I was wondering about the RSS facilities in eZ for a while now. While there are all nice and dandy for simple things, they fall short for more complicated things (like say providing RSS streams for the comments of a blog posting without creating the stream by hand) or, which is my personal thing as my blog categories are based upon object relation, the fact that a new object is related to some other object (which, in it's very essence, is what tagging is all about). So one of these days, I want to address this two things and add RSS export that will allow on the fly creation of RSS streams (think rss/$parentnodeid and the module will export all child objects of parentnode) and the above mentioned tagging features. I'm not yet quite sure just how I'm gonna do it but it's not like that ever stopped anyone ;)

I just ran David Wheeler's SLOCCount tool on a copy of eZ publish 3.7.3. David describes SLOCCount as:

a set of tools for counting physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) in a large number of languages of a potentially large set of programs.

The tool generated a bunch of interesting stats, including an estimated cost to develop the eZ publish codebase: $5,701,201 USD.

Read on for more details.

I just ran David Wheeler's SLOCCount tool on a copy of eZ publish 3.7.3, WordPress 2.0.1 and eZ components 1.0. The tool generated a bunch of interesting stats, including an estimated cost to develop the eZ publish 3.7.3 codebase of $5,701,201 USD.

Read on for more details.

I just ran David Wheeler's SLOCCount tool on a copy of eZ publish 3.7.3, WordPress 2.0.1 and eZ components 1.0. The tool generated a bunch of interesting stats, including an estimated cost to develop the eZ publish 3.7.3 codebase of $5,701,201 USD.

Read on for more details.

Will Pate, a sharp Vancouver web marketer, is looking for a new gig, specifically:

A great job with an awesome company,
filled with people who "get it"

He comes highly recommended by friends - read his blog post on the topic to learn more.

This has been due for a long time but I just never found the time... The usual disclaimers about it being evil and broken still apply, though.

For my forum efforts I figured I should offer tracking of read/unread status of certain objects. Now obviously the KISS approach would be to have a table with and just regard everything in there as being read. However, this has something like m*n storage needs and likely wont scale very far. What's would for example happen on site with 10000 objects if a new user decided all old postings should be marked read for him? It would result in the DB growing by 10000 rows... There must be a better a way (after all there nearly always is). The only really practicable way I can think of is a table with , i.e. whole ranges of read objects. But this also suffers of two problems: 1) there's no way to keep track of different versions of an object, so it's essentially only useful for site that have archive like functionality with no changes to objects once they are published. 2) it needs a lot more code to work (especially some code that goes and merges ranges if applicable). It's not so bad but the first issue can't really be solved this way I believe...

Like mood rings and fanny packs, like mullets and the Macarena, the weighted tag clouds meme popularized by Flickr and Technorati is about to cross a permanent cultural shame threshold. Brilliant as the idea remains, faddishness is choking its air supply.

If you are WordPress user and you like the tag cloud displayed on the front page of this site, the WordPress plugin I hacked up to generate the cloud is available here.

DevShed is continuing their "Enforcing Object Types in PHP" series with this new tutorial today. This time, they're focusing mor eon the use of the instanceof operator in PHP5.

This three-part series goes through the basic concepts of object type enforcement in PHP 4/PHP 5. It explores different approaches for checking types of objects to help you avoid possible code contamination when objects of incorrect type are inputted within PHP classes.

The end result of this article hopefully will help you to expand your grounding in how to implement object type enforcement in PHP 5, by developing some illustrative, object-oriented examples.

They start with a look at how not to do the object checking but provide a solution to the situation with the help of the instanceof operator. They explain its usage in the context of the widget class they've created, and show you how it can be integrated easily to simplify object validation.