My setup is a Virtual Private Server (VPS) with 256MB RAM hosted at SliceHost and this blog is served off Nginx and PHP FastCGI processes to handle PHP scripts. The wonderful (because it just works and is really easy to setup) WP-Cache WordPress plugin keeps a cache of pages that’s swept at logical times (i.e. whenever there are any updates or comments).

I may be a Rails/merb fanboy, but this awesome piece of blog software that can stand up to the Digg Effect with ease is great. WordPress FTW!

Anyway, props to the organizers for putting this together (especially the free BarCamp t-shirts from Yahoo!). Personally, I felt the icebreaker game took up too much time that could have been used for the sharing sessions – the tech track of sessions were crammed up towards the end of BarCamp.

Notably, Harish Mallipeddi, who interned at Bezurk for a couple of months, shared with us an introduction to Django together with some working code on a site he is working on. I didn’t know a whole lot about Django before and was impressed that there is a “free” admin application for Django applications. We (Choon Keat, Harish, and I) had a small debate over Django’s templating system (briefly, Django has it’s own templating system for its views, whereas Rails ERB is basically Ruby code mixed in HTML). To this day I am still convinced that PHP is already a templating language despite my old Smarty card-carrying days. Relating back to the Django templating system, Choon Keat and I didn’t like the idea of having to learn to use a templating language when the base language itself (Ruby or Python) would suffice. Obviously Python syntax wasn’t suitable for web designer consumption so Django had to come up with its own templating language.

Michael from PetrolWatch showed us some flashy scriptaculous effects on his site and demoed the Ruby on Rails-inspired CakePHP. It’s a nice framework if you had to use PHP and performance is a concern (it’s true, Rails apps run more heavily than PHP scripts, and the difference in performance is very clear in servers with minimal resources). But the lack of a good testing framework was discouraging. Still, I must say I’d have used it (or a similiar framework) if Rails didn’t exist or if I was tied to using PHP for web development.

Choon Keat showed the non-believers the power of Rails’ script/console as well as the flexibility of Ruby in allowing developers to make their own extensions to existing classes (aka “who needs hooks from God?”). I probably should have stepped in and showed some basic Rails migrations stuff that would have impressed (hopefully) the Django and CakePHP fanbase (all 2 of them) – but my laptop was running out of battery (and I was shy).

Oh and I saw a good number of Macs there, and at least 3 laptops running a Linux distro of some sort. Cool.

Instead of replacing the default WordPress search box, I decided to add another one instead (that you can see right now on the left just below the “standard” search box) and label it a “LiveSearch” box. I do this because livesearch.js seems to crash Firefox randomly on occasion (as mentioned on Bitflux blog). Besides, it’s hardly fully done, as it currently only does simple SQL LIKE matching on post titles, and the CSS is somewhat inelegant.

Anyway, what I did was to add livesearch.js to the WordPress index template, and added the LiveSearch form.

Next, I hacked out a livesearch.php script (source listing for livesearch.php) that performs the relevant query on WordPress’ wp_posts table (may be differently named on your installation) and returns an XML document containing the matching post titles and their URLs. The tricky part was to map the matching post titles to their URLs (since I’m using SEO-friendly permalinks). All it took was to include the wp-blog-header.php file and have the get_permalink(ID) function return the correct URL.

The other tricky part involved preventing searches in the LiveSearch box from going to the livesearch.php page, because that’d return an XML page that the user would hardly know how to proceed from. Adding a hidden form field was a quick hack, but it works just fine and redirects the user to the search results page that WordPress spews.

Well, that’s it for now. It feels really like a hackjob but it works just fine. Perhaps someone could roll this up into a WordPress plugin or we could get LiveSearch as a feature in WordPress in future (as Serendipity already does).

Neil Turner has worked around this with his aptly named Friend or foe hack for MT. A simple but still neat bit of PHP (and a good example of MT’s excellent template tags). If you use MT and want to “reward” your legitimate commentors, you won’t want to miss this.

No configuration needed beyond commenting out the LoadModule directive (for PHP4) in the Apache configuration file and changing the Apache startup options (in /etc/conf.d/apache2):

A restart of Apache2 is all that’s left.

I’m not sure if I left any essential stuff out in the USE flags (which roughly translates into configure options) I used so if anyone would be so kind to skim through my phpinfo() and let me know, I’d be grateful and will be sure to return the favor. Some of the USE flags/configure options are pretty self-explanatory but I have no idea what the rest really do. What does excluding the truetype flag mean? Does it mean I don’t get TrueType font support when dynamically generating images (with gd)? What about the pcre flag? If I don’t compile with pcre, does that mean no preg_* functions for me? Point me to an explanatory page please (I have been looking).

A quick search reveals the cryptic error error message to mean ‘a pair of colons’ in Hebrew. You get that when you leave in an extra ‘$’ when addressing a class method, such as:

$SomeObject::someMethod();

And no class-wide static variables in pre-version 5 PHP? Does not compute…

Anyway, acrimony aside, the PHP Anthology is a set of 2 books written by Harry Fuecks of phpPatterns fame. Harry is rather reputable around the PHP circles, and also in the XUL community. He also was a co-author of one of those big red Wrox Press books dealing with XML. So I’m looking forward this latest publication of his – it should be good.

Well, I do have SitePoint to thank for sending me a complimentary copy as part of the benefits program at SitePoint Forums – being an Advisor (otherwise known as a moderator in discussion forum parlance) has it’s perks. Now if I just have the time to read the books to return SitePoint the favor with a testimonial or a review…

• interfaces
• exception-handling ala Java and C++
• the new __construct() method that acts as a constructor – this partially solves the old nasty problem of constructors and inheritance
• static class methods and fields
• method and property accessibility - public, protected and private

To be honest, I've never really had the time nor want to play with PHP5 when it was in pre-beta development. It does seem to be a nice move, but I'm still undecided on whether the apparent "bulk" of OOP would have an adverse effect on a large user base of, erm, scripters who are largely unknowledgeable of OOP. Or maybe it would finally make the "real programmers" look twice at PHP.