phpDay.. is coming!

phpDay 3rd edition, some other news

As I sayd some days ago in Italian is started the organization of the 3rd Italian phpDay. This event is dedicated to all the php developers spread in the italian peninsula and not only and will be hosted by the University of Bari.

Who organize is the GrUSP, a national PUG, php user group, which I am member of.

Actually we’ve started the Call for Paper (open both in english and italian) and the Call for Sponsors for the companies which want to show their name in an event like that. There will be different kind of sponsorizationship, probably three, based on differents criteria.
I’ll talk about them as soon will be published on the official site.

Btw, this year the phpDay will have 2 differents paths one more technical and advanced and the other one easier and focuses also on php software.

• in the advanced path the speakers can talks abouts new development methods, security and technics, frameworks and php-related problems (like server optimization and *sql problems)
• in the presentation/introductive path the talks will be about software solutions write in and for php (ie. phpSomethings or Zend Studio) and other arguments like library how-to or introduction to the language.

Last edition phpDay had quite 400 visitors and will hope to increase that number this year!

3rd Italian phpDay

[soon I'll translate this in english]

Come annunciato qualche giorno fa è stato aperto ufficialmente il call for paper del phpDay.

Se volete discutere di php davanti ad un centinaio di persone e pensate di avere buone argomentazioni mandateci qualche info.

development of large used application on php 5

On my free time I work on an open source application called phpCollab, a php based project managment software. I love that application, and I use it normally for my own work to manage my clients on differents works.

Actually the development is very slowly, the first reason is that all the developer are very busy with their paid jobs and the second one is that the code isn’t very easy to manage (it has a lot of library file and code redundancies).

phpCollab has grown a lot and with a lot of different parents, so now there’s a lot of hard-reading code without a single line of comment .

Quite a month ago during an hack for a client, I’ve decided, for the next third release [maybe in the year 2135.... ], to rewrite all the code using php 5 (with a DB layer like creole/propel), a modular/pluggable approach like WP and off course a lot of ajax.

For the latest two item there wasn’t a problem, but some of community members were not very happy about the use of php5. Actually the software has quite 2 thousands (known) installation around the world and a lot of them are on old server with php older than 4.4.x and the users don’t want to have problem with php 5 incompatibilities. Maybe php 5 (and its goodies) isn’t yet well suited for an application like phpCollab? Or a pragmatic php 4 OO rewrite is enought?

Does anyone has some case studies about php 4 to 5 software migration?

WordPress 2.0 plugins compatibility list

Here the official plugins’ compatibility list for WordPress 2.0. If you have tryed the new Wp version with your plugins please add it to the list.

ciuaz

WordPress 2.0 beta 1

I’ve wrote a mini review on the latest nightly release of Wp 2.0 beta 1 on my Italian blog on Open Source Software.

ciuaz

ajax encoding pt.2: from js->escape to php->urldecode

Another brick to solve the encoding issue with ajax is settled, last week I ranted about the problem on showing data from a remote script inside a page encoded with ISO-8859-1.

This time I’ve the reverse problem, I’ve to save some data from a form to a db and then show it on another page. As usual xmlHttpRequest send data in UTF-8, so my data results always corrupted.

This time the solution is very simple, first I encode the data with javascript using the escape function then on the remote script I use the php function urldecode.

So a string like ÎÑTËRÑÅTÌÔñ�L will be escaped to %CE%D1T%CBR%D1%C5T%CC%D4%F1%C1L and then urldecoded back to ÎÑTËRÑÅTÌÔñÃ?L

ciuaz

phpCollab community forum hacked (again)

This is the 4th time that the phpCollab community forum, based on phpBB plus, was hacked.

I’ve liked a lot that forum but actually I, and the other dev team members, cannot check every single day if a new XSS o bug is discovered and if there is patch to download, we’re too busy by our payed day job to working also on something different than the phpCollab development.

With the new releases of phpBB also the update/patching process is begone long and boring with a lot of files to move, rename, update..

Now I’m thinking to switch to another OOS forum, but I don’t know what, the community doesn’t need a zillion features forum, but needs something easy to manage, to use and to restore.

Any ideas? (oh, obviously I need to import all the old messages…)

utf-8 madness

As I wrote, I’m working on a stupid ajax (intranet) site but I’ve a lot of problem with charset encoding.

I’ve to publish, for legacy problem, all the intranet site using old ISO-8859-1 encoding BUT using the js XMLHttpRequest the data I receive is always UTF-8.

Unlucky I cannot use php to re-parse the data and to trasform to a latin encoding, anyone has a good idea to resolve this? Can I force another encoding on XMLHttpRequest?

Ok, I’m too tired to see the obvious… To resolve the problem I had simply forced the encoding via the php header function in the file I call remotely:

header(“Content-Type: application/x-javascript; charset=ISO-8859-1″);
echo $output;

now the browser show the right ÎÑTËRÑÅTÌÔñ�L strings

ciuaz