May 04th, 2008
I was thrilled to see that there was an update yesterday to the CodeIgniter Textmate bundle for CI 1.6. If you use Textmate or E-Texteditor (Windows) then download it and give it a shot. Nice work… thanks, I’m using it right now!
A few other little utilities I’ve been getting a lot of use out of recently. The first is the excellent clipboard utility Jumpcut. It keep track of the last 10 (that’s configurable) things that you’ve copied and makes them available to you.
There are also handy keyboard shortcuts to get at it. Normally not super-useful, but I’ve been doing a lot of work that has needed me to copy and paste language keys, and this let’s me buffer up a whole page worth of
$this->lang->line('something');
and paste it all at once. Sure faster then copy > flip page > paste > flip back > copy > flip page > paste > repeat again and again. Its also open sourced under the MIT License.
Another great little tool I’ve discovered recently is for my mouse. I’m one of those guys that needs and uses the 4th and 5th buttons on my mouse. The left I use for copying, and the right for paste (see a pattern here), but in Leopard, those buttons default to… jeez I don’t remember… Expose I think. Reconfiguring them was a bit of a pain. Fortunately, I found the excellent USB Overdrive, which you can use to re-program your mouse buttons. Aside from having what might be the ugliest website I’ve seen this year, the little shareware application has been fantastic, and is well worth plunking down my $20 for it (although to be clear, the downloaded version is 100% functional and remains so).
On the topic, other little known utilities that I love include caffeine (temporarily prevent your computer from sleeping) and AppDelete (gets rid of stray files when deleting a program). That’s hardly an exhaustive list… just 2 little quickies for anyone reading this ;)
Continue reading “CodeIgniter textmate bundle and other stuff that’s saving me time”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Mac with 5 comments 
April 04th, 2008
I haven’t written here in a while, and I’m feeling pretty guilty about it. I’ve been focusing all my time on programming, and just haven’t been exploring “interesting” things as much as I usually do, so therefore not much to write about. Anyhow, that’s going to change. In the next little while I’ll be producing a few more video casts focused on CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine. I’m going to start from the perspective of how I set things up, and then expand from there, hopefully spanning a few videos to finish everything off as I need to.
I’m also about a week away from getting to re-visit some of the core functionality of CodeIgniter. We want to reconsider paging, validation, and a few little things here and there. But that doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting still! Since the release of CodeIgniter 1.6.1, there have been 56 updates to the svn. 18 of them were documentation fixes - I often hear criticism along the lines of “I checked the CodeIgniter svn, but its mostly documentation fixes”; and while I know where this is coming from (as developers we want shiny new features), the documentation is among the biggest “features” of the framework. But there were also many important security fixes, enhancements and other nice-ities in there. Check it out (what a clever play on words).
Also, as of right now this second, nobody has been hired into the 2 positions available at EllisLab, and if you’ve been sitting on the fence, get your name in there.
Continue reading “Video-casts coming”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Noteworthy with 2 comments
March 19th, 2008
Exciting news, EllisLab is hiring 2 new technical positions. You can read more on the EllisLab jobs page, so I won’t rehash things here, but they are 2 great opportunities to get in with a cool company, working on exciting stuff, with a bunch of smart, interesting people.
If you’ve been thinking about it, and are interested in working with ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter, and the amazing communities around each, we’d love to hear from you.
Continue reading “Want to work on at EllisLab?”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine with no comments
March 14th, 2008
There’s been much discussion about ExpressionEngine 2.0, and a big part of the excitement is the new CodeIgniter base. I’ve written a bog entry at EllisLab entitled ExpressionEngine 2.0: fully CodeIgnited! that deals with some of the implication of this great news.
I’m closing comments on this thread, but if you’d like to comment, please comment on the blog post itself.
Its a great time to be a nerd!
Continue reading “ExpressionEngine 2.0: fully CodeIgnited!”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine with no comments
March 08th, 2008
Preamble: Since I had my laptop in front of me all day, I decided on a stream-of-consciousness post. If you’re looking for juicy CodeIgniter or EE news and not interested in my comings and goings then I’d advise you to skip today and read tomorrow. ;)
5:31am
Getting to Austin was much nicer this year. Specifically, customs was much nicer. In fact, it was downright uneventful. I got to the gate uneventfully, and opened up lappy and started hacking away on EE for the demo. A little voice in the back of my head was telling me that its dumb to do that at 5:30am without a full cup of coffee in me… but there’s always work to be done. Duty calls!
7:33am
The little girl beside me has an unhealthy fascination with the glowing apple on my black laptop, demanding that the people around us look at, (at about 260 decibels). All she manages to say to me is “the soap is sticky”. Strange kid.
Keep reading for the full story!
