blog @ pebbl

Was just checking back over a few old sites that I worked on and realised that some of the easter eggs I built in were still there and working — considering I know the guys behind these site pretty well, and it's been a few years (try closer to 7), I don't think they'll mind if I at least point one out.

I'm of the opinion that sites should have more fun / hidden elements baked-in, rather than the increasingly impersonal, out-of-the-box and off-the-shelf sites that you see everywhere today. It's those kinds of playful elements that give a human touch and memory to the otherwise transient complexity that forms the web.

To find the above Flash map you just need to visit http://www.airportguides.co.uk. Checking the map you'll see that there are two thin lines that cross at one point, triple click where the lines cross (you should get a pointer cursor) and then you should see a new island appear. Clicking this island should modify the content of the page, injecting some credits about the people who built the site — a kind of hidden humans.txt :)

Now for something else that humanises an otherwise hard to reach subject... and obviously does it in a far superior way — *hats off*.

Over the last few years I've been constantly surrounded by chatter with regard to Selenium, but had never been in a position to try it out. Yesterday that changed when Tate stated the need to have as near to continous integration as possible with the on-going enhancements to their core website.

So, this has led to lots of interesting learning and reading up on something that has - until now - only really been a buzzword for me :)

Unfortunately my first foray into this area led me straight to a rather annoying bug in a particular PHPUnit extension designed to integrate a PHP script with Selenium. Basically I set about doing what most coders would do when presented with an Object Orientated architecture, I attempted to extend PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase with my own functionality.

Initially everything seemed to work as expected... that is until one of my Selenium tests generated an error. Rather than a helpful error message, my script bugged out with the following unhelpful error:

Argument 5 passed to PHPUnit_Framework_Error::__construct() 
must be an instance of Exception, array given

On a closer look into the problem it seems that PHPUnit_Framework_Error.php has been upgraded, however the code in PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase.php hasn't.

class PHPUnit_Framework_Error extends Exception
{
    /**
     * Constructor.
     *
     * @param  string     $message
     * @param  integer    $code
     * @param  string     $file
     * @param  integer    $line
     * @param  Exception  $previous
     */
    public function __construct($message, 
                                $code, 
                                $file, 
                                $line, 
                                Exception $previous = NULL)
    {
        parent::__construct($message, $code, $previous);

        $this->file  = $file;
        $this->line  = $line;
    }
}

The fifth argument has been changed to expect an Exception object, whereas, whenever a new PHPUnit_Framework_Error is called into existence from PHPUnit_SeleniumTestCase.php, you get:

throw new PHPUnit_Framework_Error($buffer, 
                                  $e->getCode(), 
                                  $e->getFile(), 
                                  $e->getLine(), 
                                  $e->getTrace());

The last parameter is incorrect, it should be:

throw new PHPUnit_Framework_Error($buffer, 
                                  $e->getCode(), 
                                  $e->getFile(), 
                                  $e->getLine(), 
                                  $e);

Or at least changing it to the above fixes the issues I was experiencing, now my code warns about errors correctly. Just in case it's useful to anyone out there :)

Don't ask me why but I've just finished installing the latest recommend version of Drupal 7. I'd been hearing quite a bit of chatter about it recently (after the initial buzz at the beginning of the year (and after the constant comments on the dev channel the year before that)). So I decided that maybe now would be a good time to see what improvements had been made - In my opinion there was a lot needing to be done from Drupal 6...

Before getting started however I did a little bit of research to see what others were saying, and it seemed unanimous really:

1. Drupal 7 is cleaner and more though-out than D6
2. Scalability is better, but performance is slightly worse.
3. There are a lot of modules that have been ported (D7 promise), but many useful ones are still at alpha/beta stages.
4. Module Installation and dashboard are +1 by all

From my point of view it only took me about 30 minutes this morning to get a clean install working using SQLite with my "must have" modules installed (Views,CTools,Panels). Which is far better than my experiences before with D6. I quickly created some new Views (like the new interface for Views!), tied those in to new pages controlled by Panels (Panels is now even more extensive!) exposed via Blocks (Blocks are blocks). I got Drupal's basic search working (I haven't looked in to anything more complicated like FuzzySearch altho I am currently looking in to Google Custom Search). And I then customised the main menu to be as I wanted. So all in all, good, and needed minimal time to look things up. However, I always found this to be the case really with Drupal. It's very quick to put together the large, general bits and pieces of a site... Your time just gets eaten up by editing or fixing the more smaller and specific issues which take forever to find.

Anyway, I haven't had too much time to play around now. Nothing from the code point of view. But so far the admin/front-end is a lot cleaner but totally re-arranged and I will admit to getting a little/lot lost. At least there is the feeling that once I've learned the interface it will be clearer and quicker to navigate than D6. The most annoying thing for me with D6 is that nothing was where I'd expected it to be.. whether that's because non-techy people just have very strange thought processes ;) or D6 just was very strange in itself. So D7 is an improvement... I just expect things in D6 places and haven't found everything yet ;)

So overall... since my check in January it still seemed to me that for use on a large-scale projects things would probably ok as long as you have time for bespoke modules (or you have flexibility with how things need to work), for smaller and personal CMS projects it would definitely be my choice just because it seems far more thought out than anything else out there. The "install module from URL" feature is very nice, but quite why this didn't exist previously I have no idea... it's hardly a new concept or difficult to implement, especially when you have complete control over where and how your module developers upload their contributions. I don't mean to sound negative but much of what I have seen so far in D7 is just common sense, obviously achieving common sense on a large scale project is quite difficult if you don't start out with that premise. So I'd say the "hats off" achievement isn't so much the actual new features I've come across, it's getting them all ready and working in harmony across such an open network... which is what they've achieved.