwyg editors… in the way PHPTAL doesn’t break the xhtml standards… try editing a Smarty template in a wysiwys editor, it’s near impossible! …you just need to know the tal attributes to put in yourself (not hard, there’s not many of them)

You can also preview PHPTAL templates in a browser before you execute the php to display it, if you try and preview a Smarty template the same way you get mostly garbage. With PHPTAL templates you can design a single template which is usable on both static pages and dynamic pages… With Dreamweaver and its DWT templates, it’s very easy to create an entire static site with a few dynamic sections using PHPTAL which use the same DWT templates.

PHPTAL also keeps more of the logic back in the PHP code where it belongs, Smarty is like another complete language in its own right. Read up about MVC, Smarty can promote breaking out of the MVC ideal.

Fixing errors in your Smarty templates isn’t as easy fixing errors in PHPTAL templates… for a start, PHPTAL 99.9% of the time gives you line numbers where you’ve gone wrong, and useful exceptions to help out too.

I personally consider Smarty as something that was designed for PHP3, updated for PHP4, and hacked to work with PHP5.

Stick with PHPTAL, you won’t regret it.

Finally my favourite hosting company called me today and informed me about their plans to create a PHP5 cluster server with Apache 2. I have been hastling them for some time regarding upgrading their technology and I am very eager to start taking advantage of the SOAP/XML services that are native to the new version. Viva PHP5!

It has been quite hard for hosting services to upgrade to PHP5 due to all the poor backwards compatibility, as PHP4 is not nearly as object oriented as PHP5. I am looking forward to taking on new templating systems like TAL and native SOAP/XML development and have to check out some of the database persistence available.

I have been invited to help in the testing stage which will be happening some time in the next couple of days. For me this is a great stage to build from here into full PHP5/Flex/AMF development to create powerful RIA components.

For people looking for a great PHP hosting service (that even mirrors PHP.net for Australia) look no further than Ilisys. Have a read of my summary on my article here:

- PHP Web Apps and Scalability: Load Balanced Australian hosting providers

On the weekend we brought home our beautiful black labrador pup “Toby”. His 4 weeks old, and very playful. Thankfully the toilet training is going well and he hasn’t torn anything apart *fingers crossed*. How innocent does he look in this photo !?

Had a quick look at the Microsoft Expression “Sparkle Interactive Designer” Overview, quite an interesting look into interactivity and designer tools coming from Microsoft.

Have a look here.

It’s a bit of a nightmare really. When a word is longer than its containing block-level element it tends to break out. Fortunately in IE 5.5 and above there’s the word-wrap:break-word porperty which can be used to break words longer than their respective containers.
Here’s an example using IE conditional comments:

 
<!--[if IE gt 5.0]
<style type="text/css">
.content{word-wrap:break-word;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
 

However there is no such property that will work in Firefox. So what to do? After a bit of head scratching I decided to have a look at using JavaScript. Although I am yet to come up with my own solution here it is in Spanish thanks to Mr El Micox

The Mozilla Foundation has released the first beta version of Firefox 2!

According to the Firefox Roadmap developers are striving to make sure 2 is compatible with 1.5 from a “web developer’s perspective”. Existing API’s will be kept, and new ones will be added.

Firefox 2 is said to have more of a user-focus, with improved search capabilities, integrated spell checker and an antiphishing tool. Other features may appear following the public reaction to the beta, reports ZDnet who recently spoke to Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe. For now, Mozilla hopes that software developers will download the beta and test whether it is compatible with their existing Firefox extensions and provide them with enough feedback to direct the release.
The beta is currently available for download through Mozilla’s FTP server.

Came across an interesting section within Wikipedia today called “The Free Software Portal”. Great little read, covering various Open Source projects and technologies. Check it out  Free Software Portal

Welcome to Part 1 of our 3 part series, “Setting up a PHP Development Environment”. Please note we will be using a Windows XP environment for our installation. If you have come here in search of an article on how to install PHP please refer to Part2: Installing PHP4.
Requirements :

• Windows NT i.e. XP (NT 4.0 has some issues with SP 4 please update to SP 6)
• TCP/IP networking must be installed and working
• Intel/AMD Processor (for Win Installer)

Installation & Setup
1. Download the Win32 Binary (MSI Installer) for the Apache HTTP Server package from apache.org .
Note: I am using the 2.0.58 release however 2.2.2 is now available.

2. Run a virus check and MD5 checksum to verify the integrity of the download, then run the installer.
2. Within the Installation Wizard enter the following Server Information, making sure you check the checkboox “For All Users, on Port 80, as a Service” at the bottom.

Network Domain: localhost
Server Name: localhost
Admin Email: (your email)

Note: If you get a Windows Firewall prompt, make sure you select UNBLOCK

3. Install to your local drive. Mine is C:/Apache2 and we will assume this directory in the following installment Part 2: Installing PHP.
4. After installation has completed the Apache Monitor will appear in your Windows task bar. Right-click this and select Start from the menu. The server should start loading.

5. After the server has started, open your web browser and visit http://localhost. An Apache test page should come up - You have now successfully installed the Apache Server on your machine.

Note: If there is an error, check the Apache Monitor to make sure the server is running, if not check your Firewall to make sure the service isn’t blocked.

6. (Optional) Apache defaults your document root to [drive]:/[Apache]/htdocs , if you would like to specify a different root directory open up the httpd.conf file ([drive]:/[Apache]/conf/httpd.conf) and replace the DocumentRoot with the path to your desired directory.

Follow on Part 2: Installing PHP4

For more information on installing Apache please see apache.org’s documentation Using Apache with Microsoft Windows