Brightflock - Implementation

Introducing Phonegap/Cordova iOS Social Plugin

Emily Newsom — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 16:08:58 +0000

We've been using Phonegap/Cordova for a number of cross platform apps lately and have found that we are really starting to take advantage of a lot of native plugins. One of the latest features we were looking to integrate was that of social sharing--namely, sharing items to one's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc account from the app.

On iOS, each social site (Twitter, Facebook, etc) tends to provide its own app and its own libraries in order to allow 3rd party integrations, but starting with iOS 6 Apple has followed Android's lead and integrated social functionality right into the OS itself. The benefit of the iOS social integration is that using the social features from an app is a breeze--you deal with a single api and iOS handles everything for you.

What about Phonegap/Cordova?

Now on Phonegap there is currently a ShareKit plugin. ShareKit is a social sharing toolkit that works on iOS 4.2+ (I believe) and supports a ton of sites that Apple would never integrate into iOS. ShareKit will also use the iOS social functionality if it detects iOS6. Sounds good right? Well if you've ever taken a look at ShareKit you will quickly realize it is quite the beast! For example, adding the ShareKit dependency to my last app instantly doubled its size.

So what's the alternative to ShareKit on Phonegap? Well if you're OK not supporting sharing pre-iOS6 and you want a lightweight solution, take a look at the new lightweight Social plugin that we just wrote and commited to Phonegap's github repo.

The Phonegap/Cordova iOS Social plugin

The iOS Social plugin is part of Phonegap:

PHPList Autoresponder Plugin

Emily Newsom — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:04:24 +0000

We've been running phplist ever since our MailChimp fees approached $100/month. By setting up phplist on our own servers and managing our lists ourselves, we save ourselves thousands a year. But phplist, which mostly does a good job, lacks a number of useful features--one of the largest missing features being an autoresponder.

Why doesn't a solution already exist?

If you take a look at the phplist forum (how most plugins/addons are distributed for phplist) you will see a few odd-ball hacked up autoresponder solutions. The major roadblock to a good autoresponder plugin is phplist's poor plugin architecture so a lot of people have tried to hack things together. We gave the most popular hack a try:

If this sounds good, give it a try by downloading below. We'd love to hear your feedback.

Version updates

Current version is v0.2.

v0.2 - fixed bug with user selection query

v0.1 - initial release

Where do I get the phplist autoresponder plugin?

The current version is v0.2 and was developed against phplist 2.10 stable (not 2.11). We have lightly tested the plugin ourselves with phplist 2.10.18 and are now using it with our 15k+ subscriber lists and would appreciate feedback/bug reports.

Get the phplist autoresponder plugin here: I'd like to donate

We have sponsored the initial development of this plugin and donations are gladly accepted and fund further development. Thank you!

Who do I contact for support requests?

Send an email to contact@brightflock.com or the phplist forum.

JMSSecurityExtraBundle 1.3 introduces @SecurityFunction

Emily Newsom — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:59:20 +0000

We're currently investing development resources into an upcoming open-source , both of which come with the default vendor release of Symfony2. JMSDiExtraBunde gives you the ability to put nice annotations right beside your service and controller code--information that would otherwise be stored off in yet another yaml file (not that I hate yaml! ;). JMSSecurityExtraBundle builds on JMSDiExtraBundle and gives you security related annotations as well as a cool expression language.

For example, one can do things like this:

class InstallerController extends ContainerAware {
   ...
    /**
     * @PreAuthorize("hasRole('FOO') or hasRole('BAR')")
     */
    public function checkAction() {
        ...
    }
}

Which will check that the current user has role FOO or BAR. There are many other expressions one can use and they're all listed on Johannes' site.

But what really caught my eye was the new feature that he made available in his new 1.3 version--@SecurityFunction. There's a small note on the bottom of his annotation reference page about the new annotation and a small example, but it was still a little unclear exactly how one uses @SecurityFunction. Basically @SecurityFunction gives you the ability write your own functions that can be used in any expression. So in our above example, hasRole() is a security function. If we defined our own security function fooBar() then we could use fooBar() just like we used hasRole() in the above example.

