Recent Posts:

Tina MVC v0.1.6 Released

There was an issue in previous versions which prevented your customisations from being retained when Tina MVC was upgraded. This is now fixed.

Get it at Wordpress.org.

Important upgrade notice:

If you are upgrading from an older version of Tina, your customisations will NOT be migrated when you upgrade. You should manually backup the following from the tina-mvc directory:
- app/
- app_emails/
- tina_mvc_app_settings.php
and restore them after the plugin has been upgraded.

You will also need to deactivate and reactivate the plugin to reflect the new settings in tina_mvc_app_settings.php.

Tina MVC Updates, Quick Start Tutorial and Helper Functions Reference

I haven’t been doing too much updating of the Tina code lately as I get used to the Wordpress.org developer interface and get some basic documentation up here, but there have been a few changes made as time permitted.

I’ve bumped to version 0.1.4 as a few very minor bugs surfaced. If you were trying a version prior to 0.1.2 then there was a problem with the plugin folder name (`tina_mvc` instead of `tina-mvc`) and the plugin just wouldn’t work – sorry.

I’ve written a quick start tutorial which will get you going quickly. There is also a (quick copy-paste job) function reference for the helper functions.

I will write a few more comprehensive tutorials as time permits, but at the moment Tina is being prepped for a project, so all priority is on making sure we can stick a big “production ready” sticker on it by the time the project is deployed (if there ever is such a thing in software). Currently in sights is getting the yucky “experimental” tag off the custom login and user pages feature. In any event all the core Tina code will be back-ported to the GPL version via Wordpress.org and here (www.seeit.org), so get stuck in!

Fran.

Tina MVC Framework for Wordpress v0.1 Released

Tina MVC is the open source implementation of our new development framework.

Read about it here, or download  or download tina-mvc.0.1.6 now.

Feel free to comment below, but if you would like to ask a support question, then do so here.

More SeeIT Framework Updates

Another framework update for clients.

This is a minor fix and is recommended. The changes in this update bring more consistent handling of HTTP errors.

While there are no security issues in this update, it will make your website more visible and compliant for people like Google.

If you received last months update we will be in touch shortly. For clients with maintenance agreements, the update has already been applied.

New Web Site Hosting Offers

We have updated our web site hosting offers to provide a more transparent and more flexible choice to customers.

Option A: Shared Hosting

Based on a traditional shared hosting environment. This is located in the US with a large web hosting provider (Dreamhost). You get a ftp login (if you want to upload your own files).

This is available to clients at no charge.

Suitable for small and/or non-commercial, non-mission critical sites.

Option B: Secure private hosting

This is based on our own private server located in the Blue Square Data Centre in the UK. Because it is on a private server, there is no chance of a third party web site brining down you site just because the happen to share the same server as you (a risk with shared hosting).

Performance and connectivity is much better and data protection is guaranteed by EU privacy laws. Only SeeIT clients are hosted on this server. Access by ftp is not permitted to clients.

This is suitable for larger sites where performance, privacy and uptime are critical.

Updates to the SeeIT Framework

Software_spanner

It is update time…

Following on from our last project we have updated our web framework with some enhancements and bugfixes. These are free upgrades to all clients. Updates include:

  • Security fixes (both preventative and curative – ask for details)
  • More efficient caching for images and for non-dynamic elements
  • Many minor bugfixes affecting usability
  • Better use of PHP5 features (although we still support PHP4 for our older clients)
  • Updated versions of all third party libraries
  • Lots of speed tweaks

All of these fixes and upgrades are backwardly compatible with older versions of the framework, and are strongly recommended for all clients.

We will be contacting you all in the coming week to arrange for the upgrade. If you have not heard from us by November 17th, please contact us.

An Post Shopping Directory

shoppingdirectory.ieIn partnership with ideasgarden.ie, this site is an online directory of e-tailers maintained by An Post – Ireland’s post services provider.

This site is part of a much larger media campaign by An Post. This morning radio and TV ads went live to promote An Post and the new branding is to be seen everywhere. Needless to say we are delighted to be involved.

As part of this development the website code was subjected to a pretty stringent 4 day security audit by a third party consultancy – a big name third party.

So watch out for the An Post guy with the green tie – you will be seeing him everywhere over the coming months!

An Post Shopping Directory

shoppingdirectory.ieAn Post Shopping Directory

www.ShoppingDirectory.ie

A directory of inline retailers produced for An Post.

This website was part of a large media campaign run by An Post during the winter of 2009.

(Completed in conjunction with Ideas Garden (www.ideasgarden.ie).)

