AZPunk GeekFactor

The Summer of Code or The Perfect Monsoon

Chris • Saturday, July 10, 2010 • 6:11 PM

My new IDE of choice

With my sons due date vast approaching many people have prophesized for me a life filled with sleepless nights and zombie-like days. If any new enhancements were to be made to AZPunk I knew I'd needed to do them before Ian arrived. So, I've spent the last month or so coding after work and on weekends typically into the wee hours of the morning to spruce the site up just a bit. Call it preparation for what's to come with parentdom and the lack of sleep.

Here's a bit of a behind the scenes story that brought me to this point. If dreams of keyboard shortcuts and recursive functions wake you up at night continue reading....okay not really....okay maybe. Just read!

I was attending a free session on CSS for Layout at a recent Desert Code Camp. I'm more of a backend (get your mind outta the gutter!), server code type guy so I'd been putting off the whole CSS Zen Garden thing. But lately I'd been focusing more time on the client side with jQuery/AJAX and it's use of CSS selectors. So when this free code camp session came up I knew the time to embrace the ominous div tag was finally here.

It was the first session of the morning and right off the bat I was completely lost. It was an uneasy feeling that I typically don't do well with especially when related to computer stuff. But then, about half way through the presentation the light-bulb went off and I finally grasped the concept that had eluded me and all my previous attempts at CSS layout. The presenter was talking about floats and margins and all this stuff that I'd always related to the entire page and not elements of a page. "So wait a minute...every element on a page has a margin? and a border? and padding?". She was explaining the Box Model and it was just the catalyst I needed to set the wheels in motion.

At that point I was eager to start practicing what I'd learned so I came home and plowed through The Guide that the presenter had put together for the session. I'd visited all the resource sites she cited at the bottom of the guide and at that point I was hooked and needed more. I downloaded an e-book copy of CSS: The Missing Manual and started going through it. The Missing Manual is a book series that's just a step above those Doing Shit for Dummies books. Regardless of the pride I had to swallow that book explained things so well that I went out and bought a hard copy so that I could take it with me and read on the go.

After tinkering around with examples from the book and various websites I needed to put my new found knowledge to use on something that I could relate to. It's okay doing the whole Hello World exercise but I find I need to apply what I've learn to the Real World to get the synapses purring. So, it was time to tackle a few of the AZPunk projects that I'd been neglecting.

I created a new branch of our production code and fired up my old standby Notepad++. But as I stared at the screen my excitement to get started was quelled by the blinking cursor and the vast Notepad emptiness that surrounded it. Yes, I've been coding in the non-IDE dark-ages for far too long. See, for years I've been in search of a decent PHP IDE and for years have been disappointed. I've tried Eclipse (barf!), PHP Designer, PHPEdit and the list goes on and on... Nothing in the PHP world had ever came close to the elegance I've enjoyed in the .NET world with Visual Studio and Resharper.

Tools of the Trade

Coincidentally, just prior to the CSS wake-up call I'd been teaching myself Ruby on Rails and had been using the excellent RubyMine IDE created by the fine folks at JetBrains; the same company who brought Resharper into my .NET life. I was amazed at what Ruby on Rails had to offer out of the box. It was on par with most things I was already doing in .NET and was light years ahead of PHP. So I fell and fell hard. Not to mention that the RubyMine IDE allowed me to use a lot of the keyboard shortcuts and functionality that had already been infused in my brain with the use of Resharper at my 9 to 5 gig. So RubyMine made slinging Ruby code a breeze.

Had the AZPunk re-write come a year later it would have been done in RoR instead of PHP. But, at this point I had far too much time invested in the current 2.0 PHP code and too little time before the stork paid its' visit to rebuild it the Rails way . I realized I needed an IDE for PHP that was on par with RubyMine if I was to glean any enjoyment from this process.

I was pulled back into my PHP reality and I once again continued on my journey to find a decent IDE. I looked at the ones I'd previously mentioned again and a few new ones but none were appealing. They all just seemed foreign and not like anything I was used to. I didn't want to have to learn to use a new tool especially one that uses a different keyboard map for the same functions. Nothing is more frustrating when you're neck deep in code and the trusty CTRL-D or CTRL-/ don't work as expected. Instead you have to press CTRL-Q or some silly nonsense.

For whatever reason I'd paid a visit to the JetBrains site...probably to read the RubyMine forum or something. That's when I saw JUST RELEASED PhpStorm - IDE for HTML, JavaScript and PHP. Are you kidding me?! They had just released a new IDE for PHP THAT DAY and like RubyMine and Resharper it did the same, cool stuff I'd longed for in a PHP IDE like code completion, function lookup, super easy navigation, jQuery support, easier refactoring not to mention all the other super cool stuff. It even supported Smarty! the templating engine which I chose over the one built into the CodeIgniter MVC Framework that AZPunk is built on top of, but that's another story. So cool!

So, it had been written at that point. CSS was under my belt and I had my shiny new IDE. These new features just had to happen. The gods willed it...and so did Kelly (Thank you BTW!) So with a little help from a few jQuery libraries here and a few Google lookups there I put my nose to the keyboard and got to work.

And so I present to you the new changes...I hope you enjoy them. Just keep in mind that the site is still in "Beta" (READ: excuse for any bugs you encounter :-P)

Beers all around!

Improved Calendar

Next up is the new and improved show calendar. The previous one wasn't very useful and made it was nearly impossible to find out what was going on beyond the current week. I can't take full credit for this one though. I got by with a little help from a few jQuery libraries but it did take a lot of jQuery/AJAX/CSS code, configuration and integration on my part with this one. The result makes it well worth the time I put into it.

For all you AZPunk 1.0 oldtimers this calendar works fairly similar to the old AZPunk calendar. It shows a snippet from the title of the show on each day. Be sure to use concise titles when posting shows and list the headlining band first.

Despite the title snippets you can hover over a particular title and get a more detailed view of the show you're interested in. You can also click directly on the title to be taken to the full show details where you can comment and do other cool stuff.

If you click on the day number as shown above the actual show listing on the page will refresh with that days shows.

The final feature to showcase is the ability to navigate the calendar with the buttons in the top header. You can use the forward and backward arrows to navigate to different months. You can also click the Week button to narrow in on what's happening that week as seen below. This is pretty handy if there are a lot of shows happening that month. To get back to month view just click the Month button.

Article RSS

Just a minor feature but still cool nonetheless is the new Articles RSS feed. If you're at work and want to risk blazing the red and yellow you can do all your AZPunk Article reading in your RSS reader of choice.

That's it for all the stuff you'll see. I did a lot behind the scenes work to clean up code that's been a mess since the launch and added some things to make administration a bit easier. I'm on a roll now so stay tuned for more things after my boy gets here and we both adjust to our new lives.

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