The fix is actually for another Firefox plugin: Colorzilla. I was having some problems making the HTML Validator work back then and decided to install Colorzilla first. It also had some problems but after some Googling, I found a fix that worked. The latest Firefox binaries needed to be downloaded and its libxpcom shared objects (libxpcom*.so) overwrite the current ones found in /usr/lib/firefox.

Feeling that I couldn’t do much without the HTML Validator plugin, I gave it one more try. The thing worked!

After upgrading to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, some of my Firefox plugins went crazy (HTML Validator, Colorzilla and NoScript). Then I remembered having the same problems and fixed it again.

Just wanted to post that- might be able to help someone.

“Welcome to the 1st ever Philippine PHP Developer’s Conference that will be held this upcoming December 1, 2007 where sharing opensource solutions in the enterprise and schools is the main theme.This is in follow up with last April’s grand meetup which caught the attention of Philippines IT Industry and were looking forward of expanding it’s presence thru this event.”

For example, I have phpBB2 and Coppermine Gallery. Yes, there’s already a Coppermine-phpBB bridge to tie the forum users to the gallery. But other than that, I have no other means of communication between the two. What if I want to display a link to a user’s gallery in each of his post, along with the usual buttons (profile, ims, etc)? What if I wanted to display randomly picked images from a user’s gallery and display it in his/her profile?

Ways of accessing an application’s functionalities from outside might range from a simple, block copy-paste solution and/or directly talking at another’s DB tables… to hellish insert-here-to-there hacks and conflicting variable hunts that span several files. Some people would find themselves reading and studying in detail how both applications to come up with a way to make them work together. In-depth knowledge is good. But sometimes you don’t have for that and might be an overkill in some cases. I don’t want to see how that cow got in there, I just want my hamburger.

If both had an available API, I don’t have to go through all that trouble. I would already know what it could do and know how to make it do things without dealing with unrelated stuff. And if I ever have to make it do something out of the ordinary, I will know where to look at.

Plugins just crossed my mind (it should… I’m using WordPress). Some apps come with their own plugin system, so you can extend the application and often times import some functionalities from outside the application… kinda like what an API does. But I don’t think they can replace APIs. In fact, they need APIs to exist. The application provides a some sort of a Plugin API for building plugins. Hmmm… using Plugin APIs to build a plugin that communicates to another application via the API the other app provides. Sweet. I don’t have to deal with how the inside works. I just need something to connect them from the outside.

By the way, if anyone reading this knows some open-source projects (in PHP) that have an API available, please do comment. Already found one, SMF, a forum software. The API is just in its pre-release though, but sure looks promising.

I’m sleepy and could no longer think clearly. I hope I made some sense in this post.

But it still gave me the same error warning. It should be working since its, after all, it was in the manual… otherwise it would be corrected or removed. I ran the same query, but this time the mysql command line. It worked. I executed the query in PHP, it also worked. Well, I think phpMyAdmin is having some problems with this. I’m using phpMyAdmin – 2.8.1, on MySQL 5.0.21 that comes with XAMPP . Maybe I’ll try to ask somebody to test it in other versions.

+ myApplication
     |-----+ config/
     |-----+ controllers/
     |-----+ models/
     |-----+ plugins/
     |-----+ tmp/
     |-----+ vendors/
     |       |----- HTMLPurifier/
     |       |----- HTMLPurifier.php
     |
     |-----+ views/
     |-----+ webroot/
     |-----+ .htaccess
     |-----+ index.php

But before including the vendor component, I needed to add the to HTMLPurifier so Cake can find it. So, I added something to HTMLPurifier.php, somewhere before the require_once() statements:

Now I’m all set. I just need to to include the component using the CakePHP function uses().

UPDATE: Some little update on this. When using HTMLPurifier inside CakePHP (or even in other apps), make sure that the character encoding of the output page is UTF-8. I encountered this little bug where a paragraph tag (p) containing only a non-breaking space was converted into another character. But I checked on my html page and the meta tag Content-type was set to UTF-8 (and of course I’m using XHTML 1.0 Transitional DocType). I fixed it by sending a content-type header. In CakePHP, you can do this inside the beforeFilter() function of your controller.

