My NP_MyNewsletter is ready, and I can say i'm a bit proud of it :-)

This plugin adds the possibility to Nucleus to send a daily/weekly/monthly/..., or just manually, newsletter with the latest X entries of your blog or the entries of today/yesterday. Your newsletter is completely customizable since it uses a normal Nucleus Skin to produce the newsletter!

After seeing the newsletters of websites like slashdot and newsforge i wanted to be able to send such a newsletter using Nucleus. Now it is possible

The plugin uses a normal Nucleus skin and sends the output as an e-mail, so you can give your newsletter the exact layout that you want.

When you want to plugin to automatically send the newsletter, by example everyday, just setup a cronjob at your webserver (everything is explained in the documentation). (i might write a plugin, NP_Sheduler, to do this from inside Nucleus in the feature, i'm seriously thinking about this)

The plugin can also send welcome and 'sorry to see you …

While i was testing the Nucleus 3.1 zip file before it was released, i got the idea that it would be usefull to have a checklist with tests you should do when testing a RC zip file, instead of just installing the zip and trying things you think about. Like Karma said it would even be better to have an automated testing system, but that's probably a bit overkill for Nucleus.
After searching Google for a second, i found some PHP Unit testing tools:

• SimpleTest: http://simpletest.sourceforge.net/
• PhpUnit (dead?): http://phpunit.sourceforge.net/
• Article from phpPatterns: http://www.phppatterns.com/index.php/article/articleview/33/1/2/
• Article about SimpleTest: http://www.lastcraft.com/unit_test_documentation.php

I don't know if this information is somehow usefull for Nucleus...

I commited some fixes/changes to CVS:

• CHANGED: option-metadate are now key/value-pairs, and select-lists must be the first item. From the (updated) plugin api doc:
  

  As of Nucleus 3.1+CVS, some option types can be limited to only accept certain values using option-metadata. This metadata is stored in the $typeExtras-field, and is a semicolon-seperated list of values. Note: In a select-option, the select list must be the first value in $typeExtras.

  key	explanation
  numeric	If set to 'true', Nucleus will only accept numerical values for this option (available for optiontypes: 'select' and 'text')

  some examples:

  <?php
  // following code creates a text-option that only accepts numerical values
  $this->createItemOption('TestValue', 'TestOption', 'text', '0', 'numerical=true');
  // following code creates a select-option that only accepts numerical values
  $this->createItemOption('TestCase4', 'TestCaseOption:select(numerical)',
    'select', '0', '0|0|1|1|2|2;numerical=true');
  

• FIXED: some bugs in testcase plugins
• CHANGED: ItemOptionTestCase now tests a text-option with numeric=true, to show the usage of the client-side javascript that prevents users form …

Op het Nucleus Forum vond ik vandaag een leuke beschrijving van moraes, over het samenwerken binnen de Nucleus Community:

"I was just thinking how nice are these kind of collaborative work. Roel started talking about a new design for the Nucleus site and has made some proposals and guidelines for it. Meantime Hcgtv has set the NUDN and after a lot of discussion with Admun and Teranex, Teranex made his proposal for the Developers Network, and his css layout was later refined by me. Now Karma implements a nice top bar that has something to do with Roel?s initial top bar and starts the integration of all Nucleus family sites. All of this with the help and feedback of many others (I appologize for not mentioning everybody).

It is nice to see that all discussions people had about the Nucleus sites are taking us to somewhere and everything is becoming better and better. Cool"

Moraes op het Nucleus Forum

Just a few minutes ago I committed my core-changes for some features to CVS :-) Hope i didn't break CVS, or Nucleus CVS... Here's the changelog:

