IVAN SOTO

Since I work with WordPress on a daily basis now, I will begin posting some tutorials for it. The first one will be about this quite awesome MVC framework plugin developed by Tom Benner.

In case you didn't know, Model-View-Controller is a software architecture used in most modern frameworks. The idea is to separate the logic, the data and the user interface.

The difference with this plugin is that it was implemented as a Wordpress extension, so you get to use WP routes, users, permissions, etc.

Installing

You just need to download and activate WP MVC and then create a plugin. That plugin can be generated with WP MVC so you can save quite some time. In order to generate an empty plugin you must go to the plugin folder:

cd wp-content/plugins/wp-mvc/
chmod +x wpmvc
create the plugin
./wpmvc generate plugin mPlugin

MenuStructure is a simple module I built for Kohana3 for creating menu trees. I'ts very easy to use, and in this tutorial I will show how to build a very basic website with a tree navigation menu.

First of all, start with a clean installation of Kohana 3 (that we will call ko3site), and then setup the database and htaccess file. (You should know how to get to this point).

Now, install MenuStructure in the application's modules folder.

I just released a small module for Kohana 3 called menustructure. The main purpose is to help build a menu tree on a website with just one table.

The menu builder loop is from a old code I had for quite some time. Take a look at the readme file to get an idea on how to use it.

GitHub - https://github.com/ivansf/menustructure

During the last weeks I've been playing (or working actually) with phpStorm. For those who haven't heard about this, phpStorm (or WebIDE) is an awesome IDE for web developers, it has support for quite a few languages, good deployment options and version control support (SVN, GIT, CVS).

I consider myself one of the now disappointed users of Aptana who have seen how their team started building an incredible IDE for web development that supports quite a few technologies to go shifting towards Rails development. It first started by dropping the support of their own php plugin in favor of PDT (which can be really good) but this plugin has almost no integration with Aptana, all appearance options are separate from the rest.

Now to make it even worse, they release RadRails 3 (Aptana Studio 3) and make everyone scratch their heads. http://aptana.com/ features RadRails, while http://www.aptana.org/ features Aptana Studio. But they also have http://www.radrails.org/ !!

It's time to move on...

During this year I've been moving my projects to GIT. While my private projects are on this server, my public ones are on GitHub as Open Source. Git is a really wonderful version control tool for any kind of project. It makes it easy for me to deploy, maintain and update my current sites. I just wish there could be a way to include the database on it. In this post I will explain how I'm using GIT to manage a Drupal site on both local and live environment. And since most people already have a site working, I will explain starting from an existing site.

Create the repository

The very first thing is going to the actual site, in my server this site is in: /var/www/sitename.com/public

cd /var/www/sitename.com/public
git init
echo "sites/default/settings.php" >> .gitignore

You can also run this if you want to ignore the files folder (that's really up to you)

echo "sites/default/files" >> .gitignore

Then you have to add all files to the repository and make the first commit

git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit for this site"