http://www.mark-story.com/posts/rssRecent writing and musings of Mark Storyen-usmark@mark-story.com (Mark Story)http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/view-inheritance-in-cakephp?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/view-inheritance-in-cakephp?utm_source=rss One of the new features in CakePHP 2.1 I am excited about are view blocks and view inheritance. Both are concepts borrowed from Jinja2 and other templating systems. Template inheritance allows you to create skeleton views, and define blocks to populate that skeleton in a child template.Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:28:26 -0500http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/new-errors-in-php-5-4?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/new-errors-in-php-5-4?utm_source=rss I’ve been running the PHP5.4 RC builds for the last few months, and there are some interesting changes in the upcoming PHP release. On top of all the great new features coming in PHP5.4. After updating to PHP5.4-RC4, a few things that used to not trigger errors and silently do the wrong thing, now trigger notices or warnings.Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:49:05 -0500http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/my-quest-for-a-new-programming-typeface?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/my-quest-for-a-new-programming-typeface?utm_source=rss I’ve been working all day everyday with Monaco for the last 6 years. Monaco is a great typeface, it has a number of really great properties. It has a large x-height, and a large m-width. This make it great typeface at small sizes. While monaco is a perfectly good typeface, I wanted experiment and see if there is another typeface that would be even better.Sun, 11 Dec 2011 10:29:29 -0500http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/installing-multiple-versions-of-php-from-source?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/installing-multiple-versions-of-php-from-source?utm_source=rss With the recent release of PHP 5.4-RC1, I wanted to give it a spin and make sure there weren’t any upcoming issues for CakePHP. I recently saw a great article from Derick Rethans on getting PHP setup from an SVN checkout.Sun, 13 Nov 2011 21:56:55 -0500http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/using-pathogen-for-vim-configuration-management?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/using-pathogen-for-vim-configuration-management?utm_source=rss In a previous post I talked about switching to Vim and how I was using Janus to get a good foundational set of plugins to work with, and make starting with vim less daunting. As I’ve gotten more comfortable with vim, I wanted a simpler way to manage my vim config.Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:29:36 -0500http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/using-bcrypt-for-passwords-in-cakephp?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/using-bcrypt-for-passwords-in-cakephp?utm_source=rss CakePHP uses salted sha1 hashes for passwords by default, and has for a while. There has been some talk on the mailing list lately of switching the default hashing to something more secure, such as bcrypt. I think this is a great idea, and will find its way into CakePHP in a future release. Providing a reasonanle upgrade experience is the biggest problem to solve, if the default hashing strategy was to change.Sun, 25 Sep 2011 21:26:03 -0400http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/cakefest-2011-slides-posted?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/cakefest-2011-slides-posted?utm_source=rss In case you were not able to attend CakeFest 2011. I’ve posted my slides up on slideshare. The event was a great success. Thanks to Graham for organizing the event and to all the attendees. Its great to meet the community and put faces and names to irc handles and mailing list email addresses.Sun, 18 Sep 2011 11:26:04 -0400http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/creating-folded-ribbons-edges-with-css?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/creating-folded-ribbons-edges-with-css?utm_source=rss While working on tweaking a notification box design, I wanted to include the element’s heading in a folded ribbon element. I also wanted to avoid using any images and just use CSS. Mostly to try my hand at using generated content and some CSS that I don’t normally get to use.Sun, 14 Aug 2011 19:08:38 -0400http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/my-thoughts-on-the-built-in-php-server?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/my-thoughts-on-the-built-in-php-server?utm_source=rss Earlier today I saw the announcement that PHP5.4 will have a built-in web server . I mentioned on twitter that I wasn’t too happy about the server being added. In the discussion that followed, I feel like I wasn’t able to properly convey my thoughts through tweets.Thu, 14 Jul 2011 22:44:51 -0400http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/developing-for-sqlserver-and-iis-in-a-virtual-machine?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/developing-for-sqlserver-and-iis-in-a-virtual-machine?utm_source=rss This week I’ve been participating in the SQLServer Jump-in Camp. My focus for the workshops have been building out better support for IIS and SQL Server in CakePHP. As I generally develop on MacOS, I do development for other platforms through virtual machines. This has worked well with linux servers in the past.Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:50:25 -0400http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/switching-to-vim-the-first-month?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/switching-to-vim-the-first-month?utm_source=rss About a month ago, I decided that I would try and switch to Vim as my only editor. I’ve been a pretty hard core Textmate for about 5 years now, and haven’t really had any issues. So why bother switching? My first reason is I spend a ton of time in SSH + terminals.Sat, 14 May 2011 10:12:26 -0400http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/using-git-commit-hooks-to-prevent-stupid-mistakes?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/using-git-commit-hooks-to-prevent-stupid-mistakes?utm_source=rss I’m pretty prone to making stupid mistakes all the time. I think its a mixture of being busy, and being a natural scatter brain. In any case, mistakes happen, and thankfully over time developers have come up with a number of ways to combat mistakes. These usually take the shape in automated toolds. Unit tests are a great way to automated tool to help prevent stupid mistakes from happening, Git commit hooks are another.Wed, 20 Apr 2011 22:18:59 -0400http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/sphinx-phpdomain-released?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/sphinx-phpdomain-released?utm_source=rss I’ve recently been working a fair bit on the new documentation for CakePHP and while sphinx is amazing, it doesn’t come with a built-in domain for generating PHP documentation.Sat, 02 Apr 2011 14:03:26 -0400http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/creating-multi-language-documentation-with-sphinx?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/creating-multi-language-documentation-with-sphinx?utm_source=rss In a previous article I covered how CakePHP would potentially be moving to using sphinx for the 2.0 documentation. Myself and some of the other CakePHP developers have been working on this option, and seeing if it has any legs. Turns out that sphinx is actually a pretty great tool.Sun, 27 Feb 2011 08:12:30 -0500http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/assetcompress-0-3-released?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/assetcompress-0-3-released?utm_source=rss Today, I tagged the 0.3 release for my AssetCompress plugin. A few new features have been added, and several issues resolved. You can get the code from github Build tool The AssetCompress shell is now able to generate all the build files that are named in your project. This is great for integration with build/deployment scripts.Sat, 12 Feb 2011 11:38:15 -0500http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/generating-documentation-with-sphinx?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/generating-documentation-with-sphinx?utm_source=rss In the release announcement for 1.3.7, it was tentatively announced that CakePHP would be moving its documentation over to ReST, Git and sphinx. Having documentation in a git repo, and using sphinx to generate documentation has a few nice wins, that would be difficult to achieve with the current book application.Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:20:09 -0500http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/getting-phpunit-setup-from-git?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/getting-phpunit-setup-from-git?utm_source=rss I recently had a fun idea, that I wanted to try and implement for PHPUnit. I really like coloured console output. PHPUnit already has the option for coloured output, but I wanted more. I wanted to get coloured text for F, E, S, and I that showed up in the test run progress.Sat, 11 Dec 2010 22:26:36 -0500http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/cakephp-1-year-later?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/cakephp-1-year-later?utm_source=rss This time last year, amid rumours that the end of CakePHP was nigh, CakePHP died and rose from the dead . The year that followed those events, has been a very exciting one. CakePHP continues to be a thriving project with huge popularity, and a growing community. This year has a number of milestones as well.Tue, 02 Nov 2010 23:05:29 -0400http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/cakeresponse-in-cakephp-2-0?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/cakeresponse-in-cakephp-2-0?utm_source=rss Previously I wrote about the changes that have been done for the request handling in CakePHP 2.0. Response handling is another subsystem that has received a significant facelift. As with request information and functionality, response related features were spread across several objects. Controller, RequestHandler and Dispatcher all had a slice of the pie.Sat, 18 Sep 2010 23:37:47 -0400http://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/the-cakerequest-object-in-cakephp-2-0?utm_source=rsshttp://www.mark-story.com/posts/view/the-cakerequest-object-in-cakephp-2-0?utm_source=rss Work on CakePHP 2.0 is moving along, and I wanted to take some time to discuss and explain one of the sizeable refactorings that has been done for 2.0. In previous versions request parameters were just a bunch of arrays that were copied to the various places they were needed in the framework.Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:12:13 -0400