Web Development, Code Snippets, Technology, Reviews and Random Stuff Blog.

Is this a repeat of what happened to Mambo and Joomla!?

Awhile back the rights to PunBB were sold to a company.

Apart from sponsoring the project, they wanted to later down the line offer paid-for web services in relation to PunBB (for example commercial grade PunBB hosting). We decided we liked the idea and sold the rights to the project.

Then a recent switch to a new domain occurred.

Moving the PunBB website under the informer.com domain is a way for our benefactors to promote their other services to the PunBB community and to promote PunBB to users of their other services.

Today many of the active developers mentioned they were forking the project into what they call FluxBB.

Some of you may have been wondering about the future of PunBB and the current development team following Rickard’s announcement that he will not be actively involved with PunBB, at least for the time being. … Now that circumstances have changed with the inevitable shift of power within the project, we all feel that we need a degree of control over future development which is no longer possible. We all share a desire to develop software for the benefit of the community and ourselves, without commercial concerns influencing the final product. This is not a condemnation of PunBB’s current owners: we simply feel that this change is necessary so that we as developers can maintain full control over the development process.

It didn’t bother me they had sold the rights to PunBB as long as it remained GPL, but what this split means now, I’m not sure. How many people will now abandon PunBB for FluxBB? A lot depends on how active the FluxBB project becomes and if the new PunBB development takes off.

I noticed on the National Weather Service’s website they now allow you to grab the forecast by REST, whereas before they only supported SOAP requests. This makes grabbing the forecast much simpler than it was before.

If you use SOAP there are many methods to grab the data, but if you use REST there are only 2. With REST you can either use DWMLgen which lets you get a little more specific information or NDFDgenByDay which is a little simpler and lets you pick either 12 hour or 24 hour increments (so you can get each day broken in half as in day and night or the full day). The response is sent back as XML for either method so you can format the data how you like.

For the example we are doing, we are going to keep it simple and use a single location, NDFDgenByDay and a 24 hourly period. We will also set it up so that we send the longitude and latitude for Austin, TX, the current date as the start date and request 7 days worth of data.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m really getting annoyed of seeing the same old Top ## Windows Apps or ## Web Development Tools lists on Digg. I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of making a few lists myself, but I decided awhile back not to do them anymore. Most of these lists are the same applications or websites over and over with a few new ones sprinkled in (if you’re lucky). I’m sure you’ve read blogs that state how great lists are, but many are just duplicate data. If you list doesn’t give an adequate review or enough details it’s not worth reading. If your list is really huge, people will bookmark it, but will never have the time to go through them all. Are there really 50 Killer PDF Applications I need to know about? Or could you try them all and narrow it down to 5? It’s easy to search on Google and come up with huge lists; However to actually review and figure out which are the best would be an even better list for your readers. What’s really funny is that I’ve seen lists made up of other huge lists. I’ll admit I have many of these laying around in my bookmarks, many I’ve yet to go through because there are just way too many and I don’t have the time to try them all out. Maybe I should of made a list of reasons not to make a list.

Want to show the last posts you updated in WordPress? This shows the posts you went back and updated or modified, which is different than your recent posts.


<?php
query_posts('showposts=10&orderby=modified&order=DESC');
if (have_posts())
{
echo '<h3>Last Modified Posts</h3>';
echo '<ul>' . "\n";
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
echo '<li>';
echo '<a href="' . get_permalink() . '">' . the_title('','', false) . '</a>';
echo '</li>' . "\n";
endwhile;
echo '</ul>';
}
?>


These are quick easy hacks to get RSS feeds for each forum on the index.php page and viewforum.php pages.

I covered how to put the main RSS feed on PunBB already.

Open up index.php and after this line

$forum_field = '<h3><a href="viewforum.php?id='.$cur_forum['fid'].'">'.pun_htmlspecialchars($cur_forum['forum_name']).'</a></h3>';


Add this

$forum_field .= '<div class="forum_rss"><a class="rss" href="extern.php?action=active&type=RSS&fid='.$cur_forum['fid'].'"><span>RSS</span></a></div>';/


Now open up viewforum.php and find this line

<h2><span><?php echo pun_htmlspecialchars($cur_forum['forum_name']) ?></span></h2>


and modify it to be

<h2><span><?php echo pun_htmlspecialchars($cur_forum['forum_name']) ?> <a class="rss" href="extern.php?action=active&type=RSS&fid=<?php echo $id /*MODIFIED - RSS*/ ?>"><span>RSS</span></a></span></h2>


And now for the CSS

.forum_rss {float:right;}
a.rss {background:url(../../img/feed.png) no-repeat left; width:16px; height:16px; padding-left:20px;}
a.rss span {display:none;}