/ en-gb 2013-06-19T03:58:28-07:00 info@nospam.com hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://e107.org/blog/Creating%20my%20first%20v2.x%20plugin 2013-06-19T03:58:28-07:00 Moc Misc Not only have I been working with the team to make sure we could get the first alpha out - which I’m hoping everyone is enjoying so far - I've also been preparing my first v2.x plugin called 'Owe Me!'. The code is located here: https://github.com/Moc/oweme.Owe Me! is a very simplistic plugin that creates an overview of money that is owed to you by others (be it friends, family or whoever else). It can I thought of creating this when several family members and friends still owed me some money and both the paper as well as my mental notes seemed to disappear real quickly. You know the feeling? By means of this blog post, I would like to share my experience of building a v2.x plugin considering my limited PHP experience. I can do some basic editing which is the reason as to why I practically refrained from working on v1.x plugins before. It turns out, my limited PHP skills are sufficient enough to create a v2.x plugin. I hope this inspires and encourages you to try it out yourself as well! Amongst the many amazing new features in v2.x which I highlighted in one of my previous blog posts, the plugin builder is a great tool that will be of significant use to you when you want to develop a plugin. It will generate most of the new code for the admin-area of your plugin based on your database structure. The tool also generates the new plugin.xml meta-file, which is used during installation of your plugin. Using this tool has several advantages:- There is no need to code in the HTML or the process of reading and/or writing to your database (which was still needed in v1.x). On top of that, your interface is consistent with the rest of admin area which makes it easier for end-users to use your plugin. - You can easily make full use of features such as the media-manager, userclasses, drag-and-drop sorting, batch and inline editing and so on. Let’s take a closer look at what I did to create the plugin:1) The first thing I did was thinking about the database structure of my plugin. I found this to be the most important step of the entire process as the database structure is the basis of your plugin. You need to think about how you would like the data of your plugin to be structured. For example: the Owe Me! plugin has one main table (which contains the ‘entries’) and three other tables: debtors, categories and statuses which contain information about each of these sections. I used these different tables as I wanted the users of my plugin to be able to define their own debtors, categories and statuses. I used a database tool called phpMyAdmin to actually create the structure. Most webhosting providers offer this tool. More info on phpMyAdmin can be found in this great tutorial: [-link-] 2) A simple export of my database (again through phpMyAdmin) was all that was needed to get the contents of my oweme_sql.php file. Simply put the table structure in your *_sql.php file. Example data can be added using the *_setup.php files. (* = your plugin folder name)3) I selected my plugin folder (oweme) in the plugin builder and it showed me some options like which column names needed options such as batch or inline editing, which columns could be filtered and which columns were displayed or hidden by default. 4) After the plugin builder generated the admin interface of my plugin for me, I had to make some minor and simple changes to make sure the dropdowns in my main area were pulling data from a different table in the database (e.g. the ‘debtor’ dropdown needed to pull data from the debtor table in my database). This is done through the init() function, which is actually really easy to use. Examples can be found in the FAQ plugin, or even in my plugin if you like! At the same time, the plugin builder had also created a basic plugin.xml for me which I slightly edited afterwards to suit my needs. 5) I then started working on the frontend of my plugin. The frontend is the actual area on your website that users can see. In my case this is a simple table that shows all the Owe Me! entries. The integration of Bootstrap and jQuery made it real easy for me to style the table. It instantly looked consistent with the rest of my installation which was quite a relief when thinking back about how this had to be done in v1.x. DONE! I had then finished my first simple v2.x plugin and I actually enjoyed creating it. I may be biased, but this is such an improvement from all the manual and inconsistent work that had to be done when creating a v1.x plugin. The plugin builder created the basic files (admin_config.php and plugin.xml) so I could focus on the frontend of my plugin.I am no PHP expert and yet I did manage to create my first plugin which got to count for something, right?I plan on expanding the Owe Me! plugin to include some new features and make it a little more customisable (e.g. some preferences to set for example the currency). I’ll also be adding LAN files so users are able to translate the plugin into their own language. Feel free to contribute by testing and submitting pull requests to the Github repository. You can also star and/or fork my project