Tag: php

We’ve Just Launched TallyStick

TallyStick allows you to focus on what you love to do while it takes care of tracking and accumulating the time you spend on projects. As of today, TallyStick is live and open for business. Please sign up, take advantage of the one month’s free trial (with no credit card details required) and tell us what you think.

[TallyStick Logo]

Overt at Open Solutions, we manage networks, build Internet infrastructure, consult and develop web applications for many customers. Tracking the time our engineers spent on different projects – especially those on the front line hopping from customer to customer – was becoming an issue.

And we had enough. So we built TallyStick. Necessity, as the saying goes, is the mother of invention.

We believe in web applications that are simple, beautiful and functional. And after an exhaustive search, we couldn’t find one to fit our needs… so we built it. And who better to build a time tracking application for IT and other consulting professionals than those same professionals!

TallyStick allows you to focus on what you love to do while it takes care of tracking and accumulating the time you spend on projects. We believe it’s simple, efficient and quick. And we hope you agree.

As of today, TallyStick is live and open for business. Please sign up, take advantage of the one month’s free trial (with no credit card details required) and tell us what you think.

Also, all users signing up during the beta period will receive a lifetime discount of 10% on that account!

ViMbAdmin – We Have a Logo!

As an example of open source in action, we had a note on our Google Code page for ViMbAdmin with a wanted section asking for a logo. Yesterday morning I received a mail from Robert Bell, self professed Head Nerd of Limeworks Australia offering some of his designers time to create one.

24 hours later, we proudly present the new face of ViMbAdmin:

ViMbAdmin Logo

With a cool new logo, we decided we needed to overhaul the login page. You can see the new face of ViMbAdmin at our updated live public demonstration page: http://www.opensolutions.ie/vimbadmin/. This has also been incorporated in a new release version, 0.2.4, which can be downloaded from here.

A sincere thanks to Robert Bell and his team Limeworks Australia for the logo.

 

Introducing ViMbAdmin – Virtual Mailbox Administration

About two weeks ago, my company released an internal software project, ViMbAdmin, as open source under a GPL3 license. So far the reception has been great for a project we just put out there. We have over ten third party installs and are getting good feedback and activity on the Google Code platform where we host it.

ViMbAdmin (pronounced vim-be-admin) is essentially a modern replacement for PostfixAdmin – a web based interface which will allow you to manage virtual mailboxes, virtual domains and aliases.

We have a live demo which you can access here. You can also browse screenshots by clicking the image on this page.

ViMbAdmin was written in PHP using our own web application framework which includes the Zend Framework, the Doctrine ORM and the Smarty templating system with JQuery on the frontend.

The decision to use Smarty, Doctrine and Zend unfortunately adds a bit of overhead for someone installing the product as they will also need to locate these third party libraries. Fortunately:

  • many distributions include all three as packages now;
  • if you take the svn install option then they will be also installed from external svn sources.

ViMbAdmin can work as a slot in replacement for Postfix Admin with a few MySQL ALTER statements.

Features

  • Super admin(s) user level with full access;
  • Admin(s) user level with access only to assigned domains and their mailboxes and aliases;
  • Super admins can create and modify super admins and admins;
  • JQuery Datatable throughout for quick in browser searching and pagination;
  • Create, modify and purge domains including limited the number of mailboxes and aliases a non-super admin can create per-domain;
  • Activate / deactivate admins, domains, mailboxes and aliases at the click of a button;
  • Full logging;
  • Facility for users (mailbox owners) to change their password;
  • Forgotten Password / Password Reset function for admins;
  • Very configurable including:
    • set default values for quotas, number of mailboxes and aliases for domain creation;
    • templated welcome and settings email for users;
    • either plain or MD5 mailbox password support.

We hope it’s of use to you!

Using Doctrine ORM with Zend Application

We’ve just published the first in a serious of hidden treasures articles from our ViMbAdmin application over on the company blog:

In this first of a serious of articles where we delve into some of the hidden treasures in our ViMbAdmin application, we look at how to integrate Doctrine ORM with Zend – and specifically Zend_Application and Zend_Controller.

As all the code is available with the GPL license online, I didn’t over explain the set-up but I’d love some feedback on whether I’ve been too obscure for the article to be useful at all.

Using Doctrine ORM with Zend Application

In this first of a serious of articles where we delve into some of the hidden treasures in our ViMbAdmin application, we look at how to integrate Doctrine ORM with Zend – and specifically Zend_Application and Zend_Controller.

In this article we delve into our ViMbAdmin application and we look at how to integrate Doctrine ORM with Zend – and specifically Zend_Application and Zend_Controller.

The first assumption (and requirement) we are going to make is that you are using Zend_Application. If you want to see a working application set up and configured for this, please checkout or browse our ViMbAdmin source code – which we’ll reference throughout this document.

Zend Application has a resource framework which allows us to bootstrap various resources on demand. We have created a Doctrine resource for this very purpose which you can download from here (and you may need to edit the class name and change the plugin path in the config code below to match your setup). Our implementation does many things:

  • instantiates the Doctrine object;
  • sets up an autoloader for Doctrine models;
  • instantiates the Doctrine manager;
  • opens the connection to the database;
  • sets all collations and character sets to UTF8 (this is hard coded but can easily be changed);
  • sets various hard coded Doctrine attributes which can also be changed.

