Recently I have used WordPress in combination with the wp-ecommerce shopping plugin to create 3 very user friendly and feature rich websites although each time I’ve found I have had to implement several functions in my themes functions.php file to achieve some nice affects.
After a couple of weeks using some new features within Quickauth I’ve decided to make them public and have push them to the Git repository at http://github.com/syntaxmonster/Codeigniter-Authentication-Library
The changes are within ./libraries /quickauth.php and are as follows;
$this->quickauth->user() now returns an object so that you can chain an attribute on the end.
$this->quickauth->user()->username; (Returns the username for the current user
There are also several new group functions that have been added to the file in order to make user group management easier. These follow the same coding styles that the rest of the library does and can be found at the very bottom of the file. They are listed below and will be added in to the documentation over the next couple of days;
Group Functions
OK, so I haven’t been as diligent with my posting schedule as I originally planned over the last week or so, although I have had a pretty busy time.
Firstly, I’ve slowly been moving Syntaxmonster’ clients to a new hosting provider which has meant configuring a new server and fighting with rouge DNS settings for most of the nights this week although assuming our new host is as reliable as the last then it will all be worth it!
I’ve also expanded the Quickauth authentication as I spent the early part of the week building an easy to use content management system that will make managing websites easier for both me and my clients. I’m toying with the idea of releasing the code so I’ll leave the details to that tucked away for one of the many rainy days that the MET office have planned for the coming weeks.
Finally, I also received official confirmation of my place at Cardiff University, so I’ve been bustling around preparing some of the stuff that I will need for that, and also realising that as the time dwindles away, I still haven’t completed many of my “to do before University” objectives!
That’s about it for this post as I need to get on with some work on the PHP-govtalk library extensions that I’ve been working on recently for a clients project
Recently I have been gearing the web development work that I do towards local business. This has lead me to become aware of a common trend between most web development agencies, or at least my local ones anyway. It’s that people aren’t paying enough due care and attention to their own sites. Continue reading
Since I released the QuickAuth authentication library for Codeigniter almost a year ago I haven’t really had that much time to maintain it, and thus it has fallen slightly to the way side.
In order to put this right, and to add some extended functionality to one of the lightest Codeigniter libraries around I’ve spent the last twenty four hours rebuilding the library from the ground up, and have included a simple User Interface helper that is great for displaying notices using session flash data to your users. I’ve labelled this version V2 as it’s a complete rebuild of the library, and although it works in much the same way, it definitely isn’t a drop in replacement for older versions of the library.
The final piece to this series of tutorials may be short, but it is the thread that brings your web server together and gets it all going. Now that we have all the basic software that we will need installed it is time to learn how to create a website, or an Apache virtual host, that will accept incoming http requests to the server and then route them to the correct location.
If you’ve read my previous post then you should have a fresh server with the LAMP stack installed and running. As I mentioned, the next step is to configure Virtual Hosts, and talk about the best email solution for a small web server.
Recently I made a investment for Syntaxmonster in the form of a VPS.net “node” which is essentially a virtual private server. Space and bandwidth wise I only needed one node for the amount of clients I wanted to put on there. Yet I was faced with a dilemma as I didn’t want to compromise cost or resources by loading a graphical user interface such as cPanel or Virtualmin on to the server, especially as I’m going to be the only one who actually accesses the box and makes changes to the files on there as the clients I’m moving to it pay for fully managed hosting.
The last two years at Shrewsbury College haven’t exactly been the best. Don’t get me wrong, it’s had it’s high points, but I’ve found the course I chose to be uninteresting and not very engaging at all. But now that’s all over, I got my final grades today (full marks!) and I can now safely expect to be heading off to Cardiff University late September to start the first of three years study in to Computer Science.