Till's blog

This year's DevHouseBerlin is almost over, and this is what I managed to do.

Planet-PHP

Planet-PHP's code has been opensourced for a while and when I started setting up a planet for PEAR I wasn't exactly happy with what it did. Aside from the obvious PHP4 vs. PHP5 issues, the unfortunate lack of documentation, I don't understand why anyone wants to transform an XSL with PHP, to generate PHP. And the bottom line, it didn't work always and I didn't want to debug it any longer.

The notable features include:

• Restructured the code to only expose what is necessary in the document root.
• Fixed/improved configuration handling.
• Extended/improved templating.
• Code cleanup, where possible.
• Fancy URLs and front controller pattern using Net_URL_Mapper! :-)
• Webbased admin to add and remove feeds to the planet.

Long story short — the code is on github. It's semi-complete, on the list of things to do are removing the libraries which became obsolete, a (new) submit form, a cache and maybe re-writing the importer/aggregate script.

Also, kudus to Christian Weiske for contributing the admin and generally helping out. :-)

Scr.im

scr.im is a nifty service which allows you to spam protect your email address. So, for example, instead of display [email protected] on your website, you'd provide a link where people enter a captcha to see your email address. I know this is not compliant with the German law and what not, but I wrote a service wrapper for their API anyway. I'll put it online when I find time. The code is on Github, check the README for an example.

Net_URL_Mapper

I never had a chance to explore Net_Url_Mapper before and I must say, this is definitately one of the (many) raw diamonds in PEAR. Raw because its lack of documentation is not exactly helpful when it comes to adoption. Since I spent some time with the package on the Planet-PHP rewrite, I decided to contribute documentation. If you're anxious to check it out, follow this link, or wait until next week when the manual on the official website is updated.