But what if javascript was disabled by the user? Expecting that the input would be processed by TinyMCE, the application won’t be doing some input checking. If javascript is disabled, TinyMCE won’t be able to do its job. The disallowed html code will be freely included and the application will be left open to attacks. PHP’s Built-in input filtering functions isn’t much of use here, since all they do is strip the tags or convert special characters like < and > into their equivalent entities and will no longer be recognized as mark-up. I wanted some PHP functioality that can do the filtering for me.

So I consulted sir Google and after searching some possible solutions, I found HTML Purifier and gave it a test run. Yep, it worked. I tried it with TinyMCE on, and the html fomartting was still intact after purification. Now I tried it with TinyMCE on, but then disabled javascript and inserted some not-so-malicious code and the purifier caught it. Nice! If I have time, I’ll test it further. I just need to make the application fully functional before doing detailed testing and debugging.

Awww… man. Just when everything with Joomla looked promising. Well, I’ll be waiting for more updates and fixes regarding those extensions.

Almost all of the requested features are done and are ready to be integrated with the site. The problem is that things are quite unorganized/scattered. I have two versions each for the Classifieds and Directory section, running using CakePHP and another using an OOP approach. The weather section and the Jobs section where done using normal procedural programming. As for the gallery, there’s already a user gallery mod (by the way, we’re using PhpBB or the forums) for the forum, so we I don’t think we need to install Coppermine Gallery. The Review/Ratings and encyclopedia things are yet to be decided, since the folks are still busy with the new site design/layout. I really hate the frequent switch between programming environments ( procedural, OOP, CakePHP framework and PhpBB), and I tend to accidentally mix things up. It’s tiresome and maintenance nightmare. This urge me to look for options on how I can choose an approach and apply it consistently through out the project. I rounded them down to three: PhpBB super mod, CakePHP and by using a CMS like XOOPS or Joomla .

PhpBB super mod involves hacking and tweaking phpBB, inserting codes here and there, modifying some default behavior to suite the site’s need.
Pros:
* Guaranteed to work with the server’s current version of PHP
* No additional software required.
* User and forum info already available using the native functions provided by phpBB (in case we need to integrate these info with our applications).

Cons:
* Upgrading the forums would be complicated, since you have to manually edit the changed files, one by one
* Time consuming to code and adjust with the nature of phpBB.

Using CakePhP , I could divide the site into smaller applications. There would a separate CakePHP application for classified ads, product reviews etc. Minimal tweaks with phpBB.
Pros:
* The forum, being a separate application, can be easily upgraded.
* Easier to debug, since each application would be independent from each other (except for the templates).
* CakePHP being a RAD Framework, it would be faster to code and develop.

Cons:
* Needs CakePHP framework installed on the server (easy to do) but cannot supported by the live site. CakePHP needs PHP version 4.3.x while the live site runs on PHP 4.2.x. I advise upgrading to a recent version on PHP4 (or better yet PHP5).
* I need to somehow adapt a session handling mechanism using CakePHP which is similar to phpBB, to be able access logged user’s info. I might also need to model phpBB’s user and forum data.

Since the site is developing from a simple forum site into more of a user community site, a content (or “community”, a much better term ) management system can do the job more effectively.
Pros:
* Better, more organized user and content management. User info is always kept throughout the site (and other applications running under it). Site administration is a breeze using its administration panel.
* Some of the functionalities that the site currently needs is supported through the use of extensions. There are already usable extensions for classified ads, banner management, image gallery, richer user profiles, product ratings/review, newsletters and even its own forum.

Cons:
* A decent port is needed to tranfer data from phpBB to Joomla. I haven’t found any extensions that might accomplish this well.
* You need to code (using Joomla’s API) your own plugin if you don’t find the extensions that suit the functionality you are looking for. It will take some time to learn coding your own extensions.
* You need some tweaking to make the extensions do what you exactly want it to do and make it appear how you like it to appear.

Among these three, I favor using CakePHP. Since it deals the least with modifying phpBB data (which is currently the most important asset of the site), it’s the safest way to go. And probably the fastest .