kovshenin.com

Dave Winer’s Commenting Proposal

kovshenin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:30:59 +0000

Based on a recent post by Dave Winer (RSS pioneer) called Proposal: A new kind of blog comment system. And a follow up has been posted here: Why I like comments. Briefly, the idea behind the new commenting system it is the following:

Disable commenting on posts older than 24 hours
Comments are invisible to other commenters until the 24 hour period expires
Commenters can edit their comments during the period
Length limit of 1000 characters

So jumping back to my mail inbox and the comments folder with over a 100 unread and unresponded (and spam) messages, I decided to give it a go, starting from point one. I fully agree with Dave about the reasoning behind all the points, but personally think that 24 hours is too harsh, so I started off with 7 days, keeping in mind that this has to be decreased.

This means that when a post is published, you (my readers) have 7 days to comment. Don’t worry, commenting on support pages for my WordPress plugins has not been switched off.

I’ll hopefully be implementing the rest of the features throughout September, and will keep you posted on Twitter (@kovshenin). Cheers!

WordPress and Magic Quotes

kovshenin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 05:57:09 +0000

This is crazy, and based on a post called WordPress and PHP magic quotes: you want to run me crazy! by Stefano Lissa. I’m writing a plugin prototype for WordPress that uses the new Facebook Graph API to post stuff to my wall on Facebook (upcoming blog post). The original Facebook PHP SDK comes in very handy when working with the Facebook API, and I had quite some fun using it, but..

How to Kill the get_magic_quotes_gpc Function

I’ve been trying to figure this out for hours! I had code working outside WordPress and once I pumped it into a plugin it suddenly stopped authorizing me. I had to dig through the facebook.php code to figure out what’s happening, and here it is. The getSession() method uses the get_magic_quotes_gpc function and strips the slashes from the $_COOKIE superglobal if it’s switched on. Of course, that’s the correct logic supporting both php 5 and php 6, but not WordPress.

I looked through the latest (3.0.1) WordPress core code and was quite surprised to see a function called wp_magic_quotes(). Oh my god, thought I! Commented as:

Add magic quotes and set up $_REQUEST ( $_GET + $_POST )

What the hell is that? Okay, let’s see:

$_GET = add_magic_quotes($_GET);
$_POST = add_magic_quotes($_POST);
$_COOKIE = add_magic_quotes($_COOKIE);
$_SERVER = add_magic_quotes($_SERVER);

How does that sound? So all my apps, plugins, external libraries working with server variables (like Facebook does with cookies) are not allowed to use the magic quotes function? This means that working with WordPress, we must initially assume that all these are quoted, no matter what the php settings are. I don’t even know what question to ask here, perhaps: Is this the way things are done? Why?

To be honest this is getting me a little frustrated. Not by the fact that they’re slashing the whole input (although I don’t see a reason to) but, heh, I’ve been coding based on WordPress for over two years now, and never came across anything like this. Did I miss something in the Getting Started guide? ;) Anyways, the easiest way to get this working is to replace your get_matic_quotes_gpc function with 1, which says it is always switched on.

Eh, Monday morning disappointment ;) Cheers, and thanks for retweeting the post!

Trends: WordPress vs Drupal vs Joomla

kovshenin — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 05:43:37 +0000

The battle’s been going on since 2004-2005, the three open platforms (WordPress, Drupal and Joomla) have been competing for ages. Which is the most popular? Of course you could search for reviews, votes, researches. I even came across a commercial research document about content management systems, their pros, cons and popularity. It still is difficult to convince clients (especially the bigger ones) to use open platforms for their websites. Tonnes of questions are asked about security, performance, etc.

This article will not review any of the platforms mentioned above, nor will it give pros and cons to certain properties of such platforms. We’ve seen enough reviews, tests, benchmarks and even competitions to figure out which the best platform is. In my opinion, there’s no best platform, each is good, and which ever to use is a decision the developer should make.

Anyways, I had my coffee this morning and decided to check out what Google is up to, so I browsed to the Labs. The list is quite big but suddenly I spotted Google Trends, which has been around since 2006. Haven’t used that for a while ;) Sticking in “wordpress, drupal, joomla” into the trend search, I came up with the following results:

Quite interesting isn’t it? Joomla (orange) was in a leading position from 2006 to late 2008, and in late 2009 WordPress (blue) took the lead. Drupal (red) heh, wha? There’s also a ranks by regions, cities and languages which give even more interesting results. For instance, Joomla still leads in Russian, Italian and German languages, and Drupal is very popular in India.

