Being a logical and rational person, I want to separate content from layout and with a preference for PHP I decided it was time to build a simple template system.

A few weeks later and after using it to drive a couple of my websites, here’s what Pretty Smarties has to offer:

• Uses Smarty template engine  – Easy to learn (That is, if you don’t already know it)
• Pretty URLs – Great for search engines and humans ( http://www.site.com/urls/like/this )
• SEO Optimisation – Reduced duplication by redirecting to correct host, and applying consistent “/” suffix.
• Easy to implement optional page components – Simply add or remove files to add or remove components
• Template updates are instantly applied
• Swap template by changing 1 line

Source and documentation will be posted on the logon2 blog this week.

Heath Ledger Jokes

They might get old, but he never will. LOL!

A new revolutionary (LOL!) tool is available over at logon2, it’s called ‘Lovely Caption Maker‘ – if the title didn’t give that away. Lovely Caption Maker was inspired by a beautiful effect that can be found at some of the more tech-savvy Australian Media websites such as The Age and Fox FM. I think ABC was the first place I saw this effect.

The effect I’m talking about is the semi-transparent (or semi opaq, depdinding on your perspective) captions over large(ish) images. What’s so beautiful about these captions is that they’re not actually in the image like they have been traditionally. Instead, they use fantastic meaningful, semantic, seo-friendly and accessible HTML and CSS.

Since the markup is a little bit complex for popping into CMSs, social networks or emails, I decided to make a tool that could generate them automatially – since I think I’ll be using them a lot in the future

The distasteful joke on the right is an example of Lovely Captions. Although they can be much prettier. You can use it too, if you dare. Click below for a starting point, or start with a blank palette right here.

Example Lovely Captions:

• The Heath Ledger Joke
• Kevin Rudd srsly is not …
• We love peddobear
• Power Level?

Here’s a sample – try to ignore the bland look, Alex hasn’t finished the designs. You can have a look at it yourself, if you like at the new myLook website.

 myLook.cc’s new comment system lets users make comments exactly what they’re talking about, and lets users see the comments they want to see (or not see the ones they don’t)

Keep your eyes open for a how-to guide for the Javascript Show/Hide business on the logon2 blog…

Knock knock?
Who’s there?
Interrupting cow.
Interuppti… Moo!
Int.. Moooooo!

After finally getting ProjectPier to send emails through the Mass Mail tool, I thought that all systems were go. However, that’s not true. Today, I didn’t get any email alerts, even there was activity in a project – something was wrong. Again, I found my way back to the ProjectPier website where Tim (not me had come up with a solution.

The problem is in the following files:

• language/en_us/errors.php
• language/en_us/site_interface.php
• application/models/notifier/Notifier.class.php

You need to replace all occurrences of ‘recepient‘ with ‘recipient‘.  This includes plurals so recepients needs to be changed to recipients, too.

Looks like somebody didn’t check their code It’s cool though, I know it’s easy to do. Somebody that’s part of the project should recompile it with these fixes. Not me though, I’m not part of it (yet).

Why didn’t the bath trust the toilet? Because the toilet was full of shit! (I actually made that one up – I’m a joke master)

ProjectPier after setting up, creating projects, adding tasks and changing the theme.
You really should change the theme, the default one’s a bit 90′s.

At first I didn’t notice any problems but once I started using it, there was definitely something wrong. After another day I noticed something else was wrong. The two problems:

• ProjectPier wouldn’t allow file uploads to messages, tasks, comments, etc. (Though avatars uploaded properly)
• No emails were being sent by ProjectPier. None at all.

Well, these two things were serious enough to warrant an … investigation So I obviously did some snooping around and fiddling around. The problem with these issues is that there were mainly no explicit error messages – only the lack of results (ie. files not uploading, emails not arriving).

Anyway, after some time I found solutions to both issues on the ProjectPier website:

ProjectPier File Uploads Failing

The problem was that ProjectPier thought it wasn’t allowed to create a directory for file uploads – apparently it’s an OS-dependent error. Errors were only sometimes actually reported, but when they were it usually said somthing like “Failed to create folder“. Basically, you have to go in and change some code in one of the file routines to fix it. On the ProjectPier website, Martin came up with a working solution:

In /environment/functions/files.php , the function ‘force_mkdir' needs to be modified, because this is the function that is incorrectly deciding that it can’t create the directory. Here’s Martin’s code that solves the issue:

$real_path = str_replace('\\', '/', $path);
mkdir($real_path, $chmod, true);
return is_dir($real_path);

The least disruptive way to make the change is to add leave the existing code within the function, but add this code above it, like so:

function force_mkdir($path, $chmod = null) {
$real_path = str_replace('\\', '/', $path);
mkdir($real_path, $chmod, true);
return is_dir($real_path);
\\existing code is down here

Once you’ve made this change, you’ll be sharing your project files in no time. Project files and funny pictures of cats.

Emails Not Being Sent by ProjectPier

This solution took a bit longer to find and also came from the ProjectPier website. Although nobody explicitly stated the solution, one of the posts mentioned an error about “PHP Safe Mode”. I realised that I had it enabled for the virual host.

I disabled PHP Safe Mode. Then there was email.

And that’s why, you never yell.