Keith Devens .com

Comments work again

Comments work again. They were disabled for a while because I was working on my CMS code that handles form submissions. It took me a lot longer than I expected to get this stuff done because of a bunch of different things.

As part of the process, I wound up making a whole "cookie framework" so now it's really simple to deal with cookies from within my CMS. PHP's built-in cookie handling sucks (the only characters that are allowed in cookie names are those that are valid for PHP variables). Plus, I actually validate cookies according to a generated checksum, so if cookies are tampered with on the client side they'll be ignored (and then deleted, mwa ha ha). I may even include an option to encrypt cookies automatically, or on a per-cookie basis. Pretty cool.

Another thing that held me up and frustrated me a whole bunch is that I had a bug in one of my libraries. It's like generational garbage collection... you check the code you've written more recently for errors, and then you keep going further and further back in your code until you finally track down what it was. Within my custom markup language parser I'm using for my config files, as well as to serialize cookies, I had a line that was basically like "return substr($str,0,$len)". It turns out that if the string is empty (which means that $len would be zero), that returns false, not an empty string like I expected.

Plus, along the way I wound up changing a few other things about how my CMS works, how models are loaded, etc. etc. For instance, now that all data validation can be done in the code for the "action", I don't need to do it anymore in the model function that's called to save data. So that simplified the model code a lot.

So, it turned out to be a much bigger job than I expected, but my CMS continues to rock and get better Now that I have the form framework in, I can finish up my wiki, get a real backend administration interface going, etc.

Permalink | 13 Comments | Tags: This website | id 3808

14:08 (utc-4)
edited: 14:14 (utc-4)