These stats are good when comparing the open platforms, they also show that open platforms are growing overall. But does this convince our clients to pick an open source platform for their website? I recall or three latest clients who calimed that they’d love .NET websites and an ASP (seriously) website. Let’s see:

So Microsoft’s technologies are not as popular as they were in 2004, at least based on Google searches. There’s much more fun stuff you can do with Google Trends, but the question remains. Is this information useful when speaking with clients? Does the global trend mean that pictures in regions will change over time? And why is .NET losing popularity? Just thinking out loud ;) Cheers, and don’t forget to tweet this post if you like it.

Counting Facebook Fans in PHP: The Graph API Way

kovshenin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 05:53:19 +0000

In a previous blog post called How to Count Facebook Fans in PHP I’ve shown a code snippet of how to count the number of fans on a fan page using PHP. Times have changed, the Graph API has been introduced, and due to some responses I introduce here the new way of retrieving your fans count using the new Graph API and php.

Graph API: Literally Two Lines of Code!

Before you copy and paste, flush my comments with ‘my code is not working’ posts, I’d like to get your attention to versioning of the Facebook PHP SDK which we’ve been using all this time. The SDK has changed and of course the old method doesn’t work with the new SDK which is mostly tuned to Graph API, therefore, my previous code still works on a dozen on websites, because I have the old SDK installed back there. So please, be careful to what you download and use, read release notes and change logs, it will save you hours of googling.

The following snippet is based on the Facebook PHP SDK version 2.1.1 (use the Switch Tags option on github to browse through different tags). So get a fresh copy of facebook.php and have it somewhere nearby.

Unlike the old FBQL way, the new Graph API is much easier to work with, and retrieving the fans count is literally two lines of code (initialization doesn’t count). Here’s the snippet to retrieve the fans count for Mashable (don’t forget to replace your application ID and API secret):

require('facebook.php');

$facebook = new Facebook(array(
	'appId' => 'your-app-id',
	'secret' => 'your-api-secret',
));

$mashable = $facebook->api('/mashable');
echo 'Mashable has ' . $mashable['fan_count'] . ' fans';

Easy as that! I was also surprised to see that the Graph API is doing so well. Yeah, the documentation is not very rich, but whenever you need to retrieve something from Facebook, you can always print_r the results, which gives you the full picture. Sending data into Facebook is a little trickier and I’ll show you how in a later blog post.

Cheers! Thanks for your attention and don’t hasitate to retweet this post ;)

How to Generate Quality Data for MySQL

kovshenin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:35:04 +0000

We all had fun with the World Database, Sakila and the others when learning MySQL (see Example Databases), but it sometimes isn’t enough to run certain experiments, benchmarks within your own schema. Of course you could write a script that would generate junk data based on your column types and populate your database with a few thousand entries, but as it turns out, Benjamin Keen already did.

Meet Generate Data – a free and open source script written in php, generates quality data for your databases. Works with MySQL and, well, pretty much with any SQL compliant database I guess. What I liked about Generate Data is that you get to pick your columns, their types, and the sample data like names, last names, integer between two values, lorem ipsum (my favorite) and a bunch of others. This is why I said “quality data”.

There are a few issues I encountered, like trying to get 5000 rows gave me only 200, but such issues could easily be solved by downloading the source code and launching it locally with a few fixing (I wonder why Benjamin did such a bad job at documenting the whole thing). It took me a few minutes to fill up 30,000 rows of sample data, so who needs the World database anyway?

The script is being updated from time to time and new features are being added, not too fast, but they are. Let’s see where Benjamin takes this by the end of this year ;)

WordPress: Oh Those Actions and Filters!

kovshenin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:09:33 +0000

Reading Joost de Valk’s quick post about Simple WordPress Debugging with a query variable made me think for a while. Really, how often do you come accross a white screen with no clue of what’s happening? Very effective indeed, and good note about the security issue, but anyways, what came into my mind is a life-saver for all WordPress themes and plugins developers.

I came accross this following snippet quite some time ago on IRC I believe, but never shared it for no specific reason. Perhaps I thought that everybody is aware of it, but looking at how more and more people struggle with debugging WordPress actions and filters, ugh. Here’s your life-saver:

add_action('all', create_function('', 'var_dump(current_filter());'));

This should be used in functions.php or some plugin, and at first sight you’ll notice a huge bunch of text on the output. Fire up the source view of the page you’re looking at (works for admin panels too) and look through the code. You’ll notice that all actions and filters are printed on screen whenever they’re fired.

