GS Design Just another developer blog

All of the applications this days will involve a database to store data and most of them will also have a user system. This means that beside building a login/register page you also need a method to store the data of the logged-in user while they are logged in.

Normally in php driven websites you will have that data storred in sessions, but in Zend Framework its easyer to use Zend_Auth to help you manage that part for you. The way i implemented my login is that i save the the user model in Zend_Auth storage, this helps me by having acces to the models methods like isAdmin for example.

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Recently i tried to integrate the well known swfupload script into a website.
If you are here you must probably know that normally the flash request looses session since it doesn’t send cookie headers. The recommended workaround is to send the sessionid as a parameter through post, and in the action page set the session_id() to the post variable before the session start.

I did this but for some reason, my zend application refused to accept the new session_id. I struggled with it for quite a few hours, and finally narrowed it down to a php problem since the session_id would get set properly but after session start the session would be empty.

Really hitting a dead end i headed to stackoverflow ( really thankful for the guys that made this site possible ) and tried my luck there and wrote a question. And i got my answer

Seemed like the problem was with the php extension Suhosin witch has a session protection to prevent session stealing. A very useful thing but in this case it made me spend quite a few hours puzzled and staring at the monitor.

Hope you this is also your problem,
Cheers

After starting working with zend framework i found all sorts of examples of bootstrap files, but a lot of them seem pretty messy to me since all the calls to zend components were basically thrown in there.

So after a lot of looking around i came up with a bootstrap files that is more to my liking. I found the initial class on a blog post when i was looking around but i don’t remember where, so sorry for not giving it the credit.

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this post is more of a personal best practice and thought to share it with you guys. I like to do things this way, and think this is the best aproach, but i might be wrong and i would like your feedback on this .

So in Zend Framework first of all you are recommended to always use the routers assemble method to generate the Urls. Wich is very good since you will then have an easy way of updating an URL, for example when the SEO guy tells you to switch 2 url params around.

The problem is where you place your call to the router ?

One way to go about it is to place it in the controller, or in the view. But i think that is not the best ideea since this would mean in case you would want to change the route, the name for example, you would need to change it in all the places you made it.

A second choice would be to have the router call in a function somewhere that you would call from everywhere you would want the URL generated. But that seems to me like an extra layer.

My approch.

Almost all the time that URL is related to a model. For example if u have an article model. then you could make a method buildUrl :

and then in your controllers and views you would just do:

which looks nicer and you are keeping the call to the router in one place.

Thats about it, i know this might look like pretty simple stuff for most of you, but i hope some will find this useful.
Cheers

If you started working with Zend Framework you have notice that it is a bit slower then your regular php application.
This is due more or less to the double sword of having such a big framework to work with.

There are a lot of tips and tutorial out there on how to optimize your Zend Framework, and in all of them you will see the recommendation to remove the require_once from the library and to use Zend_Loader. Wich is a good advice since all those require_onces do put some stress on your application.

But after a bit of testing i camed to the conclusion that Zend_Loader isn't so fast. So i decided to go revert to a simple solution: writing my own autoloader.
I just put this small function at the top of my zend bootstrap file.

And because i wrote all my application using Zend / Pear naming standard it works pretty good.

Hope you find this useful.
Cheers

As i wrote in a previous post there are more ways to design a database for a multilanguage website, but the one i decided to go with is Coupled Translation table approach, where basicly for each table you have another one where you store a row for each language wich has the primary table id, language id and the other columns that need to be translated.

The Requirements and Implementation

Having this idea in mind i wrote a new class that extends Zend_Db_Table to provide an easy access to the translated tables. Basically the class a couple of things:
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Important

Ignore this solution, there is already a solution in ZF implemented in View as Jani Hartikainen pointed out in the comment below.
Its $this->render('...');

Zend Framework has a view helper called partial that you can use to render other views in your view file.
This is very useful for reusing the html code.

The problem i sometimes faced with that partial helper is that it resets all the variables and you need to specify them as an array parameter if you want them to be available in the partial view rendered.

The solution

To overcome this all you need to do is make a new view helper ... i called mine GSD_View_Helper_Render witch extends the Zend_View_Helper_Partial and overwrites the methods that clones the view and resets the variables.

Thats it. Hope this is of help to you.
Cheers

If you ever had to build a site in a language that had special characters or a multilanguage website, then you have had problems with UTF encoding for sure.

Well recently a new class was published on phpclasses.org by Rubens Takiguti Ribeiro called Unicode Manipulation that will solve your problems.
The class is a complete solution to manipulate Unicode encoded text with support for UTF-16 and UTF-32 besides UTF-8.

This class can be used to manipulate text with Unicode encodings.

