Archive for the 'Web Development' Category

I’ve been throwing a decent amount of code on GitHub + Gist recently; I wanted to highlight a couple of the projects that the community might find useful.

eBay PHP Framework Wrapper

There isn’t a ton of documentation or examples around the eBay PHP Accelerator toolkit. Actually, I think it has been a couple years since the framework itself has been updated. I’ve put together a small eBay PHP library with some generic posting and searching wrapper functions. The code was pulled out of an active project and still has some references to the context in which it was situated, but it should provide a good starting point to anyone looking to work with the eBay PHP framework. In additional to providing some wrapper functions, it also has some fixes to the underlying eBat NS framework.

NetSuite PHP Framework Wrapper

Similar to the eBay wrapper library, I’ve made a wrapper around the PHP NetSuite framework. Although the library is structured as a Kohana 2 library, it would be fairly easily to rearrange the library for use in another PHP framework or as a standalone library. The wrapper provides some useful information about working with custom record types (reading + writing) and some wrappers around some trickier NetSuite functionality. The library also provides fixes to the underlying netsuite PHP framework . If you have been having trouble with the NetSuite framework throwing errors when returning a valid SOAP response, take a look through the commit log and pull out the patches.

Tumblr + Kohana

If you are looking to integrate a Tumblr blog with a custom design take a look the phumblr library which provides an easy way to integrate Tumblr via a PHP interface.

Another day, another Internet Explorer bug. I was using MooTool’s Request.HTML to load some AJAX content to display within an inline popup and IE kept throwing the classic “Object doesn’t support this property or method” error. The error was occurring inside document.id (i.e. the dollar function) which made the issue even stranger. Looking at the dollar function’s source code, it seems as though methods are copied from Element.prototype to the element being retrieved.

The AJAX content I was loading contained a form which had a form element with ID “position”. When the Request.HTML receives html content it retrieves a list of all elements contained with the AJAX response using getElements(“*”). This caused the document.id method to be called with the form element of ID “position” contained within the HTML response as its argument, which caused the following assignment to be made:

Which then triggered the above mentioned IE error. Since theFormElement["position"] is a read-only reference to the input element contained within the form IE threw an error. Be aware of the ID / name you assign to input elements when debugging obscure bugs in internet explorer!

Recently I’ve made some minor adjustments on newsletter bound HTML documents. One particular document was made in the iContact WYSIWYG editor and as you can expect the HTML markup was horrendous. Even worse than the markup was the various ways the email displayed in different email viewing environments. Hotmail, Outlook, and Gmail all displayed this same email differently.

The main issue I was experiencing was a mysterious 3px bottom ‘padding’ given to all img elements wrapped in an anchor tag and lined up horizontally using tds (apparently tables are still the norm for email marketing). No actual CSS padding or margin was being applied to the img or any of its container elements. I’m still not entirely sure what was causing the 3px ‘padding’ but adding style=”display:block” to each img element fixed the problem.