to spread the word. Pull requests are welcome! I’ve added some screenshots below to give you an impression of the Owe Me! plugin (click to enlarge).Thank you for reading, feel free to let us know what you think about the plugin creation process and/or my plugin specifically. I hope to see your v2.x plugin(s) sometime soon!Moc http://e107.org/blog/Introducing%20SFS%3A%20the%20StopForumSpam%20plugin%20for%20e107 2013-06-19T03:58:28-07:00 Moc Misc Over the past weeks and months, the community has reported an increasing amount of bots signups which consequently results in an increasing amount of SPAM on your e107 installations. We hear you. Not only you guys are spending too much of your time trying to fight these nasty fellows, so are we. The e107 team members have practically made it their day job to remove the continous flow of spam posts (okay I am exeggerating here, but SPAM is definitely frustrating, isn't it?). e107 Inc. is now proud to introduce SFS, a plugin that cross-references every signup request with the database of stopforumspam.com. This database is a collection of usernames, e-mail addresses and IP-addresses of known spambots. After installing the plugin, every signup is quietly checked in the background against the stopforumspam.com database to make sure that it is not a spambot that tries to pollute your website but a legitimate user. In case a known spambot tries to sign up, the signup request will fail. This should decrease the amount of spambots who sign up on your website significantly (the plugin has already proven itself on this website over the past few hours alone). On behalf of e107 Inc., thank you stopforumspam.com for the excellent work that has been done in building this database over the years. The SFS plugin can be downloaded here: https://github.com/e107inc/sfsPlease feel free to leave feedback and to commit some pull-requests. In addition to the SFS plugin, we have added an additional spam check in the e107 signup process. This check is included in the 1.0.3 release and should contribute to reducing the amount of SPAM on your website. There is no guarantee for a SPAM-free website but both the added check and the SFS plugin should help with reducing malicious signups significantly. We encourage you to try the SFS plugin and feel free to leave us some feedback, positive or negative. Until next time Moc http://e107.org/blog/e107%20gets%20a%20new%20look 2013-06-19T03:58:28-07:00 CaMer0n Misc As many of you would have noticed, there's been some major (over-due) changes around here.We are very happy to finally reward the community with a new website design and a new logo. The new logo retains some of the elements of the 'old cube' which we made-do with for many years, while adding some new elements. It will be different for everyone, but personally, I like the 'expansion' aspect that it portrays - which I believe is fitting for the e107 CMS. There is another aspect which I find interesting in the logo, and that is that if you take each curved element, or combine, rotate some of them, etc. you could actually make something which resembles 'e107'. Maybe one day we'll animate this, because I'm sure I'm not explaining it very well. Comment to let me know if you see it. As you will have noticed, we have also changed our version numbering. Some believed e107 was still in beta, due to the '0.7.x' format, and for some time we have planned to change this (when the time was right), as e107 is certainly mature and stable enough to be a 'v1.0'. Consequently, what was known as v0.8, will now be known as v2.0, and yes, we do still have plans to release that soon. In version 1.0 of e107 we have introduced a new theme called 'core' which will be the default for new installations, and retired 'reline'. "Core" also includes a reworked admin-theme, which takes a little getting used to (for those who were using Jayya) but we have grown to prefer it's layout and navigation, and we hope you do too. The installation routine of e107 has also been reworked inside and out. (thanks to Daniel) We hope you like the new design of e107.org. It actually combines content of what was previously four separate sites: e107.org, plugins.e107.org, themes.e107.org and e107coders.org. Yes, I have finally retired the old e107coders.org site, which will be left online for legacy value (forums etc). There simply weren't enough hours in the day to maintain that old site, and for some years now I have dreamed of having everything combined together on e107.org as your see it now. As well as the plugins which were at plugins.e107.org - all the 0.7 plugins from e107coders.org have been imported also (about 350 of them - with dupes removed) as well as over 100,000 user accounts. (doing our best to avoid duplicates there too). So, if you had an account over there, you now have one here. So many changes have been made, I'm sure I've missed something. But I'd like to close here in saying that all the many changes you observe before you now would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of our development and design team. In particular, Miro, Stoev, Deso, Vesko and our new junior developer Daniel. Thank you guys - you're all geniuses in your fields! Anyway, here's to a great 2012 ahead for e107 and it's community. Cheers!