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I have started to use virtual machines to develop sites rather than installing a local web server. This allows me to replicate the exact setup of the server I will be deploying to with ease. For each virtual machine I set up a shared folder which allows me to store the files locally whilst being able to run the code on the virtual machine. One thing I missed was the ability to use xdebug to debug the sites through Netbeans, so I set about trying to set up the virtual hosts to allow me to use xdebug remotely.

All that is needed was to add a xdebug.remote_connect_back clause to the xdebug.ini file found in the PHP configuration. Set this value to 1 to automatically connect back to any xdebug session that is created on the server.

Searching all files in a directory and sub-directories for a particular term is really useful and comes in handy in all sorts of situations. It is available on all Linux systems and the basic syntax is as follows.

grep -r -i pattern directory

The -r flag is used to recursively search underneath the given directory and the -i flag is used to ignore case. The pattern is a normal regular expression, which can be changed to an extended set by using the -E flag.

An example of finding a search term in everything under the current directory would be like this.

grep -r -i searchterm ./

Remember that if you want to use regular expression characters then you'll need to escape them. For example, to find all PHP opening tags you will need to escape the < and ? characters.

grep -r -i \<\?php ./

I have talked before about running Selenium tests in PHPUnit but I have only recently come to properly automate things. Getting a Selenium server to start and stop in a script is relatively easy and can be done in a simple script. My original script for running a directory of PHPUnit tests was as follows. I will explain more about how this all works later on in this post.

PhoneGap is a free and opensource framework for developing mobile applications. It is a great way of creating applications that work across multiple devices including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows and others. It works by rendering HTML pages using a browser, which means that you can create applications using just HTML and JavaScript. It also allows you to interact with elements of the phone like the camera and accelerometer through JavaScript using a simple API.

I recently set about trying to use this system to create an application, and as I have an Android phone I started by creating a simple Android app. The PhoneGap website has a number of getting started guides, including what software you need to get started. I found that they were a little wrong for getting started in Android. I am running OSx so the instructions here might not work for you, but they should be fine for most *nix based systems.

I had a recent requirement where I needed to temporarily replace the homepage of a website running Drupal with a simple HTML page. I wanted to do this without doing lots of changes to the site templates so I needed a solution that was easy to turn on and off and would still retain the Drupal site as it was. I found the simplest solution was to add a rule to the DirectoryIndex rule in the sites .htaccess file. Here is the rule I used.

# Set the default handler.
DirectoryIndex newhomepage.html index.php index.html index.htm

With this in place I just needed to create a file called newhomepage.html in the root directory for this to be used instead of the main index.php file. When the user visits any other page on the Drupal site then the index.php file is used as it normally is. The good thing about this method is that it can be turned off easily by just removing the newhomepage.html file.

I was at a meeting of the Manchester Web Performance Group the other day where Tom Taylor gave a talk about some of the performance testing tool he uses at Laterooms.com. He used a ruby script to set up some preferences in Firefox which then ran Selenium to open some web pages and test them with YSlow. The results of the YSlow inspection are then sent to a Show Slow server where the results can be graphed over time. I realise that I've just mentioned a whole stack of technologies there, so let me pick out the important ones:

Selenium is a remote control agent for web browsers, although it is most stable in Firefox. I have written about this tool before but it allows us to automate interaction with a website via a series of selenium scripts. These scripts can be exported into different code formats, including PHP.

When Mike Bell approached me several months ago and said we should do a Drupal camp in the north west I was completely on board with the idea. So for the past few months I have been working with Mike and a group of people from the North West Drupal User Group (NWDUG) to create such an event. The result was DrupalCampNW2012, which was held from Friday 23rd to Sunday 25th November. The venue was the new University of Salford campus buildings in MediaCityUK.

Our main stumbling block in getting this conference up and running was the venue. After talking to some of the computer science people in the University of Salford they offered the use of the building in exchange for some free student tickets.

I recently saw an implementation of a Twitter wall that used node.js to run searches on Twitter and post the results on a webpage. I had been wanting to create something using ReactPHP so I thought this was a good opportunity to have a go. ReactPHP, if you haven't heard of it, is an event-driven, non-blocking I/O that is essentially the PHP equivalent of node.js. The major difference is that ReactPHP is written in pure PHP with no extra components, whereas node.js is a collection of different programs, interfaces and languages. As a first attempt I wanted to create something simple so it needed to use simple JavaScript to load in the latest tweets for a given hashtag from a ReactPHP server. I have to warn that this is a simplistic implementation of ReactPHP, but it shows the basics of how to get started.

I spent what seemed like an eternity today trying to figure out something in a form I was creating on a Drupal site. I was building a multi step form with previous and next buttons, both of which were submit elements like this.

$form['next'] = array(
  '#type' => 'submit',
  '#name' => 'next',
  '#submit' => array(
    'mymodule_next_submit'
  ),
  '#value' => 'Next Step',
);

What I needed to do was override these and make them button elements instead of input elements. This involved creating a theme function in my template that looked like this. You could also do this in your module by adding theme overrides using hook_theme_registry_alter().

Adding an alias to your system is a good way of saving time when remembering complex commands. You can reduce a command down to a quick two letter command that is easy to remember.

The alias command can be used to assign an alias on the fly. You can create an alias to 'ls -lah' by typing in the following into the command line.

alias ll="ls -lah"

Now, when you type 'll' (i.e. two lower case L's) you will actually run the command 'ls -la'.

Or you might want to do more complex things like running your selenium server.

alias selenium-server="java -jar ~/Development/selenium-server-standalone-2.25.0.jar"

To remove an alias you can use the unalias command to remove an alias from your system.