Apostolos Dountsis

How many times you have stumbled upon a theme or a plug-in that you want to test on your site? WordPress does not offer a preview feature so the only option is to make it live which should not be the prefered (and only) option while testing or in general experimenting with new features.

In this article, we will investigate how we can setup a copy of our WordPress powered site on a local machine will serve as a development and test environment.

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I am happy to announce that Social Bookmarks 4.0 is now available. The previous version had over 8500 downloads. I hope that the new version continues on the success of the previous versions.

Social Bookmarks 4 is possibly the biggest release of the plugin. For a start, it features a new look-and-feel with AJAX and new buttons. The code base has been completely re-written. Also, this version introduces localization to the plugin. You can now download additional language packs from the site to gain access to language specific sites. A template pack is also available so that you can write your own language packs. Finally, the number of included sites out of the box is now 50.

Just head to the Downloads section and grab it!

Chris, the developer of ESftp , recently updated his Eclipse plugin to version 1.1.0, which fixes a lot of problems introduced with the 1.0.9 release.

This version, gives the ability to login using KeyboardAuthentication modes for SFTP servers, so if you were having to modify your ssh_config to login, this has just fixed your problem, also it might fix some other problems which people had with their SFTP servers that they never attributed to this problem.

He is now working on ESftp 1.1.1 which will have the following features:

It has a remote site browser, so you can browse the remote site and pick your site root without having to remember it off the top of your head. In esftp 1.1.2, A View will be put together which will incorporate the same site browser, but like dreamweaver, will let you manipulate remote files from your project, which is something that has been in high demand.

It supports FTP, plain FTP at the moment, although there are plans to allow FTP TLS and FTP SSL in esftp 1.1.2, or maybe 1.1.3 depending on demand.

The preferences system has been totally rewritten and is now doing it’s job properly, you can restore defaults and have it work predictably. You can define workspace preferences and have those automagically import into all projects if they are not overridden by specific project properties.

Also, esftp and esftp-lib have been merged back together, simplifying the installation process.

The one thing which is on his list of things to do is to allow setting the chmod status of the files which are uploaded, someone requested that they would like to set them to some default that they know would work, however this is on the list of things for esftp 1.1.2, it might not actually be possible with the ftp library that it is currently using (ftp4che), if anyone knows a better LGPL or GPL library apart from apache-commons, drop him an email.

You can contact Chris by email at: chris dot alex dot thomas at gmail dot com

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The power of PHP rests on its simplicity and speed. One of the common uses of dynamic pages is the processing of HTML forms. PHP does not offer any functions for the development of web forms so managing one in PHP tends to be nothing more than a sequence of print statements. The PEAR library contains the HTML_QUICKFORM package that provides all the necessary classes and methods to display and manage HTML forms.

QuickForm Package

The HTML_QUICKFORM package (I will be referring to it as QuickForm) provides a set of classes creating, validating, processing HTML forms. Instead of printing form elements one-by-one, we can use its methods to define a form structure that handles the form. QuickForm automatically preserves default values for our elements across form submission, displays error messages, allows custom server-side validation and filtering that can be applied to individual fields and/or the complete form and generates JavaScript code for client-side validation. Furthermore, it simplifies file uploads.

The only reason why someone may feel reluctant in using QuickForm is due to the lack of proper documentation. However, this should not hold you back as this series of articles intends to cover the majority of the package. Among others, we will be concentrating on:

• Displaying a form
• Processing the from input
• Field validation
• File Uploading
• Using SMARTY for rendering the form

The goal of the articles is to demonstrate how we can make use of QuickForm and SMARTY to develop a web application.

Requisites

QuickForm not part of the standard PEAR installation. Therefore, we need to download it and place it in the HTML directory of PEAR. Please note that the HTML_COMMON package needs to be present as well.

If the following line does not return an error then you have QuickForm present on your system.
require('HTML/QuickForm.php');

In the case that you are working on a shared host environment and you do not have access to the PEAR directory and therefore you cannot install HTML_QUICKFORM then you can always download PEAR, HTML_COMMON and HTML_QUICKFORM to your webspace. Instructions on the manual installation of PEAR can be found on the PEAR web site.

During one of my web surfing expeditions, I stumbled upon this comparison between mathematicians and programmers. The author states that “a solid block of code is like a well proven theorem” and I couldn’t agree more.

Mathematics train the brain to operate in a organised manner and develop a coherent way of thinking that facilitates in problem solving.

Ted has now started publishing a series of articles under the title “Programming like a Mathematician“ that should be read by every programmer.