I’m not entirely certain why this escaped me for so long, but it’s remarkably easy to set terminal colors with PHP. Simply echo the escape/color character \033, followed by the bash color definition and your output. For reference, here is a listing of bash colors. So, for example, if we want to make something blue text, do the following: (more…)

I’ve always found it annoying when programmers create systems where you create your account and then you’re not logged in. Maybe I’m lazy? I decided to do a poll on a popular social networking site. The poll went like this: (more…)

One of the things that is irritating is logging into a website with credentials that you know are right, only to have it fail. Then, later, you find that the site was malfunctioning. By then, maybe you requested a new password, or had to at least waste time looking up your old password. With Zend_Auth, however, we can prevent user’s from having that issue. (more…)

Hello all. It’s been quite the long time since I updated my blog. I know, I know, this is a huge problem, considering this is a cardinal sin according to my talk at MKEPUG about getting job offers. That was wrong, I know. However, things have been pretty busy. Let’s see… (more…)

First, I just want to say up front that this is not a discussion of “is 100% test coverage necessary” or a discussion about testing private methods. This is simply how you may do it if you wanted to. (more…)

There has been a lot of discussion on forums and throughout the object oriented PHP programming community about service classes. This is just intensified by the Zend Framework model of development coupled with the changes in their design/architecture and vocal spokespeople. I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring for this. (more…)

There was some discussion on Twitter regarding the original version of my article about putting most of your site’s setup in the front controller plugins in Zend Framework. However, I haven’t seen a lot of real reasons except for “that’s what the example says” or “this is how I feel.” These suggestions I have are based on performance and logical reasons. However, I could be wrong or maybe I was unclear. So I did a... (more…)

I was creating a new application with Zend Framework at work the other day and I started using my technique that I described here by adding the original email in my email address using the + sign. However, the current organization I’m at has a mailserver (Exchange?) that is either configured not to allow this or just doesn’t have this functionality built in. So, this won’t work. I solved this with a new implementation of... (more…)

Thanks to Zend and their community organizers for the opportunity to do a webinar today. (more…)

All the examples I’ve seen for pulling information from subdomains are from the hostname router directly correlating one subdomain as a value to a single controller/action combo. This means they map username.website.com to something that basically looks internally like website.com/user/profile/var1/username. This is cool for simple one off tasks - however, what if you’re creating a multiple controller/action solution? For my example, I’m creating a CMS that will have a shared code base. However, on every... (more…)