This dev box is a replica of our Web environment, will be used to develop our new environment, will host Confluence and Jira also.

What I did

install Apache
Using the terminal


sudo apt-get install apache2


install PHP and Restart Apache


sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart


Created a test.php file


sudo gedit /var/www/testphp.php



Go to

http://localhost/testphp.php

Install MySQL

To finish this guide up we will install MySQL.

Open Terminal and then copy/paste this line:

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

Step 2 (optional). In order for other computers on your network to view the server you have created, you must first edit the “Bind Address”. Begin by opening up Terminal to edit the my.cnf file.

gksudo gedit /etc/mysql/my.cnf

Change the line

bind-address = 127.0.0.1

And change the 127.0.0.1 to your IP address.

Step 3. This is where things may start to get tricky. Begin by typing the following into Terminal:

mysql -u root

Following that copy/paste this line:

mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR ‘root’@'localhost’ = PASSWORD(‘yourpassword’);

(Make sure to change yourpassword to a password of your choice.)

Step 4. We are now going to install a program called phpMyAdmin which is an easy tool to edit your databases. Copy/paste the following line into Terminal:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql phpmyadmin

After that is installed our next task is to get PHP to work with MySQL. To do this we will need to open a file entitled php.ini. To open it type the following:
Click here to find out more!

gksudo gedit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Now we are going to have to uncomment the following line by taking out the semicolon (;).

Change this line:

;extension=mysql.so

To look like this:

extension=mysql.so

Now just restart Apache and you are all set!

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Turns out it’s very easy and can be don ein the .htaccess file

in a nutshell this is what you want


# PHP error handling for production servers
php_flag display_startup_errors off
php_flag display_errors off
php_flag html_errors off
php_flag log_errors on
php_flag ignore_repeated_errors off
php_flag ignore_repeated_source off
php_flag report_memleaks on
php_flag track_errors on
php_value docref_root 0
php_value docref_ext 0
php_value error_log /home/path/public_html/domain/PHP_errors.log
php_value error_reporting 999999999
php_value error_reporting -1
php_value log_errors_max_len 0


Order allow,deny
Deny from all
Satisfy All



Dreamweaver
Possible quite topical – but I actually use it to write all my CSS. Basically I have always used dreamweaver since I started Web development in 2000. For all my non SVN sites the ‘Sites’ functionality is great and you can ftp up and down easily
Don’t ever use
Don’t ever use dreamweaver to built your site visually #fail

BBEdit
BBedit is always open, I basically paste stuff in. Use it for search and replace and general use
I like it because
It’s fast and simple

Photoshop
Not really much to say here, where would the web developer be without Photoshop. Constantly adapting images for use on the web provided by people who don’t understand aspect ratio or 73dpi vs 300dpi
I like it because
I grown up with it since 2000

VMware fusion
As a mac user IE is my biggest problem, specifically IE6 and VMware fusion allows me to run windows and all the IE browsers.
I like it because
I couldn’t upgrade to service pack 2 windows in parallels

Navicat
Navicat is just awesome. Again it is an application I have been using for some time. It just makes using databases very simple. Fast to query and visualise your data. I especially like the ability to create an SSH tunnel for your connections.
I like it because
PHPMyAdmin just isn’t good enough

But in the connection information I kept getting this:

“To perform the requested action, connection information is required.”

To perform the requested action, connection information is required.

After some searching around the web I found the answer. The scripts that run to write to the file system need to be owned by the same user that apache is running as.

Find out what user apache is running as and change ownership of the entire WordPress directory to that user.

So if apache is running as ‘httpd’, use the following commands on your WordPress installation directory:

# chown -R httpd: wordpress

[ad]

got a packet bigger than ‘max_allowed_packet’ bytes

I new I needed to change the my.cnf file yo up the ‘max_allowed_packet’ variable.

