Stuff They Never Taught You At Website School

Stuff you
need
Preamble:Ruby or go home
For Ruby
Sinatra
http://www.sinatrarb.com/
Ruby on Rails
http://www.rubyonrails.org
For PHP
Junior
http://github.com/madpilot/junior
The World’s smallest PHP Framework†
+ Apache (with mod_rewrite)
† Probably...

The Setup
Junior:World’s smallest PHP framework
You will need:
A web server that supports URL rewrites
PHP 4 (5 is better)

The Setup
Junior:The guts
You will need:
PHP 4 (5 is better)

Friendly URLS
Lesson 1: Make your URLs nicer
You will need:

Tags and Abstracts
Lesson 2: Dynamic Redirects
Moving stuff around?
Most would use .htaccess – not happiness
Store from URLS and to URS
Redirect with 301 Permanent
Bask in Google love

Tags and Abstracts
Lesson 2: Dynamic Redirects

Tags and Abstracts
Lesson 3: Auto generate tags and descriptions
Google might not care about meta tags anymore, but some sites do. Also useful for internal search...

Tags and Abstracts
Lesson 3: Auto generate tags
In five easy steps
Strip out all the HTML and non-alpha characters
Split the all the text into tokens (single words)
Strip out common words (stop words)
Count the frequency of the remaining words
Return the top 10 (or whatever)

Tags and Abstracts
Lesson 3: Auto generate tags
You will need:
A list of stop words

Tags and Abstracts
Lesson 4: Auto generate abstract
Most users will just use the first paragraph for descriptions – let’s do it for them
Find as many paragraphs as you can, without going over the word count.
OR
Find as many sentences in the first paragraph as you can, without going over the word count
OR
Find as many works in the first sentence as you can without going over the word count (and add a ellipses)
OR
Truncate the world’s longest word (and add a ellipses)

Tags and Abstracts
Lesson 4: Auto generate abstract
You will need:
PHP + Tidy Plugin
or
Ruby + Nokogiri

Search
Lesson 5: Adding Search
You will need:
MySQL with MyISAM
or
acts_as_indexplugin

Search
MySQL has full text search:
CREATE TABLE `searches` (
ìd` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`title` varchar(255) default NULL,
àbstract` varchar(255) default NULL,
`copy` text,
`keywords` varchar(255) default NULL,
`permalink` varchar(255) default NULL,
èntry_id` int(11) default NULL,
èntry_type` varchar(255) default NULL,
`created` datetime default NULL,
`modified` datetime default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (ìd`),
FULLTEXT KEY `title` (`title`,`copy`,`keywords`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM
You will need:
MySQL with MyISAM
or
acts_as_indexplugin

Search
You will need:
MySQL with MyISAM
or
acts_as_indexplugin

Search
acts_as_indexed :fields => [ :title, :body, :generate_keywords ]
You will need:
MySQL with MyISAM
or
acts_as_indexplugin

Did you mean?
Lesson 6: Did you mean?
Correct misspelled search terms
Split the term into tokens (on spaces)
Spell check each token
If it is wrong, show the correction
Make the corrected string a link
You will need:
PHP + Pspell
or
Ruby + raspell

Did you mean?
Lesson 6: Did you mean?
You will need:
PHP + Pspell
or
Ruby + raspell

Clean up
Lesson 7: Cleaning up user HTML
First thing clients do: Write their copy in Word, then paste it in
You tell the client not to cut-and-paste word documents
The second thing the client does: Write their copy in Word, then paste it in...
Also, RTE’s produce bad code, and each produces different bad code.
You will need:
PHP + Tidy/HTMLPurify
or
Ruby + sanitize

Clean up
Lesson 7: Cleaning up user HTML
You will need:
PHP + Tidy/HTMLPurify
or
Ruby + sanitize

Shpelling
Lesson 8: TinyMCE Spell check
This is a TinyMCEplugin.
Just need to define two JSON endpoints, and use the same library from the “Did you mean” section
You will need:
TinyMCE + Pspell or raspell

Shpelling
Lesson 8: TinyMCE Spell check
You will need:
TinyMCE + Pspell or raspell

Uploader
Lesson 8: File Uploader
Why are they so HARD!? It’s 2009 for god’s sake...
There is an apache module. Not so good for shared servers, but it works.
You can use a jqueryplugin, to turn normal uploaders into better uploaders
Oh, if any Adobe people are here: SORT FLASH UPLOADERS OUT.
Also. If there is any W3C people here: LET ME UPLOAD USING AJAX.
You will need:
mod_upload_progress
Some jquerymagic
AND NOT PHP

Uploader
Caveat: PHP has not happiness
You CAN use the APC. It’s pretty flaky.
The shared memory fills up, and it breaks. #balls
You will need:
APC PECL module
A lot of patience

Uploader
Lesson 8: File Uploader
You will need:
mod_upload_progress
Some jquery magic

Links
Sinatra:http://www.sinatrarb.com
Junior:http://www.github.com/madpilot/junior
Apache Uploader: http://github.com/drogus/apache-upload-progress-module
TinyMCESpellchecker for Rails: http://github.com/madpilot/tinymce_spellcheck
Acts as Indexed: http://github.com/dougal/acts_as_indexed
HTMLPurifier: http://htmlpurifier.org/
Sanitize: http://wonko.com/post/sanitize