The main reason behind the re-organization of files is to stop putting everything together within wp-content folder. As I am using SVN to manage my WordPress files, I feel more secured if I have less files changed / modified / added to my working copy. The previous structure was designed to store everything, including things are not meant to be shared among sites (installations) like attachments within wp-content folder.

Besides, although putting in everything within the same wp-content folder sounds like a good idea, but what if I want to create yet another new site (installation) for somebody which I don’t feel like sharing plugins and themes to this new site? After digging in the codex for some time, I found this guide that guides me how to further customize WordPress folder path very useful.

So the structure for a site now looks like this

/
|-scripts/ < - where I store my shared scripts
|-|-wordpress/ <- my wordpress, obviously
|-|-|-www/ <- my wordpress working copy
|-|-|-content/ <- new wp-content folders
|-|-|-|-site-id/ <- new wp-content folders for $site_id
|-|-|-|-|-plugins/
|-|-|-|-|-themes/
|-public_html/ <- my public folder, links to /scripts/wordpress/www
|-|-wp-site/ <- new wp-content folder, links to /scripts/wordpress/content/site-id

So now visitors of this blog should not be able to view attachment for my other blogs.

The deployed new theme in development is actually my current weekend project. As you can see, there's no color scheme being applied to it at the moment. I am now focusing on completing the basic features and the basic template files before being able to further customizing the color scheme.

Just in case if anyone is interested in this new theme, it can actually be forked via my bitbucket repository. I have not actually decide what license to be used, but most probably GPL as WordPress would probably requires. If there's any problem regarding this new theme, please do not hesitate to post a bug report @ the issue tracker.

Yes, you heard it right, the user will be divided into groups as soon as they are registered to the site. Whenever he/she submits something to the site, the other group will have to decide whether it should be promoted to the front page. To define this site in a question, that would be ‘Why the opposite group should vote up my article?’.

The project will be built using PHP+MySQL (I like postgreSQL, but it is difficult to find a host offering postgreSQL 8.x, expecially in Malaysia), for front-end logic, it would probably be built using either Prototype/jQuery (I use YUI at work but it is too heavy for a small project like this although I like YUI a lot). As I am not a fan of convention over configuration, so the project will not built upon those rails-inspired framework. Therefore, I will be using Zend Framework and Doctrine to do some of the work.

Besides what the framework provides, I would also have to develop some components if they are not available in ZF. In a check list, they would be:

• Form widget generation library (I think Zend has this already)
• FSM-based workflow

And the remaining tasks in the to-do list are

• Find a better local webhost
• Draft the initial database structure
• Cleanup my svn repo in unfuddle
• Site design
• Decide whether to use OpenId (recently became an option to me after seeing how it is implemented in stackoverflow) / self developed login mechanism

The initial version of the site will be in chinese (so why should I bother to write this post in english???) and if everything goes well the site will be eventually offering more languages. So beginning this week, there will be at least one post on the update of the project on both this blog and my other blog.

Somehow the Technical Director prefers CI over Symphony (as my colleague, also a new staff member like me, was working with Symphony at the same time as I was developing my first project) which I don’t have any idea why. Then he made a decision to choose CI as the new framework to be used for future projects, well, at least for the particular project which we are still working on. The reason for the switch from internal framework to another framework like CI is that their internal framework was written for PHP4 and they want to switch to PHP5.

Their internal framework was very well done, at least from what my Technical Director showed. They have their own database abstraction layer, a CRUD application generator, Object-Relational Mapping etc. that really helps building an application fast. By comparing to their framework, I find CI although quite well done as well but it is no way near as good as the internal framework. Then I went looking around to find some plugins for the CI to implement some of the mentioned features above. Then I found Rabbit-Forms for CRUD application generator and form generation, and Ignited Record for proper ActiveRecord support.

However, I found Rabbit-Forms very restrictive and decided to write a simple form generator and CRUD application generator. Although the final product may not be good enough, but I certainly enjoyed and learned a lot through actually developing it.