Every time i changed the my.cnf file to 32M – in many different locations – when I restarted the server it was defaulted back to 1M

The solution is simple

In MAMP Pro choose

File
Edit Template
MySql my.cnf

Make the change here – restart – and hey presto problem solved

MAMP max_allowed_packet

WHERE var BETWEEN UNIX_TIMESTAMP('$yesterday 00:00:00') AND UNIX_TIMESTAMP('$yesterday 23:59:59')

comic life iphoto error

I recently downloaded Comic Life to have a play around and quickly got frustrated by the fact it wasn’t picking up my iPhoto libraries.

Comic Life cannot find your iPhoto Library
Perhaps you are not using iPhoto or your iPhoto Preferences are out of date?

After much digging around I found this thread on the http://plasq.com/ forum

http://plasq.com/component/option,com_joomlaboard/Itemid,0/func,view/catid,8/id,12539/#12539

It turned out that it wasn’t the fact I had multiple iPhoto Libraries.

The problem is caused by Slideshows in your iPhoto library specifically by music with “&” in the title.

There is a bug in iPhoto which generate illegal XML for these cases…

iPhoto should put some “&” in the string but it is just putting “&”. And in these cases, Comic Life cannot read the file because it’s invalid XML.

An Apple discussion link here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2020829&tstart=0

Drupal form special charaters

While recently translating a website I cam across this problem in 1 of my Drupal modules.

This was my form object


$form = array();
$form['title_'] = array(
'#type' => 'select',
'#title' => t('Anrede'),
'#default_value' => "Herr",
'#options' => array("Herr"=>"Herr", "Frau"=>"Frau", "Fräulein"=>"Fräulein", "Dr"=>"Dr"),
'#required' => true,
);


I kept getting this

After some digging around I found this
Extended characters (as select options in a form)
http://drupal.org/node/102043

Turns out to be a very simple problem – my file wasn’t being encoded as UTF-8

If I encoded the file as UTF-8 and used the actual character ä the problem went away

This was my form object that worked


$form = array();
$form['title_'] = array(
'#type' => 'select',
'#title' => t('Anrede'),
'#default_value' => "Herr",
'#options' => array("Herr"=>"Herr", "Frau"=>"Frau", "Fräulein"=>"Fräulein", "Dr"=>"Dr"),
'#required' => true,
);


Drupal form special charaters utf8

So if you are creating a Drupal form and want to have special charaters like ü, ö, ä etc make sure your Drupal module is encoded UTF-8 and use the characters as is – ü, ö, ä

The content type was Themepark – as in Alton Towers. The exta nodes I need while creating this content item was Rides. Rides also have pictures, copy items and attributes.

After a short time digging around on the internet I found Node Relationships which does exactly what I wanted it to do.

Node Relationships can

• Search and reference (single and multiple value selection)
• Create and reference
• Translate and reference
• View referenced node on new window

And the Create was basically what I was looking for.

The presentation isn’t currently great – but that is what I am going to look into now.

Dreamweaver CS 4 Logo

In Dreamweaver

1. Go to the Preferences dialogue.
2. Open file types/editors.
3. Add the following list of file types to Dreamweaver’s open in code view field:

Modifying Dreamweaver configuration files

Navigate folder that you installed Dreamweaver,
/Applications/Adobe Dreamweaver CS4/configuration
Using your favorite text editor – mine is BBedit – open “Extensions.txt” at the end of the first line at add MODULE, INSTALL etc separated by commas, so the line should read:

also add the extensions to the “:PHP Files” line.

Next navigate to
/Applications/Adobe Dreamweaver CS4/configuration/DocumentTypes
Open “MMDocumentTypes.xml” Search for the line which has an id “PHP_MySQL add the ‘module’ & ‘install’ file extensions to both the “winfileextension” and “macfileextension” so the line should read:

Finally Navigate to
/Applications/Adobe Dreamweaver CS4/configuration/Extensions.txt
and repeat the first step

Restart Dreamweaver and hey presto – your files will open in Code mode and will be color coded