So where do you define your @SecurityFunction? Well, to me it seems to make the most sense to place these in a related service. In my case, I have a service Installer where I placed a security function isInstalled()

/**
 * @Service("acme.demo.installer")
 */
class Installer {
    ... 
    /**
     * @SecurityFunction("isInstalled")
     */
    public function isInstalled() {
        // We injected $this->installed earlier on
        return $this->installed;
    }
}

Now I can go into any of my controller actions and do this:

class InstallerController extends ContainerAware {
   ...
    /**
     * @PreAuthorize("!isInstalled()")
     */
    public function installAction() {
        ...
    }
}

Which makes for a nice way to secure your actions with your own security checks before control even reaches your controller action code.

Note that @SecurityFunction is available in 1.3 and beyond (currently a dev release).

Drupal 7 EntityFieldQuery shortcut class for nodes

Emily Newsom — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 03:07:10 +0000

One of the big changes in Drupal 7 was to create another abstraction layer above nodes, users, etc. This abstraction layer allows one to access all of the various components as "entities". In Drupal 6, I always felt the push to make everything be a node, so this abstraction layer solves that problem--just treat everything as an entity and don't force the node issue.

So how do you query for entities? Like a lot of ORMs, Drupal now has its own query language--one can use EntityFieldQuery to query for any entity. Now if anyone has worked with EntityFieldQuery, it can be a bit (!) verbose. The problem I ran into is that 90% of the time I am looking for nodes only, so why do I need to deal with entities? Well, I threw together a subclass of EntityFieldQuery that only queries for nodes. Seems like a pretty obvious class to have in the core to speed up node queries, but I couldn't find anything of the sort so I wrote my own. Lets hope we get something like this in D8 before node_load_multiple's conditions get removed.

/*
 * NodeFieldQuery - An EntityFieldQuery object just for loading nodes because that's what we want 90% of the time.
 */
class NodeFieldQuery extends EntityFieldQuery {
 
    public function __contruct($type = null) {
        parent::__construct();
 
        $this->entityCondition('entity_type', 'node');
 
        if ($type) {
            $this->entityCondition('bundle', $type);
        }
    }
 
    public function load() {
        $result = $this->execute();
 
        if (!isset($result['node'])) {
            return array();
        }
 
          $nids = array_keys($result['node']);
          $nodes = entity_load('node', $nids);
 
        return $nodes;
    }
}
 
/* Usage */
$q = new NodeFieldQuery('project');
$q->fieldCondition('field_project_company', 'nid', $company->nid, '=');
$projects = $q->load();

Optimizing a 7000 uniques/day Drupal 6 site

Emily Newsom — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:25:46 +0000

We recently took on the task of optimizing a high traffic Drupal 6 site that sees more than 7000 unique visitors per day.

Now, Drupal isn't often praised for it's performance, but there are such a wealth of modules available that can really make it into a very slick system. I'm not going to focus on everything needed for Drupal optimization, but I will discuss, on a high level, how we were able to achieve the largest performance gains.

The site in question had the default Drupal 6 performance settings all enabled and setup correctly. The database, MySQL, was being hammered and could not keep up with the request volumes. Almost all of the traffic was from anonymous users.

The first step was to install

Once Boost was installed, we saw a large load reduction, however, the database, MySQL, was still unable to keep up with many of the dynamic search requests that couldn't be static cached. This particular site's schema was built to hold all of its data in

These two steps essentially eliminated the load that we were seeing at the start of this process: Boost + Denormalized CCK search table. The server for this site is now more idle than not and it continues to serve the same volume than it did before, with no change to the user or admin experience--the kind of performance solution I like!

WYSIWYG + CKEditor + GeSHI Filter syntax highlighting

Emily Newsom — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 17:26:44 +0000

One of our goals for our new Drupal 7 site launch was to have a better blog section where we could discuss a few of the solutions we come up with to the everyday problems we encounter. For me, that means I need a good way to display formatted code to readers. Enter the

The last step was to get <pre> working with GeSHI Filter. Simply go to your GeSHI Filter options and add "pre" to the list of "generic syntax highlighting tags". You can select a default language if you aren't using <pre> for anything other than code formatting, or when you enter your code, you can quickly disable rich-text and add "language='php'" (css, c, etc) to your pre tag.