PHPNW is primarily a conference aimed at professionals within the industry to allow them to learn from each other and discover new ideas and techniques which they can then apply to their every day work. What is less prominent is how this is equally as useful for students, who may want to work in this same area once they have graduated.
Development
Virtual Hosts for Development with Apache on Ubuntu
I do a lot of development on Ubuntu, as I often have multiple projects on the go which are nothing to do with each other, it’s often easier to create separate virtual hosts on my local development machine. This means that when they are ready for the “real world”, they are already set up as isolated sites at the root of their domain (rather than in a subdirectory of an existing site).
In order to do this, you need to create a new virtual host in your Apache config. Create a new file in the directory /etc/apache2/sites-available and open it in your favourite editor. It doesn’t matter what the file is called, but it’s best to keep it descriptive. We’ll call this project “mysite”, so the file can be called “mysite”. In the file we need to configure the Apache virtual host.
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1> ServerName mysite.localhost DocumentRoot /var/www/mysite/public/ </VirtualHost>
In the VirtualHost tag, you put the IP, seeing as I only want this for local loopback (for development) I have just put 127.0.0.1. The ServerName is the URL that you use to connect to the site and the DocumentRoot is where the public documents are stored. This is a very basic set up, so there are many more options you can add.
To make the site enabled, you create a symbolic link to the file from the sites-enabled directory.
cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled ln -s ../sites-available/mysite mysite
You now need to add the subdomain (mysite.localhost) to the list of hosts, so open /etc/hosts in your favourite editor and append the line:
127.0.0.1 mysite.localhost
And then restart Apache:
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Now you should be able to visit http://mysite.localhost on the local machine (assuming the directory does actually exist).
This should also be similar on MacOS and other linux Distros, but the file locations (particularly for Apache) will vary.
Netbeans 6.9 Beta + Zend Framework
Having just got my brand new MacBook Pro, I’ve been setting it up as a development environment (blog post about that to come). I decided to install the new Netbeans 6.9 beta. The main reason for this is the Zend Framework (and Symfony) support.
In the past I have found Netbeans to be pretty good with code-completion when being used with Zend Framework, however with the release of Zend Tool (something I do really like), you’ve had to switch from Netbeans to the command line in order to create the project and then create a new Netbeans project from existing sources. This was a bit of a hassle.
Now, all you need to do is download the Framework, go into the Netbeans preferences > PHP > Zend tab, Zend script box should point to the zf script (from within the bin directory of the ZF downloading). On Mac and Linux it wants the zf.sh file (on Windows it will probably want the zf.bat file, although not tested). Once that has been set up, you can now create brand new Zend Framework projects from within Netbeans, and it preconfigures everything for you. Lovely!
MooTools Cross Fader
I’ve recently developed a script in JavaScript which will perform smooth transitions between a number of elements. This is built using the MooTools framework and is available to download from the labs.
RIP Internet Explorer 6
The time I never thought I’d see is now on the horizon. The web moving away from supporting Internet Explorer 6.
Many web developers are all too aware of the pain of getting their websites working correctly in all web browsers and THEN having to make sure they work in IE6. This is not only inconvenient and irritating, but expensive. However, with Google announcing it is no longer supporting IE6 and now Amazon following their lead, it is appearing that very soon (not immediately) people will be forced to update/change their web browser to use these large and prominent websites. Many other sites have also dropped IE6 support (list at http://idroppedie6.com/).
Finally we will be able to spend our time on functionality rather than legacy support.