Yo -- I has moved

Hey this blog has moved to WebDevNotebook.com -- I even bought a domain for it!

EECI2009

Image: Leslie Camacho of Ellis Labs announces the upcoming release of EE 2.0.

I was lucky enough to attend EECI2009 in the Netherlands last week. Overall, the strongest EE/CI conference I've attended so far, which is perhaps a good sign for the growing community around these products. It was an interesting thing to have both EE and CI people in the same building. I hadn't thought about it all that much, but these two communities are very different, and it was sort of amusing to see all of the EE people (designer-ish, stylish, expensive bags) mix with the CI people (nerdy, large brains, beer, blunt.)

There are also a growing number of EE developers who extend and modify that platform. Chief of this tribe is no doubt Solspace's Paul Burdick. He gave an excellent presentation on add-on development which clarified a number of issues about the future of this important activity for EE. Here, in PDF form, are the slides. Paul is responsible for a number of major add-ons, including the tag module. He is one of the original developers of EE itself, having been the main dev at Ellis Labs for quite a while. The other major emerging EE add-on developers were at the conference as well. These folks include Brandon Kelly and Leevi Graham. In true Australian form, Levy wore a outback-looking hat for the duration of the conference. (My apologies Leevi if it was in fact some other sort of hat.)

The big news at the conference was that EE 2.0, the new codeigniter-based version of the product will be released on December 1, 2009. There was much rejoicing when this long-delayed announcement was made. Now, after the rejoicing, I'm sure that there's quite a bit of hand-wringing/scrambling going on across the community. Many people who rely on EE for their business (Grist included) are now trying to figure out if/when/how to integrate this new development into our work. Part of what I heard from the likes of Paul made this easier to think about -- it's now clear that a) EE1.6 will continue to be supported for quite a while yet and b) many important add-ons for EE may not be ready for EE2 any time very soon. So there's certainly no pressure to upgrade, and plenty of reason to wait, play with the new product and see what happens. We also heard about a planned EE 2.1 release, which sounds like a more stable basis for an enterprise-upgrade.

Rogues' Gallery of EE Developers

A lineup of EE developers @ EERoadshow.

EE Performance Guidelines from Paul Burdick at Solspace

Paul Burdick at Solspace has written a totally awesome document about EE Performance Guidelines. With his permission, I'm sharing it. Please contact Paul or Solspace directly for updates or a site evaluation.

While I'm on the subject, here's the two add-ons currently in Solspace's new performance suite. This includes Morsels -- a new DB-based acceleration method, and Page Caching, a method to cache entire pages as flat files.

Expression Engine and Performance

Tomorrow I'm leading a session at the Expression Engine Road Show here in Seattle about EE and high traffic sites. Here's a link to the slides from that presentation for those who are interested.

EEandPerformance.ppt (large > 2M)

This covers topics like: general site performance best practices, EE caching methods, applying EE caching and then gives sort of a miscellany of considerations one needs to think about when using EE in a high traffic environment.

Recapthca for Expression Engine Member Registration

Well, due to some recent drama involving blog spam at Grist, I had the opportunity to cook up an ExpressionEngine extension that implements reCaptcha for EE signup.

EE provides a convenient hook for overriding the (rather weak) native EE captcha, so getting the captcha to appear on the signup form is simply an exercise in taking the convenient reCaptcha PHP library and invoking its get_html method at the appropriate time. The resulting HTML simply overrides the result of the usual captcha method from EE. Here are the relevant lines from the extension:

require_once($PREFS->ini('system_folder_path').'extensions
/mp_recaptcharecaptchalib.php');
$EXT->end_script = TRUE;
return recaptcha_get_html($PREFS->ini('recaptcha_public_key'));

Now the captcha appears on ths signup form, and it's time to turn our attention to processing. There are three requirements: 1) we need to invoke a check of the reCaptcha at the appropriate moment 2) we need to cleanly pass an error back to the signup process on failure and 3) we need to override or at least mask the native captcha check. Here's my approach:

EE provides the member_member_register_start hook at the beginning of the registration routine. At that point it's quite easy to do the reCaptcha check:

require_once($PREFS->ini('system_folder_path').'extensions/mp_recaptcha/recaptchalib.php');
$resp = recaptcha_check_answer ($reCaptchaPrivateKey,
$IN->IP,
$_POST["recaptcha_challenge_field"],
$_POST["recaptcha_response_field"]);

But how to handle the response? member_member_register_start only allows injection of logic into the registration process (ie -- you can't affect the return value of the method in which it appears.) You can, however, affect the session and any globals. So here's the trick I used.

In the registration form, I added:

<input type="hidden" name="captcha" value="1">

And in the method involked when the captcha is created, I did the following:

$DB->query("INSERT INTO exp_captcha (date, ip_address, word) VALUES (UNIX_TIMESTAMP(), '".$IN->IP."', '1')");

This means that EE will always be expecting a captcha response of "1", and will always get it UNLESS some outside force intervenes. This is where the result of the reCaptcha web service check comes in. If the result is successfull, we do nothing, and allow EE to think its native captcha check went perfectly. If the result indicates failure, then I do the following in the method invoked at member_member_register_start:

$_POST['captcha'] = '';

This little change will cause EE's native captcha check to think that it has failed, and produce its normal errors upon a captcha failure.

I'd be happy to provide the entire extension to anyone who is interested, but I feel like it needs a little cleaning, documenting and generalization in order to stand on its own two feet. Perhaps I'll post it here soon. Until then, let me know if you'd like a copy.

First Post

This is my new place to stash information, techniques and other discoveries I make while developing and designing products for the web.