• CHANGED: PluginOptionExtras-event now has an extra-field which can be used to add option-specific code to the page
• ADDED: new event, PrePluginOptionsUpdate, can be used by plugins to verify/modify the new value for an option
• ADDED: Plugins can now provide a documentation page, which is shown inside the admin area
• ADDED: Plugins can now limit values for an option to be only numeric
• ADDED: OptionTop-methods, to let a plugin retreive an array of the x-heighest (of lowest) values of an option
• ADDED: Plugins can now make specific options for items. These options can be edited directly from the item add or edit page

i also added my testcases to /build/testcases

UPDATE: I discovered some problems and a bug in my testcase-plugins (not in the core mods :-) ). I changed it locally here so the updated testcases will be in CVS with the following commit

I finally dropped that ugly IIS and installed Apache 2 :-)
I also upgraded my PHP to PHP5 and applied the settings I asked Karma for (THX!)
Everything seemed to work fine until i viewed my dev-blog... just an empty page :-s Something was wrong with the mysql extension... I tried everything like explained but i couldn't get it to work :-( After trying some more i finally found that there was a second php.ini in my windows-dir, while i was working with the php.ini file in c:\php... now it works... Stupid windows! (this was very useful: http://www.multidesk.be/faqs/000109/)

While i was shopping this weekend (well actually just 'looking' ;-) ) i accidentally found "Design Patterns (dutch edition)", also known (correct me if i'm wrong) as the the book of the Gang of Four (GoF). Since one of my teacher had told us this year this was a really interesting book, i took my mobile called my mum and a few minutes later i bought the book :-)

(dit was oorspronkelijk een testitem, om die nieuwe feature uit te testen, toen ik het nadien wilde deleten was er al een reactie op, dus heb ik besloten om toch maar enkele screenshots te plaatsen)

Zoals we in het development plan van Thunderbird kunnen zien moet er tegen 0.8 dus een RSS aggregator ingebakken zitten. Sinds kort zit daarvan de eerste versie in de nightly builds, dus dat wilde ik wel eens zien. Op het eerste zicht zag alles er wel vrij mooi uit, maar na wat testen vind ik toch dat de huidige uitwerking een beetje tegenslaagt. Zo kan je al geen OMPL-bestanden importeren, kan je enkel een globale 'refresh-tijd' instellen (dus niet per feed), lijkt Thunderbird de digests in de feeds niet te gebruiken (als je op een feed klikt gaat onmiddellijk de website open) en omdat de feeds mee in de mappenboom van Thunderbird verschijnen (als een aparte account) wordt deze wel h??l erg lang. Een aparte tab in het rechterpaneel zou wel handiger zijn …

I just got a really really cool idea! ;-)
One of the features i have always wanted to have in Nucleus is a feature to automatically send a dailey newsletter with the last x items, like the newsletters of slashdot, zdnet, newsforge...
I know there are some websites that offer you such a service, using your feeds, like bloglet. But using 3thd party services makes you dependent on that service and you can not costumize it like you want.
So half a year ago i started thinking about creating a seperate (hardcoded) script that would querie my database and send the mails and i would be able to set up a cronjob for it. Ofcourse this method is also far from optimal (it isn't as simple to just query items, since they somehow need to be parsed), and it would not be very portable.

So today i started thinking while i was working in the garden, and suddenly i got it :-) (i hope)
I'm going to write a plugin to create …

Binnen een zestal weken brengt de Mozilla Foundation Firefox 1.0 uit (normaal gezien op 14 september om juist te zijn). Om ervoor te zorgen dat dit niet onopgemerkt voorbij gaat wordt er hard gewerkt aan een hele marketingstrategie. E?n van de manieren waarop Firefox de aandacht van het grote publiek zal proberen winnen is dmv advertenties in tijdschriften en op websites.

Omdat de Mozilla Foundation een nonprofit organisatie is en er dus geen zakken geld klaar liggen voor zo'n groots opgezette campagne hopen de mensen van het marketingteam op een beetje goede wil. Ken jij toevallig iemand die een high traffic website runt of bij een uitgeverij of redactie werkt en denk je dat die persoon in kwestie eventueel gratis advertentieruimte kan fixen? Laat het dan OP DEZE WEBSITE weten.

(vrij overgenomen van Fuckhedz)