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

The last couple of months I've been using my Xoom more and more. I give it many uses, like streaming Starcraft 2 games, reading email, magazines, books, playing MKV videos, gaming and much more. Apps are getting much better over time and so are games.

After seeing a weird behavior when loading one of our sites at work when my connection lagged, I tried to look for a way to slow down my browser's network to see how the site was slowly being loaded. After some work I ran into this blog post "Simulating slow or laggy network connections in OS X" but it wasn't the most friendly procedure.

After giving it a try I decided to create a short script and it works beautifully.

touch slow.sh
chmod 700

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...