March 2003 – Something Odd!

revjim.net: cafelog: a look at bad code

revjim reviewed Cafelog/b2 here. I have to be honest here and admit I haven’t looked at, or been concerned much with the internal workings of b2 yet.
I’ve worked on adding features I saw as vital to any blogging software I wanted to use. Now that those are in place (namely various template enhancements) I have to look seriously at the backend code.
On another note, can anyone access the Cafelog forum or Cafelog itself? I suspect the domains weren’t renewed and now they’re innaccessible.

SmartPHP.net – Smart Template

The Smart Template Engine at SmartPHP looks impressive. It uses more traditional templating conventions than Smarty (ie. begin … end) which is *much* simpler for non-techies to understand.
This is one library I’m going to keep an eye on. I wonder how hard it’d be to support both in b2-smarty as the PHP code used to run them is very similar.

b2 trackbacks

Hmm. Trackbacks are broken. See this post for an example. I’ll have to look at that. more carefully.

SWIG and PHP4

Via the Linux.ie webdev list, SWIG and PHP4. Someone asked if you could interface PHP code to a C++ API. Looks like this could be a winner!

London Airport Announcements

London Airport Announcements – LOL! “I hate this f**king job, and I will be fired”, “I’ve just been fired, and bye-bye everybody”
~~I really need a humour category.~~ *grin*

PHP, MVC – continued

I’ve thought about this for a while after posting my previous attempt at using MVC to design a registration form.
So far, I’ve removed the need for the fields array, and simply used the Smarty “include” function to include html code for text boxes and checkboxes.
I also changed the controller so I could pass the names of different model and view classes to it. The controller should really create different view and model classes for each view IMO but that might be overkill for this. It’ll be a challenge when it comes to more non-linear apps where it’ll make sense to put code into seperate files.

Thank you Bruno for your comments. I think having as minimal a view class as possible is good and desirable considering the power of Smarty templates! The Template becomes the view class in other words.

Here’s a good description of the different components of the MVC architecture. There’s also a good page on Controller design.