Clearskys.net Blog

Introducing StayPress

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After a great deal of work, I am pleased to introduce a sneak peek at the new StayPress system.

StayPress is a collection of plugins that will turn a standard vanilla installation of WordPress or WordPress MU into a property management and bookings system. Of course when I say Property, I actually mean any bookable resource of which there is a finite availability. So the StayPress system will be able to manage property rentals, hotel room rentals, conference rooms and centres, B and B’s, training rooms, bands, etc…

The new StayPress system takes over from the previous clearskys.net collection of plugins and brings everything together into a more manageable and co-ordinated group.

Whilst there will obviously be a downloadable version of the StayPress plugins, we are also planning a hosted version of the system for those who do not want the trouble of running their own website.

If you would like to be kept informed of updates and our release dates then please subscribe to either this sites RSS Feed or visit StayPress.com and subscribe to the StayPress only blog.

StayPress is in no way affiliated with Automattic or WordPress, other than being built on one of the best web CMS systems around.

Quick Tip - Installing Eaccelerator with Litespeed

As mentioned in an earlier post, I am currently in the process of moving web hosts. As late as this morning I was perfectly happy with the configuration I had set up using the Nginx webserver and was ready to start the move, until I decided to make life easier for myself and try the Litespeed webserver (which WordPress.com uses) instead. Installation went swimmingly, despite a 3 hour power cut at a critical stage, up until the point I decided to install Eacceelerator as well and then things sort of stopped. For those of you who find yourself in the same situation - there is an extra step you need to perform to get Litespeed to see your Eaccelerator extension.

Once you have compiled Eaccelerator on your server (even if you use the Litespeed PHP compiler built into the administration website), you may find that you will need to copy the eaccelerator.so from the standard directory into the very strange looking Litespeed extensions directory before it can be enabled in your php.ini file.

To find out the directory you need, create a php file with the following content on your webserver:

and load it in your browser. You are looking for a line under PHP Core that looks like this:

You may need to create the directory, as on my installation it didn’t exist, but once you have the eaccelerator.so file in the right place you can add the following to your php.ini file:
extension="eaccelerator.so"
eaccelerator.shm_size="16"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="/tmp/eaccelerator"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.debug="0"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"
eaccelerator.compress_level="9"

Finally, restart the Litespeed server, create the cache directory (shown in the above configuration details if it doesn’t already exist) and run your phpinfo() page again. If it has all worked you should see the following at the bottom of the first block of information:

More notes on this issue can be found here and here

Hacking Kses

As I spent a great deal of time (and hunting on the Internets) on this I thought I would share the result of my efforts and hopefully save your sanity and hairline.

kses is an HTML/XHTML filter written in PHP. It removes all unwanted HTML elements and attributes, and it also does several checks on attribute values. kses can be used to avoid Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).

It is built into WordPress and WordPress MU and acts on all the content you enter into your posts and pages and strips out all the nasties that WordPress doesn’t think you should be using. 99% of the time you won’t even notice that it is there, but everynow and then you will try to include something in your post and it just won’t save. In a round-a-bout way, this is the situation I found myself in earlier this week.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t get WordPress MU to accept style attributes (this is also the case for normal WordPress). Everytime I saved a post the style would be stripped out completely (MU also removes class and id attributes as well). Most annoying and after pulling out what little hair I had left I turned to the Oracle of all knowledge.

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Making the move to PHP5

Following on from this post made late last year, I have decided to move forward with PHP5 based development where it is appropriate.

This doesn’t mean that all future versions of our plugins will require PHP5, but if a particular bit of functionality can be developed quicker using PHP5 only code, then that will be the way I will approach it.

Also, whilst I am on the subject of backward compatibility, as WordPress 2.5 brings with it a brand new design to the administration system, I will also be working to this design for the plugin administration pages (though for the time-being I’m stuck because WordPress MU still has the old look).

So far only the development versions of the Property plugin and MyDashboard 0.5 are PHP5 only

Plugin refactoring

Beginning today (well in a bit, I’m on a quick coffee break) I will be performing a complete audit on all of our property related plugin code (enquiries, bookings and property manager) and also moving everything from Google Code across to it’s new home at Assembla.

Since starting developing these plugins, I have increased their scope and functionality to the point, now, where they have started to overlap in more and more complex ways (development versions). Whilst this is fine, to a point, for a single person to maintain, I have increasingly found myself spending longer trying to work out where a particular bit of functionality should belong. So I dread to think what trouble there will be with more than one person to maintain the code base.

What does this mean?

As I don’t currently know of anyone who downloads the plugins using SVN, it will mean very little to everyone out there. Downloads of the existing versions will still function as before. The code held in the Google code SVN will be frozen as of today.

For myself, and the new team, it provides us with a lot of new toys such as an integrated Trac system, ticketing and project management. Which will, hopefully, mean the new development will move forward quicker and in a more structured fashion than my current “code when I have time” development method.

More announcements coming soon.

REST api interface plugin - PHP4 or PHP5?

This is just a short post to ask for some advice and/or opinions.

I am working on the generic XML and JSON generating functions as part of the REST interface plugin that is currently in development.

I have started using the plugin in-house with good results and performance, but as we are running PHP5 pretty much exclusively here - it makes use of the native PHP5 XML and JSON functionality.

My question is - is it worth me providing a PHP4 version which uses external libraries? Or, more to the point - how many people out there are still running on PHP4 based servers?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Small Property plugin - sneaky look

This blog and support forum have been a little bit quiet over the past fortnight as I have been concentrating on the development of our new family of Property and booking management plugins.

I have decided to take a more radical approach with the latest versions and have scrapped a large amount of the existing plugin code. The new approach is based on an MVC model and should get rid of a lot of the complexity caused from developing each area as a separate plugin, and mean the entire system will function within a single, coherent interface.

This also means that a large portion of the code-base (namely the user-interface) is completely platform independent. I already have the currently developed code running on both the WordPress and MODx systems.

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