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GraphQL in the world of WordPress as Headless CMS. To be or not to be?

Posted by on in iDevelop, PHP | 0 comments

Headless CMS are all the rage from past some time. The idea of rendering a full page from the CMS itself for every request seems old & boring. To a certain point, the benefits of going Headless are valid & quantifiable.

To put it plainly, in a Headless implementation, the backend and frontend are separated out. The CMS (backend in this case) would just be responsible for managing the content. The frontend is decoupled from it & it can be built on an entirely different tech stack than what the backend is built on. Both frontend and backend are connected by an API (provided by backend) which the frontend uses to fetch data to display it on the screen. This way, the whole page (containing data + layout elements) would not have to be loaded and rendered for every request. This provides a few benefits right off the bat:

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Fixing data encoding in a MySQL database

Posted by on in iDevelop, PHP | 0 comments

Offlate I’ve been working on a pet project, part of which involved restoring an old MySQL database. The backup was of MySQL data files and not a SQL dump. However, restoring database from those data files was not much of an issue; I just hopped over to PuPHPet and downloaded config for a VM which was quickly setup, MySQL data files copied over to /var/lib/mysql/<db-name>, repair command run and a SQL dump created.

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iG:Syntax Hiliter v5.0

Posted by on in iDevelop, iG:Syntax Hiliter, PHP, WP-Plugins | 0 comments

iG:Syntax Hiliter v5.0 is now available for download. Its been about two and half years since last release of v4.2 (v4.3 was a bugfix release made next day).

What has changed?
Well, lots on the code front, a bit on the user front. Some of those things are:

  • Language file/name cache was not re-building automatically, fixed now.
  • Finer control over GeSHi behaviour & code parsing.
  • Plugin stylesheet can be disabled if you want to use your own for code boxes.
  • CSS & JS assets are enqueued only if they’re needed.

This version sees a major code over-haul, a major re-write/restructuring of the code which has resulted in a cleaner, modular & better performing code. Also the PHP version requirement has been bumped up to PHP 5.3.0. The core code of the plugin would not load if installed PHP version is less than 5.3.0, fail gracefully & show you a friendly notice in wp-admin about it.

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WordPress metaboxes Object Oriented way.....

Posted by on in iDevelop, iG:Custom Metaboxes, PHP, WP-Plugins | 0 comments

This is something that I’ve been meaning to do for a while but didn’t get around to it till recently, or rather, mid November last year. I wanted a neat, clean, Object Oriented way to create metaboxes in WordPress, which would be light & fast, and yet flexible enough to allow override on both UI render and data validation/sanitization. The other requirement was that I was looking to over-haul some old code that we’ve been using at PMC (my employer), so naturally the code has to be WordPress.com VIP compliant as pretty much all our sites are hosted there. And because I’ve the uncurable itch to roll my own thing, I just had to do it! ЁЯШЙ

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Abstract properties in PHP

Posted by on in iDevelop, PHP | 3 comments

What are abstract properties? There are abstract methods but the notion of an abstract property seems a bit ridiculous. Why so, you might ask! Well, the thing is, methods are declared & defined (not necessarily at same time). So you can declare a method without actually defining it (ie., no body, no set of commands which it will execute) and the same can be defined at a later stage. But there is no such thing as defining a property of a class; properties are always declared as containers of data which reserve a space in memory on class initialization.

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Supercharged Models in Laravel

Posted by on in iDevelop, PHP | 0 comments

When I was first started playing around with NodeJS few months back, I came across Mongoose, a really neat ODM for MongoDB. You just needed to define the schema for each entity and pass it to that model and Mongoose would validate all data against that schema. That concept kinda intrigued me, as you wouldn’t need to create your own validation for the data.

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Using AJAX in Laravel

Posted by on in iDevelop, Javascript, PHP | 24 comments

This question came up in a forum where I drop by now & then. It is also something that I recall answering previously on one or two occasions. So I thought I’d write about it here with a rudimentary example to provide a gist of how it works.

There’s no mystery or secret voodoo involved in having AJAX work in a Laravel app. On its own Laravel 4 (current version) doesn’t have any API for implementing AJAX, so you’ll need to do the footwork yourself. The basic concept that applies everywhere else applies here as well; grab the data from a HTML form, create an AJAX request and send it to server to a URL on which data is expected. Form data is retrieved on server just like any normal form data would be, the only key part is since you’re dealing with an AJAX request you can’t send back a normal View as response, you’ll need to make your own response with proper headers.

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PHP: Which framework??

Posted by on in iDevelop, PHP | 2 comments

At recently concluded BarCamp Delhi 10, there was more than one discussion on frameworks, be it Javascript or PHP. There are a lot of frameworks around for just about everything – server side stuff (like for PHP, Ruby, Python, Java etc), layout (CSS frameworks) or client side frameworks (for Javascript). Over the years I’ve tried out & played with a number of them across different programming languages but since I mainly work in PHP, lets talk about that here. I wrote a similar blog post about 7 years ago which referenced a comparison done by someone else and which I used as a point of reference to choose a framework which best suited me, but times have changed a lot and so have the requirements, expectations etc.

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Zen of WordPress development.....

Posted by on in iDevelop, PHP | 1 comment

At BarCamp Delhi 9 someone asked me how I go about developing on WordPress and what would I advice to someone starting on it. We had a good discussion at length & though its been a couple of months since then, I thought I’d share my insights here as well.

Basics:

The usual basics and good development practices apply here as well, so keep them in mind. WordPress has documented & sane coding standards, so make sure you understand & follow them. Other basic principles like DRY, KISS, etc. also apply. If you don’t already, then document your code. Use code comments extensively, document each function and every complex code block.

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Setting up a PHP Development Environment - v2

Posted by on in iDevelop, PHP | 13 comments

Sometime back I wrote a step-by-step guide for setting up PHP development environment in a virtual machine. This is a simplified (& less tiring) version of that.

You’ll need a few things to proceed:

  • A computer, ofcourse. I used a MacBook Pro running OS-X Lion.
  • Oracle’s VirtualBox VM software – get it from here.
  • A linux distro. We will use Ubuntu Server here. Current LTS version is 12.04. Download the 32 bit ISO from here. Remember to download 32 bit version, the 64 bit version is kinda sluggish on less than 4 GB of RAM. 32 bit version is good enough for running web development stack unless you have specific needs.

 

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