We the add various configuration parameters to the application.ini file:

 

Or the following where $application is the instance of Zend_Application:

$application->getBootstrap()->bootstrap( 'doctrine' );

From that, you can use Doctrine to your hearts content!

We also have a Doctrine CLI script which works from the same resource. See:

http://code.google.com/p/vimbadmin/source/browse/trunk/bin/doctrine-cli.php

 

Doctrine ORM – Find Many to Many Objects Without a Relationship

Hmmm, does the title of this post make sense? Probably not but it’s not an easy concept to squeeze into a few words.

Here’s the scenario, I have two tables A and B in Doctrine ORM with a many-to-many relationship defined in table AB.

Now, I want to find all objects in A that do not have a relationship with an object in B via AB.

Here’s what I have:

Doctrine_Query::create()
    ->from( 'A a' )
    ->leftJoin( 'A.AB ab' )
    ->where( 'ab.id IS NULL' )
    ->fetchArray()

This works but is it the best way?

 

Introducing ViMbAdmin – Virtual Mailbox Administration

Open Solutions are pleased to announce the immediate availability of our latest free and open source web application, ViMbAdmin, a web based interface which will allow you to manage mailboxes, virtual domains and aliases.

Open Solutions are pleased to announce the immediate availability of our latest free and open source web application, ViMbAdmin (vim-be-admin). ViMbAdmin is a web based interface which will allow you to manage mailboxes, virtual domains and aliases.

ViMbAdmin is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3, or (at your option) any later version.

ViMbAdmin was entirely funded by Open Solutions and developed by our staff. If you find this application of value, please consider making a donation to our chosen charity.

Do you want to see it in action? We have a live demo which you can access here. You can also browse screenshots by clicking the image on this page.

ViMbAdmin was written in PHP using our own web application framework which includes the Zend Framework, the Doctrine ORM and the Smarty templating system with JQuery on the frontend.

ViMbAdmin is hosted on its own Google Code project page where you can find documentation, browse the source code and access our Subversion repository. We have set up a Google Groups discussion group and you can read our ViMbAdmin blog posts.

ViMbAdmin can work as a slot in replacement for Postfix Admin with a few MySQL ALTER statements.

Features

  • Super admin(s) user level with full access;
  • Admin(s) user level with access only to assigned domains and their mailboxes and aliases;
  • Super admins can create and modify super admins and admins;
  • JQuery Datatable throughout for quick in browser searching and pagination;
  • Create, modify and purge domains including limited the number of mailboxes and aliases a non-super admin can create per-domain;
  • Activate / deactivate admins, domains, mailboxes and aliases at the click of a button;
  • Full logging;
  • Facility for users (mailbox owners) to change their password;
  • Forgotten Password / Password Reset function for admins;
  • Very configurable including:
    • set default values for quotas, number of mailboxes and aliases for domain creation;
    • templated welcome and settings email for users;
    • either plain or MD5 mailbox password support;

 

Fix for Silly Annoying FreeBSD PHP Ports Errors

The following occurs quite regularly on FreeBSD:

Cannot find autoconf. Please check your autoconf installation and the
$PHP_AUTOCONF environment variable. Then, rerun this script.

and when fixed, it’s followed up by:

Cannot find autoheader. Please check your autoconf installation and the
$PHP_AUTOHEADER environment variable. Then, rerun this script.

The fix is to set those environment variables (as appropriate for the autoconf and autoheader version numbers – the below is my example on FreeBSD 8.1):

export PHP_AUTOCONF=/usr/local/bin/autoconf-2.68
export PHP_AUTOHEADER=/usr/local/bin/autoheader-2.68

in bash of the following in tcsh: 

setenv PHP_AUTOCONF autoconf-2.68
setenv PHP_AUTOHEADER autoheader-2.68

Database Design for Doctrine

Creating a database schema directly in the database or in YAML can be very frustrating and difficult. I’ve looked at tools like MySQL Workbench in the paste and have not been impressed – especially as I need an export to YAML function for Doctrine (a PHP ORM project which I’m a big fan of).

I recently came across ORM Designer and have quickly become a big fan. It’s interface is nice, it has excellent support for Doctrine including behaviors and I’ve ran through many update / export to YAML / create models from YAML cycles without issue.

I’d strongly recommend for anyone using Doctrine – plus there’s a 30 day evaluation without any limiting of functionality so you can examine it for yourselves.

Link: MySQL Best Practices

I came across this site today which has some good advice for MySQL. I’m particularly happy to see that Doctrine, a relatively new ORM for PHP which we’re big fans of, is gaining some traction.

I came across this site today which has some good advice for MySQL. I’m particularly happy to see that Doctrine, a relatively new ORM for PHP which we’re big fans of, is gaining some traction.

I also noticed that Piwik, an open source analytics package, are using some interesting quality assurance tools which may be of interest to PHP developers (along with a continuous integration tool I came across recently: phpUnderControl).