Frank Ryans Bar

frankryans_snapshot

Frank Ryans Pub is one that many will be familiar with. Old Frank ran it for many years and it always had a lovely old charm about it. However for the past few years Tadhg Coughlan has taken over as landlord and he has turned it into something quite special. Several of us (SeeIT and partners) frequent it and we’re fans.

The website is technically pretty straightforward, and for that reason we decided to implement it on the Wordpress platform. However this is a great example of what can be accomplished with a little thought and some good photography. It is always a shame that people fall down on the detail and stick in stock or home made photography after spending good money on the rest of the website.

If you require pictures for a web site, there is little post processing required and no prints. This means that you can get an award winning architectural photographer like Philip Lauterbach of plpix.com to take your pictures for a lot less than you think.

Frank Ryans Bar

frankryans_snapshotFrank Ryans Bar

www.FrankRyans.com

A brochure site developed for Frank Ryans Bar, Queen Street and Smithfield.

This site was built on the WordPress blogging platform and showcases one of Dublin’s best bars. Check out the gallery – it is a real example of where a small investment in photography really pays – kudos to the excellent job done by Philip.

If your requirements are not complicated, then Wordpress makes an excellent platform for static websites. Not having to worry about basic CMS functionality, we were able to address style, content, pictures and SEO.

(Completed in conjunction with Philip Lauterbach Photographer (www.plpix.com).)

Migrating IMAP Email The Easy Way

email-iconMoving email servers has always been a royal pain for me. I’ve tried many of them over the years, and migrated from nearly as many of them. However the last couple of times I put myself through the pain I came across imapsync – an excellent script that will do an IMAP to IMAP migration [...]

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Debug your IMAP server with Telnet

terminalEmail by IMAP rocks – there are so many benefits to using it over POP3, particularly in an office environment. However many IMAP clients really suck when it comes to manipulating accounts with large messages. We recently watched a server brought to it’s knees during a email server migration – by an 165MB email containing [...]

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Stop EU Software Patents

stopsoftwarepatents.eu petition banner Time to revisit this post-Lisbon…

Did you know:

Eurolinux collected over 400,000 signatures supporting a petition for a software patent-free Europe

  • That petition has now expired and they need your support
  • Our own EU-Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, is completely misinformed about software patents
  • The EU-Commission is now obliged (post-Lisbon) to present a legislative proposal when a critical mass of citizens demands it

I strongly urge you to read on and see what the EU patent office is approving – your support is needed.

Save MySQL

Save MySQL In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database.

Read about it here…

SFO Syndrome – The Hidden Menace

muppets…or watch out for the Muppets…

Again and again get a very similar request:

Can you move/fix/migrate/upgrade our web site please?

… and every time I get a similar reason for the request:

There was a bloke who used to look after us, but he’s gone now…

This is (un)commonly known as SFO Syndrome – Supplier Fecked Off!

Cleaning up after SFO is a service we regularly perform for clients, and sometimes it is quite shocking to see the mess that a previous supplier has left behind. (I am often led to muse that the provider may have disappeared because they may have realised that the game was up!) I have written before about this (see ‘Open Source and Open Standards’) but it is worth restating:

If a quote is to good to be true, then it usually is!


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Open Source and Open Standards

open-neon-signRecently we were asked by a client to migrate a web site from one server to another. The web site in question was built on a Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla – a CMS written in PHP and using MySQL for database storage.

I am not fond of Joomla, but that is my personal opinion and don’t let it colour yours. As a programmer I find it heavyweight and overly complex. Lots and lots of code means frequent discoveries of bugs and frequent updates. As my friend Alan Kennedy says “every line of code is a liability” and he is spot on. However we aren’t all programmers and for someone who wants an “out of the box” experience Joomla may well fit the bill. Personally I prefer the excellent Wordpress – it may be a ‘only’ a blog system, but it is fantastic for static web sites too and uses a much simpler database schema, although it doesn’t have the extended functionality of Joomla.

Open Standards – your data, your way

Where am I going with all this? Well what happens when the person you used to create your web site disappears, or when you just want to migrate? If you are stuck into a commercial, closed source and/or proprietary model, you are at the mercy of whatever commercial provider will take you on. If, on the other hand, you are using open standards, then at the very least you have access to all the code and data in your web site.
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A Reluctant Web Designers Journey

seeit_source_imageA long overdue of SeeITs’ website. My colleague Simon Stewart in CIC made the very valid point that a web programmer should show something more on his website than a page of largely static text and a broken contact form. (In fairness the contact form brought me nothing but spam and Asian software companies trying to get me to outsource my coding jobs to them, so it was no great loss to me.)

One pleasant surprise was how modern browsers behave with standards compliant HTML and CSS (as long as you don’t get too funky with your layout).
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