I recently got bored from updating my and friends WordPress sites. It is really boring to backup old installation, backup database (you can skip these steps, but if something goes wrong… ) and upload new installation. Be careful not to override custom files, etc. And finally run update script.

Well it is not that bad if you have only couple of WordPress installations, but I have a dozens… maybe two or three dozens. So I asked myself couple of times ago, how to automate it… It was not enough time.. or enough WordPress installations. But time has come and it is close to be ready in beta version.

After quite a long period I finally found some spare time for work on my WordPress plugins. I did some small fixes and moved Custom Logo and Plugin List into WordPress Plugin Directory. It is only a beginning. I am working on rest of my plugins and also one brand new plugin. As usually this new plugin idea came from everyday practise .

Happy WordPressing

Well Ext Javascript library is great. No doubt about it. And because I am still using PHP for some of my projects, I wanted some abstraction over Ext for PHP. There was no such project for PHP at that time. So I decided to start-up with some small prototype (yes I am XP fan ). All worked quite well, and code base started to expand. But one day I realized that I am doing noting than rewriting Ext to PHP… That strange feeling did not came away and I decided to do something with it. Back to the trees…. So after some time spent by thinking about design and generally whole purpose and motivation to writing PHP helper for Ext library… And my conclusion was that I will write some helper framework for handling communication (JSON and XML) and to help generally with all but Javascript itself. Ext syntax is simple and nicely designed so why not use Ext syntax itself… So that was how ExtPHPUI was born…

With ExtPHPUI I am focusing on following features:

• simplicity
• security
• performance
• flexibility

These more server oriented features are not in the scope of Ext JS, so I decided to provide helpers to simplify Ext JS sever side development…

If anyone is interested in PHP development with Ext JS library or even ExtPHPUI and want to share some knowledge and experiences feel free to contact me. I will write some more information about this project later.

I know that this is not fresh news, but it is really important to me… PHP4 is dead! God bless. But it is not absolute true – it will be stinking around for some more time…

I have to say that I really love WordPress because of it’s simplicity and continuous development. I also never faced any issues while upgrading to a new version. Until today. I did all what was recommended, but was unable to complete upgrade. It ends up with downgrade back to previous version. I did some searching about this issue, but I do not see a clue. Uprade.php script just stops displays only WP logo and blog itself displays a lot of database errors . It looks like upgrade.php script failed before changing database structure (#_categories -> #_terms and other tables…). I have to check whats is wrong and did some manual upgrade later . I prepare some WP 2.3.1 environment for testing my plugins. Yes I did not finished it yet . New installation of WP 2.3.1 works like a charm as usual .

Yes I tried another PHP framework – CakePHP. I am quite familiar with Zend Framework and prefer it, but friends of mine are working on an interesting project using this CakePHP so I had to checkout what is going on there . It is another MVC framework inspired by RubyOnRails. More info can be found on project website. I did my first tests, first Helpers (to be exact DataGridHelper because I am lazy and like nice UI ) and continue to play with… Maybe I will release some Helpers and Components later. But have to say that my experiences with this framework are really good. I will report my later experiences too, while project and my knowledge of CakePHP will grow. Now back to the baking…

Bill Karwin, Product Engineering Manager for the Zend Framework announced Zend Framework Beta Release 0.9.0. From announcement:

This is the first Beta Release of Zend Framework. This marks a new milestone for the Framework project, because with the status of Beta, we are establishing the feature set for Zend Framework 1.0, and we are adopting a commitment to backward-compatibility and interface stability

You can download it from http://framework.zend.com/. Read full announcement here.

I found an interesting article on phpbuilder.com about coding tips and tricks for PHP developers. It is targeted mainly to PHP4 but these principes stay the same with php5.
So here you have URLs:

• 10 Tips That Every PHP Newbie Should Know, part 1
• 10 Tips That Every PHP Newbie Should Know, part 2
• Fundamentals of PHP Superglobals
• Writing More Secure PHP Programs

Stay tunned… more to come later.

PRADO is a component-based and event-driven Web programming framework for PHP 5. PRADO reconceptualizes Web application development in terms of components, events and properties instead of procedures, URLs and query parameters.
This is not meant as introduction to PRADO. I only have a few things I want to tell about. I know that it is a few months later, but… First of all I have to say, that there is no doubt about quality of this project both from desing and implementation point of view. The first thing that surprised me was the fact, that PRADO is so simillar to ASP.NET. Of cource if it will be only concept or design, but there are simillar names of methods e.g. javascript __doPostBack(), way the namespaces are named and many more… And this is only simple example, there are more similarities to .NET framework. I have to say, that in my current project (WM framework) I took OOP design of PRADO as an pattern for building my own PHP5 classes (of course that there was more pattersn like Java or C#). One reason is that there is no materials about practical level of OOP design in PHP5, I do not have enough experiences (and time to gain them) and the final – I belive that PRADO is a good example (because it wins ZEND contest)… And who could know more about PHP than core developers