A Day in Paradise

This is something that really bothers people in the business world when switching to Thunderbird from Outlook. In my opinion Thunderbird should make the dash-dash-space sigblock separator optional, or at least have a config option to turn it off.

The reason is that many people do not use a “signature” as a random block of information meant for the bottom of the page, but rather a real “signature”, something like.

Yours truly,

John Doe
CEO, ACME INC

This obviously looks very bad when it has — before it.

There are a couple plugins that allow you to drop arbitrary text into your document, but none that do this automatically when starting a new email message.

What you have to do is:

• Install TemplateLoader
• Follow the steps to create the template which includes your sigblock
• Choose that template as the default for your identity

And you are good to go. You will notice that there is a slight lag when starting a new email, but that is the price you pay

Some other links on the topic.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Signatures_(Thunderbird)
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=535118#535118
http://mailformat.dan.info/trailers/sigblocks.html

A flurry of PHP updates this week… on the heels of PHP5.2 we have ezPublish 3.9 and Zend Framework 0.60 and ezcomponents. While I have updated the PHP version on the server, I’m holding out on ezPublish and ZF till the holiday weekends.

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.

Just a quick note to let my planetary friends that I’ve created a page that is tracking all information about my Zend Framework Hidden Gems series of articles.

More information on my Zend Framework Hidden Gems page.

I’m not going to waste blog space reiterating what is covered in the link above, but just wanted to mention that this work is being released (and will stay) under the Creative Commons license, so any comments on the articles, style or code is greatly appreciated and will be integrated back into the work (with attribution) to make this series a point of reference for those using Zend Framework.

After a week of intense work on EZP templates, it quickly becomes apparent where you have made mistakes with the designing of your templates. Most of this stuff is just common sense, if anyone has any other pointers please comment, or post URLs for where this has been discussed.

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.

<rant>
The worst thing about the majority of VIM tutorials/books is that they start in the most obvious place. If I’m interested in a text editor and after reading the first chapter of a book all I know how to do is move the cursor around, I’m not going to be that impressed. Lets face it, moving the cursor around in any direction isn’t exactly a groundbreaking feature of VIM.

For a beginner VIM users, there is nothing interesting about how you can use k and j to move the cursor up or down, or the h and l to move the cursor left and right. I think it’s safe to say that, for the first tutorial we can let user use left-arrow instead of h, right arrow-instead of l, up-arrow instead of h and down-arrow instead of j. As users begin to understand the basic concepts behind VIM commands then it is important on it’s important to know that you can move the cursor up with j, down with k to the left with h and to the right with l. But there is no need to bring this up in the first lesson!

The other thing that there is absolutely no need to mention are the nuances of the different modes that VIM has. When you open VIM you’re in command mode, hit i and you can insert text, hit esc or (ctrl-c) and you’re back in command mode. How difficult is it to say that? What more do people need to know to get started.

VIM has tons of cool features, the conceived “steep learning curve” is probably because instead of focusing on the features that separates VIM, each tutorial starts out with a discussion about how to move the cursors using the keys j(down), k(up), l(right, I remember this because I think l should make the cursor go left, but it doesn’t), and h(left).
</rant>

OK, so with that out of the way lets get into cool thing #1

Yanking and Registers

One of the first things that I’ve had people ask when I introduce them to VIM is “How do I copy and paste”. In VIM you copy by “yanking” text into a “registry”. If I want to copy this line I’ll enter command mode (esc) and type yy, this yanks the entire line. Deleting will also yank the line into the default registry. To delete the entire line type dd.

Move your cursor (using the arrow keys or h j k l, or you can move to the end of the line using $ and the beginning of the line using ^) and then type p to put the text you just yanked or deleted into the current location of your cursor.

Now you’ll notice, that only the last thing you yanked (or deleted) is stored in the default register – If you yank or delete something up, the previous text will be replaced. To get around this, VIM provides registers which you can use to store yanked data.
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