How To Install PostgreSQL And phpPgAdmin Support In XAMPP

I'm working on akaikiwi and I want to test some stuff on Postgre, as the databases I'm aiming to support are SQLite, MySQL and Postgre, the latter is the only one XAMPP doesn't support natively.

I found a great post on How To Install PostgreSQL And phpPgAdmin Support In XAMPP that worked nicely, except in the last part, I had to add

Alias /phppgadmin "D:/xampplite/phpPgAdmin/"

 AllowOverride AuthConfig
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from all

Inside alias_module instead of mime_module, but other than that, it works like a charm :)

Read more...

Sending mails from localhost with XAMPP Lite

One of the most common tasks of web development is sending emails, whether from a registration process, password recovery or if they suscribed to an update, you will need to send emails. The problem is that XAMPP doesn't have a default configuration for sending mails, and developing without this ability is pretty dull, you need to test your mails!
But don't worry, you won't have to install anything, and you wont need a hosting, you just need a Gmail or Hotmail account.

1. Edit your php.ini file located inside the php folder of your XAMPP installation path.
2. Search for the line ';sendmail_path = "\"YOUR_XAMPP_PATH\sendmail\sendmail.exe\" -t"'
3. If it has a ';' in the beggining, remove it
4. Edit sendmail.ini file inside the sendmail folder
5. Add the following lines
   
account Gmail
tls on
tls_certcheck off
host smtp.gmail.com
from [your-email]@gmail.com
auth on
user [your-email]@gmail.com
password [your-password]
Finally edit the account default line, it should look like this
account default : Gmail
That's it! Now restart apache and you can now send mails.

If you want to use Hotmail instead of Gmail just change the host to 'smtp.live.com', the email adresses, and if you want, the account name (Hotmail instead of Gmail).

Read more...

Rounded Corners with Yahoo Javascript Library, YUI 3

YUI 3 is an awesome Javascript library by Yahoo!, I'm really loving it, it has a very nice organization and it's nice to use.
Something that seemed a bit weird to me though, it's that it doesn't have a Rounded Corners plugin, so I decided to create one, and here it is!
Using it it's pretty simple, here it's and example:



Enjoy!

Read more...

Creating Anonymous PHP Objects

So I'm working on akaikiwi and found out a very nice thing, which doesn't really help me right now, but I really feel like sharing it, as I'm sure it'll be useful for somebody.

$obj = (object) array('foo' => 'bar', 'property' => 'value');
echo $obj->foo; // prints 'bar'
echo $obj->property; // prints 'value'

That's it! That will cast the associative array to stdObject. Useful to save some code.
In PHP 5.3 you could actually also use closures to make some nasty stuff, it's a pity PHP 5.3 is still not widely used.

Source: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.php#84292

Read more...

More on YUI and akaikiwi

So far, I've been working on a personal site, forum-like, and I've been playing with YUI more, I'm very satisfied, it feels way nicer and more like Javascript than other frameworks. I like the organization of widgets, plugins and extensions. It's really nice so far.
About akaikiwi, I'm adding little fixes here and there, thanks to my project, I always try to follow YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) so basically add functionality when I need it, instead of when I think I will, this makes the libraries simple and tight.
The site should be finished by febrary but I think it might take until the end of march to get it up and running online.
About akaikiwi, I don't know when the first release is comming, but I think it will be released after this site is finished and tested.

Read more...