These few days I am picking up Drupal, a content management system (CMS). Drupal is a very interesting system where one can almost build any website as long as it is community driven with it. However, there are a lot of things to learn to make sure you are not screwing your installation. I am extremely amazed by the way they implement the plugin system. Although it is a procedural system, but as my Technical Director says there are many object oriented concepts being implemented. Besides that, with plugins like CCK one can even do CRUD application with Drupal (although debugging will be extremely painful IMHO). There are a lot of fun stuff in Drupal for example the form generator, the hooking system, access control and of course their nearly perfect documentation (somehow i prefer it than YUI’s documentation).

Besides that, I am also doing some personal reading on Test Driven Development (TDD) and is currently focusing on unit testing PHP scripts with simpletest. Many developers who practices TDD claimed that TDD helps increasing the productivity. However after reading many documents and I am still don’t have the idea how to set up tests. Guess I would have to find out some examples elsewhere.

I only realize that my software design really sucks after getting involved in a real life development project and is currently doing a lot of readings to improve my design skill. So the main impact made to my personal project is that the project is currently on hold indefinitely until I feel that I am ready and want to practice what I have learnt these few weeks.

I did not quite like ASP.NET when I took the course in Internet Programming. Probably the unit merely touches the surface of the power of ASP.NET but I still prefer PHP because every thing is not encapsulated. However, ASP.NET is great in the sense that it helps desktop application programmers to do web-development because the programmer can still double click on a control and then add in codes to model the behavior. Anyway, since I work in Gnome Environment most of the time, unless I install mono develop, I would not have a chance to do ASP.NET unless somehow I find myself a job for that.

This is also the reason why my new personal project will be written in PHP5 instead of ASP.NET. I have recently applied a free subversion hosting at unfuddle as my current web host does not offer subversion. The reason I start learning sub-version is because in this post, the author says,

The n00b way of updating files on your web host would be to FTP in and drag and drop / delete stuff. Doing it like this will quickly get you into a mess with a large site with many files – there’s the potential to forget to upload certain files, accidentally overwriting things you shouldn’t etc. Some FTP apps have a “sync” button that tries to solve this, but I don’t trust them; you’re still overwriting files that you can never get back. That’s not a good policy to have with the valuable data on your production server.

I quite agree with that as it happened when I was deploying my final year project online last year. Uploading the files online was one of the problems, and another one was to keep mine and Regina’s work in sync. We didn’t use revision control at the time because we thought we didn’t have enough time on learning it and it seems that we wasted more time in making sure we have the identical copy all the time.

However, I am still not being able to use subversion fully because my current web-host doesn’t allow me to use SSH. I will have to find a way later to deploy my personal project online.

April FOOOOL~

Anyway, yesterday was a wonderful day as you an find jokes everywhere. Recently a lot of people seems to love Mr. Rick Astley and his “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video clip very much. I was told that youtube was linking all the featured videos to the music video clip yesterday (Rick Rolling). Digg on the other hand shows random mathematical symbols(some claimed each symbol represents a certain number of diggs) after a user diggs on the article.

My fellow bloggers were having fun as well as one of them claimed that their blog was being sold (in Chinese language) and there are also some saying that they have stopped blogging. As mentioned above, I helped mybloggercon to set up a joke (in Chinese language) claiming that we are filming a movie. Then I further rick rolled the visitors without them knowing that the song actually means. Besides that, I have recently just finished posting my short story and made an announcement that the story will be published. Some friends like Regina actually took it seriously, anyway, I will make a hardcopy for her as she wanted earlier before she flies back to Sandakan.

Hopefully I can get employed by the end of the month.

Prerequisite

1. Latest Prototype Javascript Framework and Scrit.aculo.us library
2. Call the slide show script file which you can download from here
3. Insert the images into a a list with id olImageSlide in following format:
   
<ol id="olImageSlide">
<li id="liImageSlide1"><!--Insert image here-></li>
<li id="liImageSlide2"><!--Insert image here-></li>
</ol>

   Notice the increment of value in the list element id.
4. Insert the images into a a list with id olDescriptionSlide in following format:
   
<ol id="olDescriptionSlide">
<li id="liDescriptionSlide1"><!--Insert Description here-></li>
<li id="liDescriptionSlide2"><!--Insert Description here-></li>
</ol>

   Notice the increment of value in the list element id.
5. Done!

Demo

Note

It is advisible to have all the image cropped into the same size.