Clearskys.net Blog

Server moves, testing and updates

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This blog post is, in all honesty, a way of testing the blogging bundle in TextMate. Yes I have succumbed… I’m only 14 days into the 30 day trial period but it certainly looks like I will be putting my hand in my pocket and buying a license.

After months (over a year actually) of being reliant on Eclipse PHP I pretty much thought that my process of development was as streamlined as it could get. Boy was I wrong!! I highly recommend trying it out (Mac owners only though I’m afraid).

Server Moves

We’ve been hosted on the MediaTemple Grid-Server now for almost a year, and whilst it has been mostly fine and certainly better than our previous hosts, the extra level of control and ssh access has spoilt me a bit. I was planning on upgrading to a MediaTemple DPV server until I found Slicehost.

I’ve been playing with a basic Slicehost slice for a few weeks now and have managed to get WordPress MU running on it with the Nginx webserver and PHP5 running as a FastCGI process. I may write up a tutorial at a later date, but all I can say for now is Wow, does that thing fly. It certainly shows up the availability and latency problems MediaTemple have been having over the past 4 months.

I will be posting as parts of the site make the move over to the new server, so if some things stop working, then you know why.

Development Updates

I must admit to being rather inspired by the recent release of the new BuddyPress website and WordPress MU plugins. So I am contemplating taking the Property management plugins in a similar direction (though obviously not by getting a job at Automattic).

The main Property management plugin is very close to approaching an Alpha release. It is primarily a backend administration plugin that has no interaction with the public side of the WordPress powered site. The front-end plugins will use the information generated by the management plugin to display the required information to your site visitors, these will be released a bit later.

I have the Property management plugin currently in use and undergoing testing on one WordPress MU powered site and so far it seems to be behaving itself, there are a few bugs I am working through (and browser issues - yes I am looking at you Internet Explorer) but nothing major.

I will post more on this early next week, and maybe include a screencast of some of the functionality, if I can manage to operate a computer after my planned birthday weekend Irish pub crawl.

Tags: buddypress, management, mediatemple, plugins, property, slicehost, wordpress

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.

Tags: google code, plugin, property, svn, trac, wordpress

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.

More »

Tags: bookings, development, modx, plugin, property, property management, rental, small, wordpress