phpMyFAQ devBlog

Three days after the release of the beta version we didn’t got any feedback. Is this a good sign? We had more than 100 downloads so far. On my test machines running on MacOS X 10.5.6 and WindowsXP SP3 the beta runs very smooth.

The beta version is a little bit delayed because of some missing layout work in the new administration section. I think we can release the beta within the next two weeks and we hope we get a lot of responses for the release candidate which is planned for June 2009.

We’re almost done with the work on our beta release of phpMyFAQ 2.5 – yesterday we removed Prototype from the trunk. Since today everything is based on jQuery. The next days we’ll work on stability to release a stable beta version. Please note that the new backend layout is still not finished in the beta release. The work for the a second beta or a release candidate will be focused on the administration layout.

As you might know Microsoft is supporting PHP quite good since last year as they noticed how big the PHP market is.

A lot of intranet installations of phpMyFAQ are running on Windows Server, MS SQL Server and IIS. Due to the fact that I only can test on Linux, Windows XP and Mac OS X I asked my friend Pierre, who’s working on PHP for Microsoft for a free MSDN subscription. And finally, last week my subscription arrived. I already installed a Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7 and an Active Directory. During the beta phase of phpMyFAQ 2.5 I’ll test also on this environment. Thanks, Pierre and thanks, Microsoft!

We put a lot of work on phpMyFAQ the last days because I got some help from my Mayflower colleague Anatoliy. The beta release should be ready after Easter!

Today we started with the work on the new administration layout. Here’s a first screenshot:

phpMyFAQ 2.5.0-beta Administration frontend

Today I installed IE8 on my virtual machine and phpMyFAQ 2.0 and 2.5 are working well on IE8. Beside testing new browsers from Redmond we fixed a lot of issues in the frontend and backend PHP code base.

One of the main targets for the beta release is improving the backend technology. As I wrote some weeks ago, we switch out Ajax library from Prototype to jQuery. The last I improved the comment administration which is now fully ajaxified and you can delete multiple comments without any page reload. We’ll add more Ajax befor releasing the first beta version.

The last couple of days I moved a lot of the backend code to get a cleaner structure. In the future we want to release more versions and phpMyFAQ 2.5 will be the base. A base has always to be very solid and this is what I’m currently working for.

Alberto Sanchez from Spain implemented a cool new feature for phpMyFAQ 2.5: LDAP authentication! With phpMyFAQ 2.5 it will be possible to authenticate the users against your company LDAP server. Thank you very much, Alberto!

Today I updated one important component of phpMyFAQ: the WYSIWYG editor. We upgraded the outdated TinyMCE 2.1 version to the latest version 3.2.1.1. Currently the Image Manager has gone away but it will come back. Besides this bigger change we fixed a lot of bugs.

The last days I fixed a stupid bug in the installer script. Some user had the problem, that the installer wrote the file with the database credentials but couldn’t read from it. It was a require / require_once issue on PHP 5… It’s fixed in SVN and versions 2.0.12 and 2.5.0-alpha2 will include the fix.

We’re still refactoring and migrating the whole code base to PHP 5.2 and it’s more work than expected but we’re on a good way.

Both version made good progress the last days… phpMyFAQ 2.0.12 will be released within the next two weeks, the release of phpMyFAQ 2.5.0-alpha2 is planned for march.

Today was a big code change in the database connection backend of phpMyFAQ. I refactored the whole connection handling and added a singleton pattern. Yes, nothing special but with this addition we got rid of the global handling of the database object. We also improved a lot of code during this refactoring.

Today I added a wrapper class for the Filter extension of PHP 5.2. Beside that I rewrote the instant response feature using jQuery instead of Prototype.

Matteo added a new mail subsytem for phpMyFAQ 2.5. The new version makes good progress and all “new” features are added but it’s still very unstable… we’re also preparing a bunch of new features on our website like a API documentation and better developer information.

Matteo and myself committed a lot of fixes and patches for phpMyFAQ 2.5 last week. We also received updated Turkish and Chinese translations. 2.0.11 will be released within the next 2 weeks, the alpha2 release should be out the first quarter of 2009.