How could that be used? It clearly shows the order of each action and filter and it clearly shows the names (which tend to be forgotten sometimes). Maybe there are a few more pros I can’t think of right now. Downsides? It doesn’t actually tell you whether it’s an action or a filter, but anyways – short, useful, could be added up to Joost’s snippet.

Mockingbird Launch: Goodbye Beta Users

kovshenin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 08:24:23 +0000

I received an e-mail a few days ago from Mockingbird, the wireframing online software which I constantly used for my project:

Mockingbird will launch on August 15th, 2010

Hurray? No. According to their blog post about the launch and a few posts on Twitter, most users seem quite disappointed and they do have a point. Some say the pay-per-month model doesn’t work for them, as they prefer to pay per project. Others say that pricing is quite weird and the active/archived projects doesn’t make any sense. Some argue about the number of pages limiting for free users.

After some feedback the guys at Mockingbird posted two updates to the post about new plans, the beta plan and the transition from beta to an upgraded account.

I say that Mockingbird simply ditched all their beta users. I’m very disappointed as I loved their service so much, that I constantly mocked up anything that came into my mind – from websites to apps, mobile apps, mind maps, graphs and charts and much much more. Now that they’re shutting the whole thing down I’m moving back to my good old Axure RP and Photoshop. Too bad.

I do think that at some point any startup has to go commercial and make some cash, but restricting access is definitely not the way. Add some new cool features and make Pro accounts with these features. Add new exclusive components and sell access to them. But restricting access to what you’re already working with, what the hell? Imagine Twitter says that in order to post more than three tweets per day you have to get a $10/mo subscription, huh? Or Gmail says that in order to read more than 10 e-mails per day you need a $5/mo subscription.. Rediculous..

TeamLab vs Basecamp: A Project Management Duel

kovshenin — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 06:04:37 +0000

Team. Team, team, team.. How good is your team if you can’t manage it? This reminds me of an IT Crowd episode:

Well if you can’t work as a team you’re all fired! .. Hello security? Everyone on floor 4 is fired.

As some of you already know, I run a little web development startup here in Moscow called Frumatic and during the past few months we’ve been struggling to get our project management and collaboration right. I don’t think there’s a reason for me to write about how important project management is and that no good business today could live without a good CRM, PM, SCM and the rest.

If you can't work as a team you're all fired!

Today we’ll speak about two awesome project management systems – Basecamp and TeamLab. Both services are quite cool and look alike in some sense. I’ll try to outline the pros and cons of each app, then give a short tip on how to make your choice between the two. Let’s start off with Basecamp.

Basecamp by 37signals

Basecamp has been developed and launched by 37signals back in 2004. Since then it’s been evolving, new very nice features have been developed, and today, Basecamp is a very powerful project management and collaboration tool, offered as a service (SaaS). Basecamp wouldn’t be complete without it’s sisters Highrise (CRM), Backpack (business organizer) and perhaps Campfire (chat) and of course the Basecamp Extras and the Basecamp API which gives developers the power to mash their software with Basecamp.

Basecamp Pros

Let’s start with a short list of Basecamp pros. I’m sure there are tonnes of others:

Web-based and easy to use
Fast and secure, powered by Amazon S3
Maintaned and supported very well
On-going development, enhancements
Offers tonnes of extras and a public API
Offers time tracking

Basecamp Cons

And here’s a list of Basecamp cons. I found some of these quite annoying, but despite that, I still love Basecamp ;)

Quite expensive (good plans start from ~$50/mo)
Not very customizable, all you can change is the logo and color scheme
Does not offer self-hosted version
Does not allow to use your own Amazon S3 account to host your data
Quite poor CRM and Business Organizer
Basecamp Extras are poor, some of them are even commercial

Yeah, paying for software is not a crime, but in my opinion, Basecamp is slightly overpriced, plus you’ll have to pay extra if you’d like to get Backpack or Highrise (which is quite a poor CRM actually, I found SugarCRM CE, which is open-source, much better than Highrise). Now let’s see what TeamLab is all about.

