For Cited (Dutch) I created a dynamic quote request form (Dutch) which allows potential customers to specify exactly what they are looking for (of course limited to the options that are available).

Through a secured back-end, the site-owner can specify which configuration options are available in which order for which products and categories. You may notice a lot of different configurations are possible!

Within the existing site, the MVC of Zend Framework was used to build only the form and back-end. It’s not ideal, but yet again proves the advantage of the ZF use-at-will structure: almost anything is possible.

So you now know where to get your next shipment of USB sticks/braces/cards!

PHP Development Tools (PDT) for Eclipse makes me feel uncomfortable. I start to doubt myself because I cannot seem to find the intended way to upgrade to a new version.

Eclipse in general is such an well structured IDE: it has so many advanced features to increase your productivity (yes, I just saw a presentation by Mik Kersten about Mylyn). But for some reason, while using PDT 1.0.3, I cannot find a way to upgrade to a new version from within Eclipse. Using the update manager I mean. Isn’t that the most logical place to look?

Also, I wasn’t able to find one decent post about someone explaining how to do this. Because of that, I’m in doubt with myself: am I to stupid to see this or is it really not possible. I cannot imagine the latter is true so…

In the end I just downloaded the PDT 2.0 all-in-one package and unpacked it over my previous installation and everything seems to work fine. Maybe this is the only way to upgrade to a new version? No, never mind, this can’t be true.

In an attempt to write more (short) posts about completed projects: a first case.

Last year I built this Bikini store for Bubble (warning: nasty browser resize) and this week a lot of changes were launched. Among them: a few fancy JavaScript effects, a lot of usability improvements and an altered delivery costs calculation.

Zend Framework got upgraded from version 1.5.3 to 1.7.6. Only major consequence was removal of parent directory traversal when including view scripts because of this fix.

No one doubts that learning something new is a good way to increase job security, productivity and overall happiness.

But in these tough economic times, it’s one of the mayor things people tend to spend time and money on. At least online:

The graph above shows the traffic boosts some online universities have been getting over the last months (although you may not be able to see it, ashford.edu has also doubled their traffic in the last months with an estimate of about 200.000 visitors).

If an online degree doesn’t sound appealing to you, simply reading a book can bring the same benefits.

Some suggestions:

I hope to order and read these this year. (Although I don’t know about the last one yet: it’s not the book I would usually read, but Andy pointed me to its site and the user story is just so funny.)

The phpdb.org server seems to be unreachable since yesterday, together with the Propel and Creole Subversion repositories.

Well, I guess their host doesn’t work weekends so lets hope it will be back up on Monday.

In the meanwhile, you will probably also get a timeout error message when updating your projects which have the Propel repository linked with svn:externals. Here’s a list of the different options you have:

• The easiest: don’t update the external libraries. On Windows, select “Update to revision…” in the TortoiseSVN right-click menu and check “Omit externals” instead of performing a normal “SVN Update”. Since you’ve probably linked to a tag it doesn’t need updating anyway (unless someone linked to a new version).
• Create your own repository with the files you still have in your working copy: inside the external libraries folder, select “Export” in the TortoiseSVN menu and export to a new folder which you can then import into a new repository. That new repository can then be used as an svn:externals link.
• Include the Propel files from option 2 inside your project instead of linking to them. But this takes away the flexibility svn:externals provides, so it is not preferable.

Luckily, most SVN servers have a good up-time record.