February 15, 2009

Google Sitemaps on WordPress-MU

I was looking into getting Google Sitemaps running today, and didn’t find much in the way of WordPress-MU compatible sitemap plugins. The only article I found was on a website that wasn’t responding, and looking at its Google Cache, it was a bit dated.

All of the plugins I could find seem to put the sitmap.xml file in the WordPress install directory. The problem with that is that the directory isn’t apache writeable, which means you have to touch and change the permissions of the files manually. Also with WordPress-MU, there may be more than one blog in use for that installation, so you can’t serve these multiple blogs’ sitemaps from a single location.

I took a few of the cached article’s ideas and made them easier to do. This guide will work on WordPress-MU 2.7 (the latest release).

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February 9, 2009

Zend_Loader, the silent killer

Update 1st May 2009: Good news, Zend Framework 1.8 defaults to no longer suppressing errors in loading classes (not sure how much of their library has been converted to use this though)

A good article on the autoloader changes:

http://devzone.zend.com/article/4525

Several times during website development, I have come across scripts which die without errors, so I try and debug the pages, finding which functions/includes it is getting to before it dies, narrowing it down. The code I usually come across which causes this is in the Zend Framework in the form of:

@Zend_Loader::loadClass('My_Class');

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April 19, 2008

Zend_Form’s flaw in an MVC environment

Zend_Form, the latest and greatest addition to the Zend Framework in version 1.5, is an infusion of the best bits of Zend_Filter_Input, and the Zend_View_Helper system. At first glance it looks like the ideal system for setting up from the simplest to the most complex forms, and this is how most people will see it.

I recently delved into the use of it, and was instantly shocked at a fatal flaw in its design. Where am I supposed to put it?

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April 6, 2008

Zend_Cache_Frontend_Page flaws using HTTP codes

In my attempts to create the most Digg resilient website, I decided there was only one thing for it, full page-based caching on the server.

My first foray into this was trying to implement Zend’s Zend_Cache_Frontend_Page.

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April 1, 2008

Hierarchical data access in MySQL using nested sets

As you may know, MySQL is a relational database system. It consists of flat tables, which can be joined together in queries. Relations between these tables can only be specified in a way that is one-to-one/one-to-many.

This suits most situations, but when you start getting to hierarchical data, such as multiple level categories (as used on this site), these types of relations start to become non-optimal.

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