Posting has been light this week because I’ve spent the time building a new site for the Jewish High Tech Community. First, credit where due, thanks to Andreas Viklund for making so many great designs available as open source as I used his andreas08 package for a very professional color scheme and layout (note that any red/reddish colors were added by me). Second, thanks to Chad Dickerson and his crew at Yahoo! Developer Network as I used the Yahoo! UI library for some nice Ajax effects: the future meetings popup and the in-place RSVP form/error message.
The site, behind the scenes, is much more complicated than necessary given the minimal content but I really was just looking for another technical exercise. All (well, 95+%) of the text you see is stored in a set of XML files, one for the common material and one to hold the material for each specific page. The pages are generated by one of the PHP classes, with common functionality like the header, footer and navigation menu abstracted to a parent class.
Given the nature of the site content, I decided to implement the hCalendar microformat on event pages. For now this is mostly meaningful as a learning exercise for me since the specification is not quite complete nor commonly used, although I expect microformats will gain traction fairly soon and users of the Tails extension for Firefox (or FlockTails for Flock), the Endo OS X aggregator or the Technorati Microformats Search will benefit already. Hat tip to Ryan King for clearing up a couple of questions for me.
I was a bit surprised at how unsimple PHP’s SimpleXML class turned out to be. The documentation could use a boost in explaining how to handle child collections and marked up text. By the former I mean multiple instances of the same type of element nested within a parent such as, in this context, several event elements inside the events element in the XML files that drive the past and future events lists. The latter refers to the near complete lack of mention that a CDATA directive must be used to alert PHP’s processor that the element contains (HTML) formatted text, or otherwise the markup is essentially ignored.
There’s still a bit more work to do but I wanted to push the new pages for the announcement of our exciting January 9 meeting. We have the aforementioned Chad, Evelyn Rodriguez, Anil Dash and Jason Hoffman presenting their forecasts for the likely important events we may see on the web in 2007 and then participating in a panel discussion of them.
Our events are free and open to all, so do join us if you have the time and inclination.
BillSaysThis 