Archive for category Programming

Templatizer

Posted by Avi in Programming on May 19th, 2009

I released an extension the other day for EE. You can find it here.

The basic idea is that creating templates in Expression Engine, especially if you don’t plan to edit them from the CP, can sometimes be a little repetitive and annoying.
Normally with EE, the templates are stored in the database, and you have the option of also storing them on the filesystem. But in order for them to be recognized by EE, they must reside in the database at least.

Using this extension, you can start your template off as a physical file, and the first time you view it in the browser, it will automatically be recognized by EE and inserted into the database!

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Flash Messenger for Expression Engine

Posted by Avi in Programming on May 7th, 2009

A common idiom in web development is that a form is submitted via POST, and then a redirect is done to a success page. The reason for this is that if we left the result of the submission to return HTML to the browser, we would run into the infamous and confusing message “To display this page, Firefox must send information that will repeat any action (such as a search or order confirmation) that was performed earlier.” (At least the way firefox tells you). This has become none as the POST/REDIRECT/GET pattern.

The problem becomes that, because of the stateless nature of HTTP, this second request has absolutely no connection to the previous request. If we just wanted to display a thank you page, or a success page, this would not be much of a problem. But what if we wanted to display the same form again, and display a success message on top when its submitted?

One way of doing this, which is the way Expression Engine does it, is to pass in a parameter in the query string, like ?success=1. The problem with this is that now if somebody refreshes the page, they’ll see the same message. Not the biggest deal in the world, but can we do better?
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ACL in Zend Framework

Posted by Avi in Programming on March 19th, 2009

When I first started using the Zend Framework, one of the most confusing things was the ACL component. Even after I succesfully implemented an ACL solution in my app, something seemed wrong with it.

I would like to argue that the proper use for the Zend ACL is actually impossible, since there is a reported bug in the code which, to my knowledge, has not been fixed.

The use case I will discuss is where you want to only authors to edit articles and only to articles authored by themselves. I think this is a fairly common case.
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Presenting a list of Timezones to the user

Posted by Avi in Programming on March 12th, 2009

 

I first got into timezones when I working on an calendar app which displayed various times of day which are pertinent to Jewish daily life. The app would display calculated times which of course would differ based on the timezone of the given location. As I investigated into timezones, I found them to be fairly complicated. Not all timezones are even on the hour…some are at 30 minute offsets, some at 45 minutes, and historically there have been even stranger offsets than that.

To make matters worse, there’s the whole issue of Daylight Saving Time. Apparently some places have it some don’t. Some countries have a set date for DST, some pick a new one each year depending on circumstances. And of course, DST does not mean only adding one hour. 
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