Category Archives: Web Development

Quick Chat WordPress plugin and widget

Like most web sites now days, TechyTalk.info web site is based on WordPress foundations. WordPress is as its authors describe it "a semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability." It is also open source and based on open source technologies like PHP and MySQL. WordPress has given a lot to the Linux community and to me personally so I've decided to give something back by making WordPress plugin for all of us to use.

We all like to chat so I've decided to extend WordPress trough quick and lightweight Ajax chat plugin. One of the advantages of open source community is that you don't need to start from scratch so I've decided to base my plugin on the work of djaney3's chat plugin. I've also decided to name this newborn "Quck Chat".

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PHP Savant templating engine pagination class and plugins

I don't use Smarty templating engine for my PHP web projects. Why? I hate it. Why? I' familiar with PHP and I don't need to learn another markup language that takes away the power from PHP and imposes restrictions all the way. I'm not saying that without spending (non)quality time using Smarty (and loosing valuable time to learn it's unintuitive syntax).

For my web projects I mostly use PHP Savant customized to fulfill needs of the project at hand. What is PHP Savant? It's authors say that PHP Savant is a powerful but lightweight object-oriented template system for PHP. Savant does not compile your templates into PHP like Smarty, instead, it uses PHP itself as its template language. With PHP Savant you can write your page templates in pure PHP and you don't need to learn a new markup system. PHP Savant is great for developers because it is "complex" enough to be extremely useful, but at the same time simple enough to be easily modified without any special knowledge.

SavantPaginate

When it comes to PHP pagination, things can get quite messy. Pagination without templating engine is a nightmare and that's something to avoid at all costs. Even when you're using templating engine like PHP Savant things can get quite complicated without encapsulation of pagination logic in some kind of PHP class. Recently I made PHP Savant pagination class together with PHP Savant plugins for pagination, all for one of my recent projects for college. Today I'm my bringing PHP Savant pagination class and PHP Savant pagination plugins to you, all in a hope that you'll find it useful in your own web projects.

Instructions and download

You'll find instructions and download links by clicking on "SavantPaginate" at the top of TechyTalk.info or by clicking on the following link:

http://www.techytalk.info/other-projects/savantpaginate/

Ubuntu Netbeans and LAMP server with Xdebug as non-root user

In this article I'll show you how to setup Linux Apache Mysql PHP (LAMP) web development environment on Ubuntu Linux with your web site files in your home directory. This way you can easily develop for web as non-root user. If you are trying to install Linux Apache Mysql PHP on Windows, I'll point you to one of my previous articles where I have explained just that:

Apache, MySQL, PHP server on Windows

My goals for this session are to install Apache, MySQL and PHP with Xdebug module for PHP development debugging. We will setup Xdebug and use it with Netbeans, but once Xdebug is properly installed, you can debug your applications with any other application like Eclipse. The most important thing for a web developer or web programmer is to be able to easily modify his web development files without becoming root for everything he is working on. I will show you how to instruct Apache to make virtual host in your home directory. At the end of it all I will install Netbeans and create sample project to work with our new development environment. So lets get started...

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Apache, MySQL, PHP server on Windows

Apache LogoBeing a web master has its good sides, that's for sure. Messing with slow and unreliable FTP servers all the time isn't one of them. On the other side if you violate your hosters "holy" TOS (Terms of service) you will witness ultra fast shut down of your web page and in some cases wipe of your entire SQL database. What would you say about having testing server of your own? Wouldn't it be nice to test your PHP page locally on your Windows PC during construction and "FTP" it to the server of your choice once it's finished? Sure it would! You don't need Ph.D. in computer science to tune Apache, MySQL and PHP just the way you like it, or maybe even smarter to configure your local testing server the way your web page hosters server is configured. If you're interested, follow me...

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