TeamLab by Ascensio System

I came across TeamLab a few weeks ago and I found it to be quite terrific! TeamLab was launched this summer, somewhere in the beginning of July I guess. It’s based in Latvia, where Russian is quite a popular language by the way ;) TeamLab is written in Microsoft ASP .NET (C#) which makes it quite easy to understand. As it is a startup they haven’t yet implemented their monetization plan, so TeamLab is offered free of charge as SaaS or open source for download. You can deploy TeamLab in the Amazon EC2 cloud and use S3 for file hosting, which is quite wikid!

TeamLab Pros

Below is a list of pros I found for TeamLab. These may change in the future ;)

Free and open source, released under GPL
Compatible with Amazon EC2 and S3
Web-based, easy to use
Offers a full-featured Company Intranet and a Wiki
Quite active on Twitter
Offers import and export

TeamLab Cons

The cons of TeamLab from a php developer’s perspective (ASP .NET is good, but .. well ;)

Written in ASP .NET
Does not offer time tracking
Has some bugs, like any other startup ;)
Does not offer extras, mobile or API (maybe it’s only a matter of time)
Will not remain free of charge forever (I guess)

The last point may or may not be true. Like any other startup, TeamLab will go commercial at some point. I spoke to the representatives of TeamLab on Twitter and e-mail, and I’ve been told that all the functionality included in TeamLab now will remain free of charge in the SaaS and the open source downloadable package, but new features will require you to pump their back accounts with money. This is very optimistic indeed, as we’ve already seen such trouble with Sugar CRM Community Edition and Mockingbird, which is planned to go commercial on August 15th.

Making the right choice

Personally, I’m using Basecamp, but TeamLab made quite a good impression, and I do have thoughts about switching. What would make switching much easier is .. Import! An Import from Basecamp feature would be awesome, besides they offer all the tools (API) and documentation to do that.

TeamLab does though offer import and export, but from their own system and that’s good to go, especially since you can have your own self-hosted TeamLab, which would be preferred by large companies, as they do not usually trust third-party services.

So, if you’re worried about security, need time tracking and CRM integration, then yes, Basecamp is definitely your choice. But if you’re willing to play around and build solutions on top of, then go with TeamLab, as you will always be able to have your own extras running inside TeamLab Open Source. This will also save you some cash ;) Thanks for reading and don’t forget to retweet this post!

5 Really Useful Trac Reports

Highcharts: Pure Javascript Charts API

kovshenin — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:51:45 +0000

I was working on a project lately that involved charts and graphs which had to be interactive, lightweight and somewhat complicated. I looked through quite a lot of different chart APIs, and for some time thought that I’d have to go with Open Flash Chart which is good and simple, but it was Flash. There’s nothing wrong with Flash, but Flash is what makes it more complicated to modify and extend. The standard OFC functionality seemed to work fine for me, but soon I came across Highcharts.

Highcharts is purely written in javascript and uses some advanced SVG to render the content. It’s quite impressive and very well documented. Chart control is all done via javascript, and all the options available make it very flexible and extensible. Since everything’s done in javascript it fits well with PHP without having to write tonnes of code or use some third-party library. The json_encode function comes in very handy when passing options from PHP to Highcharts.

Highcharts is free for personal use, commercial licenses start from $80, which is quite okay. Check out the Highcharts Demo page for some terrific usage examples. Happy charting and thanks for retweeting!

5 Awesome Links for Web Designers & Developers

kovshenin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 11:45:13 +0000

It’s July and it’s so damn hot back here! I think all the possible new records have been set last week in Moscow. Thank god we had those new air conditioners install in the office before the heat wave, otherwise it would’ve been impossible to work. Anyways, haven’t tweeted much this week, but I did go through my RSS feeds, and here are some interesting links for web design and development fans:

Browser Cover me – before you present your designs to your clients, make sure you give them a cool border with this online app. There are several different systems and browsers you can pick from, which makes it even more awesome!
phpQuery – how many times did you have to screenscrape a web page and dig something out of it? Yes, XPath is cool, but it doesn’t work with HTML people write these days ;) phpQuery gives you the power of jQuery selectors and functions in php!
15 Must-Have Minimalist Icon Sets – an awesome freebie set for your new web designs. It’s quite important to keep using the fresh stuff, so posts like these are quite handy
10 Useful WordPress Security Tweaks – a very nice article on Smashing Magazine about WordPress security. Very informative and awesome!
Konstantin’s Notes – okay okay, this is my Tumblr page which I use to post stuff on the fly, sometimes quite interesting ;) which makes it awesome too!

This was the short list for today. Stay tuned and thanks for retweeting!