Jamie Hemmett has a few suggestions for local user groups out there on what to do and not to do to help make their group successful. Some of it was gathered from personal experience, other tips from the recent user group panel discussion from this year's ZendCon.

I just listened to the PHP User group Panel discussion from the Unconference session at ZendCon. While I listened I took some notes to try and help our Irish PHP Users Group be awesome like some of the other groups out there. I reckon the podcast and great tips it contains will help other User Groups out there too (not just PHP).

Some of the observations/comments she men ......

DevShed has start up a new series today with the first part in a four-part series looking at exception handling in PHP5.

If you do any serious programming, whether it's in PHP 5 or some other language, you've needed to know how to handle run time errors and other "exceptional" conditions. You can do this by making your program throw generic exceptions. Or you can unlock the potential of PHP 5 and learn how to create custom exceptions, which is the subject of this four-part series.

In this first part they get you started with exceptions, showing how to throw them and catch them correctly (try/catch). They put it to good use in an example catching exceptions thrown from a MySQL connection and select.

Brett send in a link to a new post on his "Mr PHP" blog about a method he's come up with to cache images using the phpThumb library.

Generate thumbs by visiting a URL such as your.com/thumbs/images/image.50x50.jpg. This will create a 50x50px thumbnail of your.com/images/image.jpg. The thumb will be stored on your server at your.com/thumbs/images/image.50x50.jpg so the next request for the same image will be loaded without loading php for ultra fast image cache.

The phpThumb tool lets you dynamically resize an image and, if one does not exist for it, make a thumbnail that's output and cached. From then on the script just pulls from that local copy. He includes his code to get it working and the mod_rewrite rule that maps an image request back to it (so it's still "/images/myimage.jpg" instead of ......

In the recent OpenMind conference we were discussing how open source projects simply don't die as long as there is an interested user community: Even if the original company or individual who built the application stops working on it, somebody will always rise and start maintaining it.

Last few weeks have been a great example of this. Nemein is the company which originally built the OpenPsa2 suite of project management and CRM tools for consulting companies. In last two years there have been some shifts in strategy, and so we ceased working on the product.

2008-10-15 23:40:08 | 全文 | 评论(0)

Over the last couple of months there is a concept in object-oriented programming that has been bothering me. This is the notion of 'programming to an interface, not an implementation'. This is a principal I first learned about when reading "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" and then further solidified when I read "Head First Design Patterns". So when I say "programming to an interface, not an implementation" what exactly do I mean? Bill Venners interviewed 2008-10-15 23:40:08 | 全文 | 评论(0)

The NETTUTS blog has another WordPress-related post today that looks at "context includes" - changing the look and feel of the postings based on the content type they're tagged with.

The great thing about WordPress is that it doesn't limit how content is displayed, but provides a 'framework' of ways to do so. Even better, it's possible to change the display according to the content. When writing this tutorial it was hard to explain what's going on... But the best way is this: the post will be displayed within the loop according to its content - or contextual differences. Either way, it's including specific files that match up to the category of the post.

There's plenty of code to go around introducing you to the parts of the typical WodPress install you'll be working with and some CSS to help you style the resu ......

In this quick post on the Ibuildings blog Ivo Jansch (CTO of Ibuildings) looks ahead to the upcoming PHPNW conference (Nov 22nd) and their participation in it.

The conference features speakers such as Derick Rethans and Rob Allen (see the schedule for more speakers), and at 50 GBP it's very good value for money for PHP developers. [...] We're also sending a bunch of our developers there, and we have a booth, so if you want to meet us or land a cool job, come talk to us at the conference.

The PHPNW conference will be held November 22nd in Manchester (UK) and has several exciting things going for it - a great 2008-10-15 22:40:04 | 全文 | 评论(0)