Continue reading “South by Southwest 2008 : Day One”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Noteworthy with 5 comments
February 20th, 2008
There’s some discussion in a thread on CodeIgniter about microframeworks, and there’s always some discussion about the newest, latest and greatest PHP framework. I know the market is a bit crowded, but here’s a little something I’ve been working on outside of my time at EllisLab. I’m a bit hesitant to release it to the world, since it competes directly with both CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine, but its so good that I can’t help myself. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as me. Here’s some highlights
- It works on all versions of PHP (yes, even those not released yet)
- Its FAST. Really fast. The fastest against anything I’ve ever benchmarked it against and is WAY faster then CodeIgniter.
- Tiny footprint. The whole framework is only a few KB big.
- Compatible with every database that PHP supports.
- Pretty good documentation (not fully developed yet).
- Very small learning curve. If you know PHP, you’ll pick it up right away.
- Catchy name… I mean seriously, who doesn’t think that “Igniter-zen-i-rails” doesn’t kick ass? Crazy people, that’s who.
- We’re corporate… but not too corporate.
- Albatross!
Seriously, you should try it.
I’ve included my files so far. Its pretty mature so don’t expect any more development on it. You can get the files by reading the full post.
Continue reading “Igniter-zen-i-rails, my new PHP framework”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Noteworthy, PHP with 39 comments
February 13th, 2008
Version 1.6.1 is primarily a maintenance release, but does bring a handful of nice feature additions and enhancements, such as Active Record caching, a new Path Helper, and a series of enhancements for working with multiple character sets. After a very successful 1.6.0 release, a series of bugs have been squashed and enhancements have been made that we wanted to roll out as a formal release. Updating from 1.6.0 is as easy as simply replacing a few files in your system directory (full update instructions).
Work continues at a fever pitch, and we’re looking to make the next release into something very special. For full details, here’s the official announcement.
Happy CodeIgniting!
Continue reading “CodeIgniter 1.6.1 Released”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 5 comments
February 12th, 2008
Elliot Haughin is a popular CodeIgniter user who keeps a blog of all things web. In a wonderfully written forum post, he takes the time to explain how caching works in CodeIgniter. It is haiku. Well done Elliot, thanks for taking the time to write this up. Much appreciated.
Continue reading “CodeIgniter caching explained”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with no comments
January 30th, 2008
A month and a half of really, really solid work has started to pay dividents! I’m very proud to announce the release of CodeIgniter 1.6, the kick ass open source web application framework for PHP developers working in the real world. The release marks a new turn in the development of the framework, and has received considerable attention from both EllisLab developers, and the community.
Among a host of new capabilities, this release features:
- A Database Forge class: database agnostic table and field manipulation
- An enhanced Active Record library
- A revised Session Class with “flash variables” and additional security
- An extendable Model Class with auto-loadable Models
- Extendable Helpers, and additions and enhancements to existing Helpers
- A revised view architecture that allows for simple inclusion of multiple views
- And over 120 different enhancements, improvements and bug fixes. Yup one two oh other changes.
What’s even more exciting? Development on CodeIgniter is moving forward in earnest. There are great things on the horizon, and as soon as some of the 1.6 dust settles, we’ll be ready to kick up more dust in the form of another version, with a raft of new features. I expect the release cycle to get much tighter now.
Some of the changes are so simple and elegant, I’m kicking myself that I didn’t think of it earlier. The new view functionality for example is so simple yet functional. Rick did a great job with that. Extending the helpers? I love this change. That particular innovation was courtesy of Derek Jones. Again, very simple, very elegant change. Brilliant.
I hope this release is as exciting for you as it is for us - and hey, just because its out doesn’t mean you get to sit back now! Keep hitting the SVN for more changes, features and enhancements.
Continue reading “CodeIgniter 1.6 hits the streets”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 8 comments
January 28th, 2008
As of CodeIgniter 1.6.0 (not out as of this writing unless you use the svn repository), you’ll be able to “extend” CodeIgniter helpers. This is a huge convenience if you just need a small change, or a single additional function, but don’t want to make an entire duplicate copy of the helper.
For example, I often find myself needing a “mysqldatetime_to_timestamp()” function in there. Previously, it would mean making an entire duplicate helper in application/helpers, but now, adding an additional function is as easy as creating an application/MY_date_helper.php page, and just adding in a single function.
function mysqldatetime_to_timestamp($datetime = "")
{
// function is only applicable for valid MySQL DATETIME (19 characters) and DATE (10 characters)
$l = strlen($datetime);
if(!($l == 10 || $l == 19))
{
return false;
}
//
$date = $datetime;
$hours = 0;
$minutes = 0;
$seconds = 0;
// DATETIME only
if($l == 19)
{
list($date, $time) = explode(" ", $datetime);
list($hours, $minutes, $seconds) = explode(":", $time);
}
list($year, $month, $day) = explode("-", $date);
return mktime($hours, $minutes, $seconds, $month, $day, $year);
}
Also, if you want to change the behaviour of a current function, you can simply create an identically named function. Perfect for getting seconds out of timespan() (a personal bugaboo).
Of course, this is on top of an impressive change log of other features added into 1.6.0. The future looks very bright indeed!
* This function originally written by Clemens Kofler.
Continue reading “Extending CodeIgniter Helpers”. Posted in
CodeIgniter with 7 comments
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