The goal was to use links that Amazon provided themselves to showcase categories and percentage discounts with my affiliate tag. The thought was a clean interface would easily encourage people to click a discount of say 90% but send affiliate contributions my way. (more…)

Have you ever used Zend Form, created a submit button, and had a few extra tags that were just throwing you off? I know you have… You probably did it like me: $this->addElement('submit', 'submitbutton', array( 'ignore'=>true, 'label'=>'Submit This', )); (more…)

Many years ago, a business mentor of mine told me that I should “read something else.” I didn’t know what he meant so I asked for more. He said I should go find some biographies, some history books, etc, and read those before I go to bed. He said it would not only expand my mind and show me that my problems weren’t that bad. He also told me it would increase my vocabulary. Well... (more…)

What is the measurement of a good career? Promotion? Raises? Running a project / leading a team? Usually all of this. However, the most traditional measurement of success in a career is moving upward. Time to run a department, time to lead a team, etc. However, I submit a very radical idea: Sometimes just be great, don’t lead. (more…)

By default, when using the Zend Paginator, the result set will come back as an array. If you are using a paginator associated with a database result set, and that db has a class defined for its row, it will come back as that class. However, if this is not the case, or you are not using information from a database, you may still want a different result than just a plain array. (more…)

So, while chatting with one of the developers on my team, we started talking about testing an XML document creation process he had been working on. He wrote a unit test and said “see, here is my class which generates the XML, and then here I use DomDocument to add the nodes I know it will have and test against that.” (more…)

By default, PHPUnit is not part of the default installation of Eclipse PDT. (Zend Studio is another beast, however…) (more…)

It drives me nuts that the best practices with javascript that is not required for the initial rendering of your application is to be placed at the bottom of the document, yet frameworks (like Zend Framework) do not support that out of the box. (I recently found out that Joomla also shares this problem.) (more…)

I’m no sys admin, so I can’t be sure, but I’ve seen lots of issues with using things like MySQL Proxy to fully separate the write and read queries in an application. Maybe it works, I don’t know… but I do know that if I can separate the connections in my code, that saves my Admin time… it doesn’t appear to give that much of a hit to performance either! Do keep in mind that... (more…)

For a CMS I’ve been working on, there are a number of custom routes that are added statically in a loop. These point to specific ID’s of articles on on the default module’s page viewing controller/action. Sometimes these routes need to appear in the Zend_Navigation output. As you can probably guess, the logic used for this is similar to what you might experience when using the URL view helper. But, for some reason, I could... (more…)