Edmonds Commerce Blog

Using Git for version control is great, but if like my you work on a lot of different projects then everything you can do to save time setting Git up is well worth it.

One of the features of Git is the ability to only track certain files and ignore other files. For me that means I only want to track files I am likely to be editing and ignore images, flash files and whatever other junk is floating around in a project.

The solution (and all credit and thanks to the kind people on #Git on Freenode IRC) is this .gitignore file. This file will ignore everything except files with the extensions that you set. Dead easy.

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Eagerly anticipated, pretty much a whole new version even though its numerically a tiny increase - the features being released in this update are largely features that were originally scheduled for PHP version 6.

Some of the key new features include: namespaces, late static binding, closures, optional garbage collection for cyclic references, new extensions (like ext/phar, ext/intl and ext/fileinfo), over 140 bug fixes and much more.

Powerful new language features include namespaces (a higher level way of defining scope - allowing for larger and more complex applications), late static binding (more esoteric object oriented language feature), closures (allowing functions to be assigned to variables - familiar to javascript developers but a nice new powerful feature for PHP developers).

The release also includes some cool new extensions like Phar (very similar in principle to a Java Jar) allowing an entire PHP app to be distributed and run as a single file.

Most of these features won't really affect the average webmaster until apps turn up that take advantage of these new features. Along with these cool new features however, PHP 5.3 brings some solid performance improvements that will benefit all webmasters.

It's great to see PHP maturing and growing as a language and this new release is really more power to my elbow as a PHP developer and that has to be a good thing!

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My favourite IDE Netbeans has recently been released as version 6.7. Now installed and looking forward to taking advantage of some new features and fixes

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I recently came across rgba colours which are a very simple and logical way to produce a colour (rgb) with alpha transparency as well. This is ideal if for example you want to create a translucent white box to put some text in.

CSS does have some (dodgy) opacity controls, but they set everything as transparent including any text or pictures contained within the element. By using rgba, we can set a translucent background colour and have opaque elements contained within.

As usual, to get it to work in IE requires some extra effort, however this hack mentioned here and originally credited here seems to offer a solution.

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I have recently had the misfortune of stepping out of my usual developers bubble and having to do a bit of graphic web design. Of course that means that not only did I have to try to make something look good with my meagre design skills, but then I had to worry about making sure it worked in IE...

Web Designers... I FEEL YOUR PAIN

As I only use Ubuntu or Mac's, testing in IE is not exactly easy. Or at least it wasn't until I decided to take the plunge and set up XP as a virtual machine. It's really really easy on Ubuntu.

1. Go to the Applications->Add / Remove system

2. type virtualbox in the searchbox

3. Install VirtualBox OSE

4. Go to the Applications->Accessories menu and launch VirtualBox OSE

5. Hit the blue New icon in the top left

6. Follow the wizard. I used the following settings:

6.a name: xp

6.b: memory: 192mb

7. At the boot disk stage, you need to hit the New button to create and install a new 'boot disk'.

8. Whack your XP CD in the drive and install it.

By default the right hand ctrl key is your key for escaping out of your virtual machine. This means that if you click on your virtual machine with your mouse (for example to go through to multiple steps required to tell XP that you want English UK keyboard, and surprise surprise an English Keyboard layout and furthermore you don't really need to install English US as a separate language)

Note - to access your Ubuntu environment you will need to have folder sharing set up, the virtual machine will see the host Ubuntu like another computer on a network.

If like me you need to edit the hosts file to point a dummy domain to your local development environment, the IP address you need to use is 10.0.2.2

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This is a nice little script I just knocked together that helps to synchronise databases when the table structures might not be exactly the same (for example different versions of the same system).

You would need to edit the top section to put the correct DB credentials etc.

This is definitely not to be used on a live DB, purely for aiding development and migration.

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This is as much a note to self plus anyone else googling for the words Ubuntu Jaunty and Filezilla

The version that's in the repositories is a bit old and missing some cool features like synchronised browsing.

The latest version is available from GetDeb - http://www.getdeb.net/app/FileZilla

If you have already installed a version from the repos, totally remove it using syntaptic package manager. Then download the main filezilla package and the filezilla-common package from GetDeb. Install the filezilla-common package first and then the Filezilla package itself.

Sorted.

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Had another tearing hair out moment when trying to figure out why my helper override was working fine, but my block override wasn't working. Here is the result:

helper working, block not working:

then after a load of messing about, this one does work:

helper and block both working

yeah exactly :S

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Recently spoke to a client about the possiblity of setting up Magento on EC2 and remembered that I had seen a pre optimised AMI including caching etc to hopefully run Magento well.

A quick bit of Googling though and I saw that the top results are all people charging for AMI's.

That can't be right, so I thought I would do a quick post to give the free optimsed AMI an SEO booster.

Debian Etch Linux Optimized for Magento:
Magento Optimised AMI for Amazon EC2

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After a few hours of intense googling I have finally figured out why my Magento custom module is refusing to activate. I finally figured it out. It's all because the snippet of XML that I copied and pasted off a tutorial somewhere did not have the right capitalisation.

doesn't work - EC_All.xml

does work - EC_All.xml

I think next time I'm just going to use the module creator!

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