It can perform several types of operations that involve text strings encoded as UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32, like:

- Get the text sequence for byte order mark for little and big endian
- Convert a given character code to Unicode encoded text and vice-versa
- Get the byte length of a given Unicode encoded character
- Convert text encoding between UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32
- Get a part of an Unicode encoded string from a given position and an optional length
- Get the string length of an Unicode encoded text
- Determine whether a given string has Unicode encoded text

[Class Page]

Hope you find it usefull,
Cheers.

Today i finally decided to go ahead with installing subversion, after a bit of reading i opened a ssh session and input :

[root@servername ~]# yum install subversion

But to my surprise i got an error

Error: Missing Dependency: perl(URI) >= 1.17 is needed by package subversion

After a bit of googling i managed to find a solution on a forum and i thought to post it here, maybe other will find it faster

First we need to download the perl(URI) with version greater than 1.17 using the following command.

wget http://yum.trixbox.org/centos/5/RPMS/perl-URI-1.35-3.noarch.rpm

Then to install the perl package :

rpm -i perl-URI-1.35-3.noarch.rpm

That is it, you can now install and configure subversion as normal.

Cheers.

Preinfo

Before you go right to the comment section and recommend gettext or other similar ways, know that i am talking about content that is manageable from an admin panel or is added by the user

Also this article is based on personal experience and is not necessary the best way to do this.

Building a metalanguage website poses a lot of problems, and one of them is how you store the content in the database for each language.

If you do a google search you will find little resources about it, and most of the are on forums. This seem a bit strange to me, so after i had decided on a database schema for a metalanguage website i decided to post it here in the hope that other people might find it useful and save them some googling time.

As far as i searched there are more or less 4 databases schemas for metalanguage website.

1. Column approach

This approach is very common and basically it duplicates the column of content for each language.

table pages
-- id (int)
-- title_en (varchar)
-- title_es (varchar)
-- content_en (varchar)
-- content_es (varchar)

The way you would query it is by automatically selecting the right columns according to the language chosen:

Or you could select all and do the column selection from php :

Advantages

• It doesn't have duplicate content, since there is only one row for each record, and only the language columns are duplicated
• Easy to implement

Disadvantages

• You need to build the watch what column you are working with depending on the language
• Hard to maintain. Although this is a easy way for 2-3 languages its becomes a real drag when you have a lot of columns or a lot of languages
• Hard to add a new language

2. Multirow approach

Another approach that i saw but i have never worked with it. It is simillar to the one above but instead of duplicating the content in columns it does it in rows.

table pages
-- id (int)
-- language_id (int)
-- title (varchar)
-- content (varchar)

So you will basically have 3 rows for the same page if you have 3 languages. The main problem i see with this approach is that it would be a bit tricky to know witch id you will use for the table relations.

Sorry but since i dont really have experience with this i cant show you sql & php examples.

Advantages

• Ease in adding a new language

Disadvantages

• Need to watch the table relations
• A lot of duplicate content. You will have duplicate content for all the columns that are not translated

3. Single Translation table approach

This is an approach that becomes a little more complex then the other 2, but it is more suited for dinamic websites and which have a large number of languages or which intend to add a new language in the future and want to do it with ease.

table languages
-- id (int)
-- name (varchar)

table pages
-- id (int)
-- language_id (int)
-- title (int fk)
-- content (int fk)

table translation
-- id (int)

table translation_entry
-- translation_id (int)
-- language_id (int)
-- content (text)

In this approach you would store the id from the translation table in the title and content columns from the pages table, and then do a join with the translation_entry table based on the language id.

Advantages

• Proper normalization
• Ease in adding a new language

Disadvantages

• Longer joins and query to get the content
• All the translated content goes into one table
• For me it just looks hard to work with and maintain

4. Coupled Translation table approach [my aproach ]

This is a variation of the above approach that to me seems easier to maintain and work with.
Instead of having just one translation table, you have one for each table. and you move the columns from the pages that need to be translated to the translation table.

table languages
-- id (int)
-- name (varchar)

table pages
-- id (int)

table pages_translation
-- id (int)
-- page_id (int)
-- language_id (int)
-- title (text)
-- content (text)

To get your data you just do a simple join:

Advantages

• Proper normalization
• Ease in adding a new language
• Easy to query
• Columns keep there names

Disadvantages

• You have to create translation tables for all your tables that have columns that need to be translated

Conclusion

I am sure that there are other methods of doing a multilingual website, this are just the ones that i thought are most commonly used. My solution is the best, its just the best for me, because it works for my project and its easier for me to work with compared to other approaches.
In the end the best approach is the one that is the best for you. The one that you find the most easier to work with and maintain.

Cheers,
and good coding.