Morphfolia – A New Open Source CMS is Born.

My friends, Adrian Kearns, finally released his excellent CMS, Morphfolia, as an open source project.

Morphfolia is two things:

  • A Content Management System (CMS)
  • A web application framework (for the typical Microsoft ASP.NET stack)

Morphfolia provides a suite of tools and capabilities that make website development and management flexible and easy.

This is achieved by a mature architecture and good design principles; the pages, content, page-layout and look & feel are all separated. Continue reading

Tableless and Secure One-Time Password (OTP)

A one-time password (OTP) is a password that is only valid for a single login session or transaction. It is commonly used in the internet for registration and password reminder process in which OTPs are provides to the user in a form of a link that the user uses to access in order to create/reset his password.

Common requirements of One Time passwords are:

  1. Statistically unique – using the same password for all requests is probably not the right security choice.
  2. Hard to guess – using sequential number is again, probably not the right security choice.
  3. Can be authenticated by the server – the server needs to distinguish between real OTP and bogus OTP.
  4. Good for one time – after the process is done the OTP should no longer be valid.
  5. Time limited – the OTP usually expires after a configurable amount of time.
  6. Secure – hackers should have a hard time changing the expiry date, username context and so forth.

Most OTP implementations use a Database table to persist the OTP and to manage their expiry date, a DB table might look like this:

id User Id OTP Expire date
1 Amir Asfsd3434bgddh 1/1/2010
2 Someone Ddfsd3345ssfsss 7/1/2010

While this is a valid solution, it is not the most efficient and elegant one, the truth is that you do not need an additional table enable and manage OTPs.

The answer is simple – the seed for this OTP is already persisted in the Database in the form of the old password (or more exactly the old password hash)

Here is how it is done:
Continue reading

How I Save Time Filtering Spam Comments with Mollom


I get spam comments all the time, it drives me crazy and make me wish I didn’t have a web site at all. Spam really bring the evil side of most site owners.

Yesterday, I finally had enough, I got 300 spam comments and only 4 real ones – I had to go over 3 pages and read bogus comments like:

“I have a question [link to gambling site]”

or “nice post [link to viagra]”

and the ho-so-known “dgsdgsdghsdfhdf [link to a SEO company]”.

I went to drupal and looked for the most popular anti-spam module they listed and found Mollom.

Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop spam on your blog, social network or community website. When site moderation becomes easier, you have more time and energy to interact with your community.
Continue reading

Open source presentation at the Wellington Architect forum

Just finished my presentation on Open source and Architecture in the Wellington Software Architect Forum.

We have covered these topics:
1) Definition, Licensing & players
2) Open source based architecture examples
3) Best practices
4) ROI, TCO and other TLA
5) Open source tools for architecture
6) Want to be an open source developer?
7) Future FOSS trends

You can download the presentation here.

IPWEditor – In-Place WYSIWYG Editor 1.2 Released with TinyMCE support


IPWEditor provides easy in-place editing for Web pages with a layer of WYSIWYG. It allows you to seamlessly replace text on Web pages with inputs for on-the-spot editing.

Up until now IPWEditor has integrated only with FCKeditor. The major feature in this release is integration with TinyMCE, a popular WYSIWYG editor.

Developers can now choose to run IPWEditor with either FCKeditor or with TinyMCE editor using the same IPWEditor code.

Continue reading

Drupal crashes when adding module in Modules admin screen

Drupal is a popular CMS that enables 3rd party development of extensions such as themes and modules. In order to get a good value site out of Drupal you need to install several modules and theme that provides functionality such as cool look and feel, SEO improvements, support for content types such as images and a lot more. Continue reading

How to SELECT a Random Record in SQL

Sometimes we need to retrieve a random entry from the Database. An examples for that could be trying to display “random posts” or “a random image”.

Some developers pull some or all of the records and then preform the randomization in the application tier (AKA in code).

In most cases letting the Database return random eateries could prove to be a better option performance-wise.

Here is how it is done:
Continue reading

IPWEditor – In-Place WYSIWYG Editor 1.1 Released


IPWEditor provides easy in-place editing for Web pages with a layer of WYSIWYG. It allows you to seamlessly replace text on Web pages with inputs for on-the-spot editing.

As reported by some members of the community, due to jQuery issue with IE 7, IPWEditor 1.0 had some issues around IE usability.

Thanks to these inputs and some refactoring around the jQuery limitation, these issues were resolved in this IPWEditor 1.1 release. Continue reading

Make ThickBox Work with Other JavaScript Libraries / Resolve ThickBox Conflict Issues

ThickBox is a cool visualization tool based on Jquery JavaScript library. ThickBox helps you display photos in a cool way and is useful in many web projects.

The problem

ThickBox does not work when the HTML pages has other JavaScript libraries such as Mootools.

Debuging the error reveals this:

$(domChunk) is null

Continue reading

AutoSnippet – automatically generate HTML and javascript code snippets


Code snippets posted online are a great source of knowledge and simple way to share experience and to reuse code. As developers we always look to see if there is a ‘code example’ which we can modify to our needs. As bloggers we find code snippets very useful to get our information out to the readers.

The problem is that creating these code snippets is a complex and cumbersome task. You need you replace all the < with &alt, wrap the code in <pre> and <code> tags and then use a Syntax Highlighter to make our code look nice. Every time we change or fix the code you need to reiterate this process.

AutoSnippet solves this problem by automatically generating the code snippet from the source code (HTML, CSS and Javascript). No more cumbersome repetitive tasks and no more inconsistencies between example and real code.

In this article I will show how to generate automatic snippets for your blog and source/code websites.




 

Usage:

HTML and javascript goes here

1) Example of code and its automatic snippet(with Syntax Highlighter)

The following code snippet on the left is automatically generated with SyntaxHighlighter. As a developer you just write the code and the autoSnippet generates the snippet itself.

Just write

code and the snippet is automatically

generated on the right ->

Here is how it is done:

2) Example of code snippet only (with Syntax Highlighter)

The following code snippet automatically generated with SyntaxHighlighter.
To get the ‘snippet only’ affect you need to put the source div over the target div.
again, as a developer you just write the code and the autoSnippet generates the snippet itself.


Just write

code and the snippet is automatically

generated here!

Here is how it is done:

3) Simple Example – with no Syntax Highlighter:

AutoSnippet can integrate with other Syntax Highlighter. Here is AutoSnippet at its simplest form.

just code 🙂

Here is how it is done:

Auto snippet is easy to use- it is a jquery plug-in and uses SyntaxHighlighter for syntax highlighting. Both of SyntaxHighlighter and jquery are common and well established open source projects. AutoSnippet is easily extendable and is released under the MIT open source license.

download and docs

Formal documentation and download can be found here.