This started out as an e-mail to a colleague to bring him up to speed on how to theme Magento. While writing it I realized that this knowledge would be beneficial to many others and posted it on my neglected blog. Here are a handful of link to help you with the wizardry that is Magento templates.
Magento Knowledge Base – Theming & Design
Magento WIki – How to create a new package / theme
When compiling PHP from source sometimes you’ll bang your head against a wall while trying to resolve dependencies. After a mild head banging session I’ve discovered that if you add –lib-dir=lib64 to ./configure while compiling PHP it will fix your problems.
My main issue was that I kept getting the following error:
configure: error: libjpeg.(a|so) not found.
I looked in /usr/lib64 and both libjpeg.a and libjpeg.so were there. I specified –with-jpeg-dir=/usr/lib64 and continued to receive the above error. It wasn’t until I added the –lib-dir=lib64 that made everything work.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit in on the “PHP Development Tools (PDT)” talk here at EclipseCON. I haven’t used PDT since it’s inital release last year so it was great to see what they’ve been doing. Yossi Leon the Project Leader provided an overview of the PHP perspective and the various views. Then he went on to demonstrate the debugger which currently only supports Zend’s close sourced debugger protocol. However he did mention that there is a patch for Xdebug support if you’re feeling brave and want to compile PDT. For the most part PHPEclipse provides all the features that PDT does but there are a good handful of features not in PDT that PHPEclipse currently supplies. However, there were a couple neat features that I’d like to see make their way into PHPEclipse. Personally, I attened this talk because I’ve had one question on my mind since Zend proposed a PHP plugin for Eclipse. That question being, “Will Zend be releasing a commerical version of PDT?” Come to find out PDT is NOT a plugin itself but a framework which a plugin can be build upon. After learning this I had to reword my question to, “Will Zend be releaseing a commercial IDE based on PDT?” Which of course the answer to is yes. I was unable to find out when but Yossi did say it should be surfacing soon.
Now knowing this raises another question, “Should PHPEclipse switch to PDT as it’s underlying framework or do we continuing developing the current framework.” This is a question that only can be answered by the PHPEclipse developers and community. I personally wouldn’t have an issue with the switch because Yossi informed me that they will be creating a generic debugger interface to support multiple debuggers. This is something that the PHPEclipse developers have been discussing for quite some time since we have support for both DBG and Xdebug. The only concern left is what influence will Zend have upon PDT because of their interest in developing a commercial IDE upon it. Having a 100% open source project such as PHPEclipse involved in the development of PDT might be a good idea. What do you think should PHPEclipse switch to PDT?
I am honered to be representing PHPEclipse at this years EclipseCON in Santa Clara, CA. Philippe Ombredame and I will be in the Exibit Hall from 2:15pm to 8pm on Tuesday, March 6th 2007. There will be a demo of PHPEclipse and we’ll be available to answer any questions you might have. If you’ve never had a chance to see PHPEclipse in action here’s your chance and if you have, stop by and introduce yourself. It’s always great to others from within the community. I’ll see ya there.
I stumbled across this tool last Oct and tagged it with “toblog” on del.icio.us but I never got a chance to actually write about it. dBug is var_dump()’s sexy twin. It outputs detailed information about the selected variable that is beautifully formated yet human readable. It truly comes in handy when you’re trying to debug an issue on a remote server. You can check the output on the examples page.
Brett Bieber has just released a release droplet for Mac OS X. This makes pushing a release of a new package completly painless. For full details check out the post “Chiara_PEAR_Server Release Droplet for Mac OS X” on his blog. For those of us that don’t run OS X and want to create our own script, Brett was kind enough to create the Salty_PEAR_Server_RemoteReleaseDeployer package which allows you to do just that.