At the end of my recent post on building a cron service for your Zend Framework application, I mentioned a couple of weaknesses in the approach I took. Most notably, my cron service lacked any kind of locking mechanism to prevent cron runs from overlapping.
Recently, in a fit of narcissism, I decided that my blog needed to be Twitter-aware; that is, I wanted all my posts to display automatically-generated lists of all Twitter tweets that reference them (via the backtweets.com API). Loading these backtweets is a bit resource-intensive, so I figured it'd be best to offload the work to a scheduled background task (e.g., a cron job).
Zend_Acl is a very powerful tool to help manage access control logic, but it can be a bit difficult to determine exactly where and how to use it.
In previous Zend Framework apps I've written, I often handled access control at the level of the controller action. Each action was represented in the ACL as a resource, and the ACL logic was applied by a custom plugin just prior to any action dispatch.
Although I've loved using Wordpress for the duration of this blog, recently I've been working on a custom replacement blog platform that I can host and maintain myself. This probably sounds odd, especially since there are already so many excellent blogging platforms available, but I've pushed ahead with it for a couple of reasons I think most developers will understand:
This has been a year of busy weekends for Jamie and I, but these last couple of days have been a nice exception, especially after how busy last weekend was.
Following right on the heels of my weekend at DrupalCamp, I've stumbled across a few rather interesting blog posts on how Drupal is perceived in other parts of the PHP development community. Thought I'd post the links and make a few comments here, since the issues being discussed are pretty relevant to my day-to-day work as a web technology guy.
This blog is powered by Blahg, a custom-built PHP 5 blogging solution leveraging such noted libraries as Zend Framework, Doctrine, TinyMCE and maybe some more I'm forgetting at the moment.
As a sort of proof of concept for the ideas I discussed in my previous post, I've put together the first draft of what could become a very helpful reusable module. With this post, I'd like to introduce my new Zend Framework "content" module, which provides several abstract components for a reusable model layer, along with a concrete framework for building a variety of content types sharing a common database-based persistence layer.
It’s been almost a month now since the release of Zend Framework 1.8, and although I was very excited about some of the new features, it’s taken me awhile to digest that excitement into something bloggable.
Well, I’ve finally gone ahead and posted a Zend Framework component proposal: Zend_Auth_Adapter_Flexible. It’s the same idea I wrote up in my last post, but with a few key modifications; I thought I’d take a minute or two to discuss those modifications here.