David James Whitely » PHP

Web Tools

admin — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:41:09 +0000

This is going to be a list of web development tools that I use. Right now, it’s pretty small. Inspired by this page from elementiks.com.

Templates:
Bulletproof Templates – Joomla Blank Skeleton Templates
Sandbox by Plaintext – WordPress Blank Skeleton Template

jQuery:
Visual jQuery
jQuery API

Adventures in Aspell – Installing and Configuring for Dreamhost

admin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:32:47 +0000

I’m working on a special project involving Aspell, here are some instructions for updating Aspell on your Dreamhost server.
This page from Dreamhost has proven to be extremely useful.
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/aspell-0.60.6.tar.gz wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/en/aspell6-en-6.0-0.tar.bz2 tar -xvzf aspell-0.60.6.tar.gz tar -xvjf aspell6-en-6.0-0.tar.bz2 mkdir usr cd aspell-0.60.6 ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr make make install make clean cd ..
Then
nano .bash_profile
Add Aspell to your path:
PATH=$HOME/usr/bin/:$HOME/usr/share/:$PATH export PATH
Save changes, logout and back in to see changes to your path.
Then
cd aspell6-en-6.0-0 ./configure make make install make clean cd ..

That’s it! Type “aspell -v” to make sure you’re now running version 6, not 3, which is what Dreamhost has by default. Disregard what it says about changing spellchecker.php, it’s still necessary to force utf-8 (at least in my tests). Now it’s time to start hacking Speller Pages.

Manually call Joomla Module to store as PHP variable, Allow HTML in Menu Title

admin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:09:55 +0000

This is a handy piece of code I use for whenever I need to load the output of a Joomla module as a PHP variable. One common use for this is to allow for HTML tags in menu titles. It’s also handy if you need to do string searches.

<? // extra code to make this work $style = -2; // set the style $position = "column4"; // set the position of the modules to be loaded // end of extra code $document = &JFactory::getDocument(); $renderer = $document->loadRenderer('module'); $params = array('style'=>$style); $contents = ''; foreach (JModuleHelper::getModules($position) as $mod) { $contents .= $renderer->render($mod, $params); } // html_entity_decode allows html from the menu title to parse normally // otherwise, just do whatever you need to $contents echo html_entity_decode($contents); ?>