Compiling PHP 5.3.2 on Snow Leopard
Everybody that compiles PHP itself on Snow Leopard, has probably bumped into the iconv errors. When I was building the Wordpress 3 theme, I kept getting errors about imagecreatefromstring and imagejpeg. Somewhere I found that it had to do with GD and libJPEG, so I tried to compile PHP again.
But no luck at first, I ran into the iconv errors pretty fast. But this time I found a post from Sean Coates. The trick was to compile a new version of iconv, and apply his patch. (I forgot that last part, that didn't work, only with the patch I could compile). That's all I used from his post. I didn't install homebrew, I didn't reinstall Apache, I just installed iconv, applied his patch and make was a success!
Wordpress
Since a week or two, I started looking into Wordpress. Last week I downloaded Wordpress 3.0 and started building a new theme. I'm developing a fully customizable theme for a family member. Coming from the Symfony framework and before that a custom framework with the Smarty template engine, Wordpress was yet again a new way of programming. It's still procedural based, but you need to build the widgets OO.
I need to dive some more in all the hooks Wordpress has, that's some magic I haven't figured just yet. But now I've been busy for a few days, the development goes pretty quick. A lot of functionality is already present, like categories, blogroll, recent posts and comments. I just need to figure out how you can alter the output from a widget. Like the categories widget, I like to show them in a tag-cloud manor, but how to change the ouput I haven't found out yet. But I guess that shouldn't be all to hard.
MacJournal and my Symfony blog
So, now I wrote my blog with Symfony, I lost the possibility to write my blogposts with MacJournal. After a quick search, I discovered they support the XML-RPC protocol, I didn't knew that one yet, but after a quick look, it looked a but like SOAP, but please correct me if I'm wrong!
I also discovered, that the specifications of XML-RPC where last updated June 2003! Also I couldn't find any good documentation about the requests MacJournal does.
Anybody has some tips for me? I did find some Blogger API's, that would be possible to integrate as well. If it all works out, I will publish it as an Symfony Plugin.
Control Panel
Since about 3 weeks I'm thinking of creating a simple control panel, starting simple for my own domains, but might be expanding and Open Source it. But every time I make some time for it, I keep bumping into the problem: it's not as simple as it seems.
There are a lot of things to keep in mind, for instance, for my own needs I need to create email-addresses and mailboxes. But a logical step is to maintain the domains and there virtualhosts as well. With that, the next logical step would be to maintain clients, because a domain doesn't stand on itself. So every time I start working on it, I soon give up for that time, because I still need to create a solid database design.
If only there were more then 24 hours in a day...
Javascript and jQuery
Since I learned the power of Javascript and jQuery, I like to build a nice project with them, the only problem is... I have no idea's what to make. I already thought of making a Symfony plugin, something in combination with sfForm. But making a Symfony plugin is from a whole different level, I still want to do that once, but for now I just like to create something free. Not bound to a specific platform expect for jQuery.
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