It’s hard to believe that we’re already done with 2006, this one went by fast. A lot happened, and due to the overflow of work, I missed a lot of what I did last year (specifically LinuxWorld Expo and LinuxTag).

One of the big work-related events is a new venture that I’ve been working on this year. <project-pimping>HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website Creation was officially launched on December 1st, however about 18 months worth of work had gone into the product and building a client list before the site launch. The sprang out of my work with HedgeCo Networks which involved a the development of a high-end statistics/graphing package which generated quantitative statistics for Hedge Funds. After deploying the product on their flagship product, they started receiving request to license the package on various other website platforms, so the package was reworked into a slimmed down edition which can be deployed in smaller sites.

As we started deploying the product we realized the potential, and reallocated some of the design talent that we had been working on other project into creating entire websites and Hedge Fund start-up consulting/compliance packages. Since our Dec. 1 launch we have had a fantastically profitable month (to keep up-to-date with what we’re doing check out the Hedge Fund Websites blog)</project-pimping>

All of the above required me to reallocate my own time away from other projects, until the point that for the last year I have done little else. So as of Jan 1, 2007 I am officially working full time for HedgeCo Hedge Fund Websites… Freelancer no longer! This year I’m also moving my family up to West Palm Beach, Florida and will be working in the brand new HedgeCo offices (will post pics of when we move in later this month).

OK, so now that I’ve spent all my time pimping my current project I’ll skim through the news.

January: Slow month, Sid officially joined our family as “brother”. I weighed in on the PHP Security debate du jour wondering when good security verges on paranoia and the side effects.

February: Traveled to UK for PHPLondon conference. This was a fantastic event (looking forward to next year), as far as I remembered there were about 250 geeks attending the 1-day event. Got a cool new LCD. In defense of PHPNuke (and other applications of low repute whose name starts with PHP*) I responded to Marco’s post reminiscing about how great PHPNuke was back in the day.

March: Slow month… google releases finance portal, barra stops reporting S&P numbers and screws up my webservice. Tom Fox is Executed.

April: Gearing up for the world cup 32Cards PHP-based card game is released. I start using backpackit to organize my life (note to reader, I stop using it in a couple months, when it stops scaling with my needs). I spent 10 days in Florida, unfortunately missing PHPTek by 10 days.

May: I question open-source for highly specific niche applications (more specifically my statistic package). I enjoy Scott Sigler’s “Infection” which is in full swing. I start watching theshow with ze frank.

June: DSL CRASH!!! I try to “upgrade” my connection by switching providers which turns into 3 weeks on dial-up. During this time I camp at friends houses during all night product launches, and drive everyone around me insane. I finally return. World cup is in full swing, and Germany is World Cup CRAZY! I take pictures.
I travel to Norway for the eZpublish conference & PHPVikinger. Ammar Ibrahim comes to Frankfurt, we watch some football!

July: A slow month… I try Fedora Core, only to get frustrated when I can’t mount my ntfs external drive with the correct permissions (worked fine in root, was able to find no usable explanation). Infection ends. Put out a notice for css code monkeys get more response than I can handle. Macs Rock? During one of the hottest months on record the kids have chickenpox and we are confined indoors.

August: I subscribe to Gail Orenstein’s Flickr feed during her trip to Israel. cool pictures (quite possibly NSFW) with political commentary. Two talks are accepted for ZendCon. I manage to squeeze into the PHPConference schedule at the last minute. We take the kids on a mini-vacation to Legoland and then visit some friends in Switzerland.

September: Catch Mark Nemcoff on in a 5-minute-review. I deploy a site using eZpublish, blog about lessons learned. RIP Lilo. Do some myspace defending.

October: The Pear book is out!. I speculate about google world domination, and yahoo opens up the login api. Spend a week in WPB Florida, then fly to LA and drive down to San Jose for Zendcon.

November: Conference season. Meet Scott Sigler!!! Give talks at Zendcon, fly back home and give tutorial at IPC2k6. After seeing that the Zend Framework is more than hype I take a look at it and start my Zend Framework Hidden Gems article series. I dump backpackit for google docs (which I am still happily using). When is it a good time to rewrite your platform?

December: HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website launch. Fantastic month on the work front, however not a whole lot of time for anything else. David (CPUNerd) on the other hand has way too much time on his hands, and immortalizes me in kilt.

And that’s about it… probably the longest blog entry ever! I’m looking forward to this year as being the craziest yet. I’ll be flying to WPB next week, and for this first quarter will probably spend more time on that side of the pond.

A big THANK YOU to my readers (let’s make that anyone who made it this far into the blog entry). And most of all thanks to Stella, Annie and Mia for putting up with me during this hectic time.

