For the next Cognifty release I'm working on a Phing based installer.

Phing is good at doing all those rote tasks like copying, unzipping, and replacing values in a configuration script, so why hasn't anybody done this before?

The remote webdav module shows you a virtual filesystem to allow an admin to change some configuration options, change the template HTML or even install local modules.

Release 18 is the latest version of Cognifty. The new big feature is custom content publishers. You can create your own types of content based off of the main file upload tool or text tool. You can write your own plug-in to handle the publishing and do any sort of compiling, checking, or linking required before the content goes out to the site.

Released last week, Cognifty 17 brings a new identicon library as well as a simple way to backup your database.

Identicons are a nice way to visually identify something. Most of the time, people confine their use to blog posters who don't have a specific avatar image. Assuming that the poster's IP or e-mail address are unique, the identicon is a visual representation of that piece of data.

In honor of this release's compatibility with nanoweb and the new SQLite PDO driver, I've written the first part of an article dealing with how to write your own virtual host control panel, or other embedded PHP servers.

You can build a PHP-CGI binary for 1 platform, compile in PDO and SQLite (since sqlite is just a C client library and not a server), and ship it with nanoweb. Now you have a full Web application stack in only about 14 Mb (depending on what you throw into the php-cgi and how much you compile statically).

I've just added a new "live cheat sheet" to the http://cognifty.com/index.php/tutorial/ section. I've seen some other projects which have these so-called "cheat sheets", but the cheat sheet is simply a huge PDF. These PDFs usually show a graphical representation of the software system as a set colored blocks and arrows with tiny variables written inside the blocks. These variables are supposed to help you remember which functions are available at which points in the system.

How can we capture 404 errors in MVC frameworks? Apache always finds the index.php file that kicks off the MVC application. So, should a missing controller constitute an error at all? Is sending a 404 the "right" thing to do?

I've seen a lot of people talking about mysql_real_escape_string() vs addslashes() vs addcslashes(). There seems to be a lot of real confusion about what these functions do (even with the php.net manual around), especially when it comes to character sets. I feel that some people are being scared into using some escaping methods with which they are not very familiar. So, I've decided to lay it all out in a few charts so there is no confusion about what each function does and how each can help protect against SQL injection attacks.

Release 10 of Cognifty has a nice little database feature that I haven't noticed in other libraries. I'm not saying they don't have them, but they don't really announce useful tools to developers, just the same old stuff about OOP and some directory structure loosely based on LogiCreate.

The feature about which I'm talking is the getUnlimitedCount() method. When working with data items, or active records, or SQL abstraction, or whatever you want to call it, the getUnlimitedCount method runs the query it would normally run, but it selects the total number of records without including the LIMIT or ORDER BY clauses.

Capturing spam as a Web service is becoming increasingly popular. Services like Akismet, Akisment, Mollum, Defensio, can scan the content from your site's visitors, but what about the behavior?

There is one huge disadvantage to storing large files in a database when it comes to PHP, and that disadvantage is PHP itself, specifically the MySQL driver. When PHP requests data from MySQL, the result set, if large enough, will get paged to disk on by the server. When the MySQL client library in PHP gets the result, it keeps a copy of the data, and then copies the values into the Zend Engine so PHP can access it. This can lead to 3 times the amount of data, slowing down a PHP process that is reading BLOBs from the database.

Everybody thinks PHP5 is so great, I hear it all the time. People say, "We should use PHP5, it's so great", "It has much better support for OOP", "You can do so much more with 5 than with 4", etc. etc. You get my point.

The problem is, every new feature of PHP5 has some crippling bug that causes it to be unusable, or at least not usable in a way that makes your code better or easier to understand.

I'm just about ready to release version 8. There's been a lot of visual enhancements to the admin screens. New jQuery tabs have been added to a lot of the content screens, and a graphic check mark has replaced the basic "yes/no" values in the "is published" columns.