Writing

Creating custom selectors with jQuery

I recently re-discovered a powerful, but mostly hidden feature of jQuery. If you’ve used jQuery for any length of time you’ve probably used filter selectors like :input, :visible or :hidden. What you may not know is, it is really simple to add your own filter selectors. The secret lies in $.expr.filters which is an object of filters.

Using composer in CakePHP 3.0

For 3.0 the team and I are re-visiting how we’ll recommend installing CakePHP, and as always I wanted to try to provide context on what my thoughts are, and get some feedback on the plans.

Background & context

CakePHP is currently availiable in a few different ways. Generally people either download zip files, or clone the repository. Both of these methods provide a quick easy way to get started.

Configuration in CakePHP 3.0

Early work has started for CakePHP 3.0, and I’ve started re-visiting how CakePHP handles configuration and bootstrapping. I want to focus on configuration for this post, as bootstrapping, while related is worthy of its own post. The goal of this post is to provide some context on the planned changes, and to get feedback on those changes. My hope is that by getting feedback early on we can avoid problems & surprises later on.

Re-designing CakePHP

Myself and the rest of the CakePHP team recently embarked on a journey to refresh and redesign the CakePHP website and brand. I wanted to delve into my process and thinking around the changes.

The cakephp.org website has been around for quite sometime. Its previous incarnation served the project amazingly well.

Selenium, jQuery and pending ajax requests

We use selenium extensively at work for automated acceptance tests. If you’ve never used selenium, it allows you to record and playback browser sessions and create integration tests from the perspective of a browser. Its generally a great tool, and really helps make sure we don’t release broken code. Recently, however I’ve found Selenium can have adverse reactions with jQuery.

New errors in PHP 5.4

I’ve been running the PHP5.4 RC builds for the last few months, and there are some interesting changes in the upcoming PHP release. On top of all the great new features coming in PHP5.4. After updating to PHP5.4-RC4, a few things that used to not trigger errors and silently do the wrong thing, now trigger notices or warnings.

My quest for a new programming typeface

I’ve been working all day everyday with Monaco for the last 6 years. Monaco is a great typeface, it has a number of really great properties. It has a large x-height, and a large m-width. This make it great typeface at small sizes. While monaco is a perfectly good typeface, I wanted experiment and see if there is another typeface that would be even better.

Using bcrypt for passwords in CakePHP

CakePHP uses salted sha1 hashes for passwords by default, and has for a while. There has been some talk on the mailing list lately of switching the default hashing to something more secure, such as bcrypt. I think this is a great idea, and will find its way into CakePHP in a future release. Providing a reasonanle upgrade experience is the biggest problem to solve, if the default hashing strategy was to change.

CakeFest 2011 slides posted

In case you were not able to attend CakeFest 2011. I’ve posted my slides up on slideshare. The event was a great success. Thanks to Graham for organizing the event and to all the attendees. Its great to meet the community and put faces and names to irc handles and mailing list email addresses.

Creating folded ribbons edges with CSS

While working on tweaking a notification box design, I wanted to include the element’s heading in a folded ribbon element. I also wanted to avoid using any images and just use CSS. Mostly to try my hand at using generated content and some CSS that I don’t normally get to use.