I released the 5th article on my Zend Framework Hidden Gems series, this week focusing on Zend_Db. The upcoming article will be on Zend_Feed and because of the good response to the initial Zend_Db article, I’ve pushed the article on Zend_Db_Select into the queue after Zend_Feed. Expect to see both those articles in the usual place in the next 2 weeks.

In work related news, I’ve just launched my second ezPublish site (working on my third as soon as I get finished with this entry) I’m putting all our site release information on our HedgeCo Hedge Fund Websites corporate blog, so as soon as I get around to writing a release announcement you can see it on the Hedge Fund website launch section.

Oh, and I’m talking at PHP|Tek (more information here), looking forward to that. Now that we’re talking about traveling, I’ll be working out of West Palm Beach from the 7th of Jan to the 2nd of Feb so if anyone in the area wants to meet up, it would be awesome.

The heart of the hedge product a niche tool for hedge fund managers to manage their investor portfolios and relations. The underlying system is currently a custom PHP/MySQL system, however we are working with WebStyle Systems to create platform using eZpublish to which we can move some of our accounts and base future products on. We will also be launching another niche product based on this platform. This is still pre-alpha development.

One interesting tool that we are using for our support is SupportSuite by Kayako. This is a great support/ticket platform, what I have been most impressed with has been the moderate use of AJAX in both the backend and frontend support interfaces. Internally we use Mantis to manage our projects.

The project is still in it’s early stages. We are working on the “flagship” hedge fund websites website and moving that away from it’s launch state. Of course we have a blog where team members will be blogging (just me so far).

Thanks for the space, I now return you to your regular programming… Oh yes, we’re looking for another designer (isn’t everyone), check out the blog if you’re interested.

Thankfully there is usually someone who has done this before you. I also took a quick look at the 3 tables on another development machine and compared the data. The tables in question are: ezuser , ezuser_role and ezrole - although I didn’t modify the ezrole table.

The EZP forums are great for this type of thing.

CSS Rocks
EZP works best with CSS based templates. You’ll notice this most when you need to create a template for a container which will contain a list of various other items. When using CSS, you can use generic code (such as <li> for the list items) and then apply specific classes to the container to modify the look in that page. Since I was delivered a table based html layout for this project, I learned this the hard way.

Override, override, override
The power of EZP comes into play when it comes to overriding the default templates. The power is there to override anything from default datatypes (I had to change the textarea datatype to have fewer than the default 70 rows) to individual objects, classes or sections. There are a couple pitfalls you’ll have to watch for:

• Use Sections: When you want to change the look of a section of your site (ie: I want all the articles in my knowledgebase to have a blue headline) create a section for knowledgebase and then create an override for the class within the section.
• Create a strategy for your override precedence: I had some trouble with overrides taking precedence over other overrides until I came with a basic strategy. Node overrides take precedence (places 1-10), Class overrides come next (11-20, then Section overrides (places 20+), and finally any global overrides. You may not have this many overrides, my main issue was with the “node/view/full.tpl” template.
• Create a strategy for your override naming: If you have a lot of templates you’re managing and if you, like me, prefer to edit your templates outside EZP, you’re going to want to have a naming strategy for your templates. I’m using (type_of_override)_(class)_(section)_(node).tpl. So an override for articles in knowlegdebase would be full_article_knowledgebase.tpl. If I am doing a node override it would be full_42.tpl.
• Create generic templates. I started out creating some very specific templates, before I realized that generic templates which span over a wider range of nodes/classes will be easier to manage. If you need more specific templates after that you can always override your overrides
• Don’t re-invent the wheel: I found myself creating templates which were just containers for other list items. Don’t re-invent the wheel, use (or override) the container template and then modify the list templates for the sub items.

And finally CTCS
This is one that I learned in IRC as well as from a couple of head banging sessions which turned out were caused by me not clearing the cache. Clear the Cache Stupid, ask questions later.

Because of the power of eZPublish user policies the interface takes a bit of getting used to. Since it took me a couple tries to get it right, I’m documenting the steps for future use.

1. Go to the User Accounts section of the Administrative panel
2. Click on “Roles and Policies”
3. Edit the Anonymous user
4. Click on “New Policy”
5. Choose the “Content” module (or if you are using another module select that one)
6. Click “Grant Access to one Function”
7. Choose function “Read”
8. Click “Grant Limited Access”
9. Select the limitation, in my case I only want to grant access to one section, so I just choose the section and click OK.

This simple exercise should give you a feel for the power that you can have with just a couple tweaks of the eZpublish user policies.

To enable / disable this, edit your (site).ini.append.php
DebugRedirection=disabled

By default the ‘attribute’ operator will only display the names of the attributes of the array, but sending ’show’ as the first parameter will show the data as well. Sending an integer as the second parameter will display the specified number of child arrays.

example:


{def $my_node=fetch(content, node, hash(node_id, $module_result.path.1.node_id))}
{$my_node|attribute(show, 1)}