Archive for December, 2006
PHP Solutions has been out for only just over a month, but I’m thrilled to see that Carolyn Wood, Editor of Digital Web Magazine, has put it at the top of her favourite books of 2006. What I find particularly encouraging about her brief comments is that she’s already using some of my “solutions” in her own sites. All too often I find that I pick up a book on web design or technology, and think: “Hmm, that’s interesting”, but then never really do anything with my new-found knowledge. It’s nice to know that I’ve inspired at least one person to try something out.
December 22nd, 2006
As a result of lobbying here and in a private forum, the Dreamweaver 8.0.2 PHP hotfix is now freely available for download from this technote on the Adobe website. Thanks to Scott Fegette of Adobe and everyone else for their efforts behind the scenes to bring this about. Please note that the hotfix is needed only if you are using Dreamweaver to develop with PHP. It is required to complete chapters 9 through 12 of my book Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. It fixes the following problems in PHP pages in Dreamweaver 8.0.2:
- CONCAT() stripped out of SQL queries by Dreamweaver
- Failure of XSL Transformation server behavior in PHP 5.1.4 and above
- Backslashes incorrectly inserted when magic quotes are turned off
- Problems with LIKE in SQL queries
December 18th, 2006
A lot of people have complained (and rightly so) about the way Adobe forces people to jump through seemingly endless hoops in order to get the PHP hotfix that fixes a handful of serious bugs in Dreamweaver 8.0.2. One of the advantages of being an author of books on Dreamweaver is that I can participate in a private forum and raise matters of concern directly with Adobe and the Dreamweaver team. Yesterday, I posted a message in the forum expressing my frustration about the “scandalous lack of availability” of the hotfix, and in the process sparked off a heated debate.
I pointed to the slew of complaints in response to my original blog post. Fortunately, Phil Adkins had reproduced the response he received from Adobe Customer Service. An Adobe representative quickly replied that Phil had got in touch with the wrong department. It wasn’t Customer Service, but Technical Support he should have contacted. Quite frankly, this is nonsense. When customers get in touch with a company, they frequently have no idea which department they’re dealing with. It’s the job of Customer Service to put them in touch with the right one.
But it shouldn’t be necessary to ring or email any department in Adobe to get the hotfix. It should be made available for immediate download like any other Dreamweaver updater. That message has been passed on to Adobe in emphatic terms by me and several other people. The Adobe rep promised to convey that message to the Dreamweaver team. (Update: the hotfix can now be freely downloaded - see Scott Fegette’s comment. )In the meantime, the following should help:
Contact Dreamweaver Technical Support, not Customer Support (the details are in the right column of this Adobe page)If Technical Support doesn’t know what you’re talking about, tell the representative that it’s covered by TechNote b6c2ae2aTell Technical Support that you need DW802_HotFix-0_6_0.mxpIf you still get nowhere, ask the representative for an incident number, and post the details here - I’ll pass them on to my contact inside Adobe
Hopefully, nobody will need to go as far as the last point, and this silly saga can be brought to a close. The tragedy is that it happened in the first place.
December 16th, 2006
Changes to the way Apache handles virtual hosts in the 2.2 series affect the instructions for setting up virtual hosts in Windows on pages 86-7 of Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. The most important difference is that Apache 2.2 applies stricter permissions than either the 1.3 or the 2.0 series, so you’re likely to see a “Forbidden” message rather than the website that you were expecting. The other change is that the main configuration file, httpd.conf no longer contains everything under the sun. Virtual hosts and other optional features are now controlled by external files.
I’ve created a tutorial showing how to set up virtual hosts on Apache 2.2 in Windows. Although it was originally intended as an update for my book, I decided to give full instructions, rather than just outline the differences. As a result, the tutorial can be used even if you don’t have a copy of Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. Although why anybody should be without a copy is one of the great mysteries of the universe. 
If you haven’t experimented with virtual hosts in your local development environment, they’re well worth looking into - and they’re not difficult to set up. If you locate your testing sites in the Apache server root, localhost becomes the site root, and what should be the top level of the site goes in a subfolder. For simple sites, this doesn’t really matter, but it can make testing very difficult if you want to use links in PHP includes.
Root-relative links cannot be tested if the site is in a subfolder of the server root, but using a virtual host solves the problem. A virtual host gives you exactly the same structure in your testing environment as a live site because the top level folder of the virtual host becomes the testing site root. If you make extensive use of includes, virtual hosts are the way to go.
December 10th, 2006
Waiting for the first reviews of a new book is always a tense time for an author, so I was delighted to visit Amazon.com today and see not only one, but two reviews that give PHP Solutions five stars. It’s as though Christmas has come early. All I need now is for lots of people to take notice of what one of the reviews says: “this book is a must have”. Although I enjoy writing books, it’s hard work, and the author gets only a tiny portion of the cover price in royalties. Buying through the Amazon links on my site can actually double the amount that I receive for a single copy.
December 9th, 2006