At the moment the plugin can display one of two data sets: The hot events on joind.in; or the talks from an event on joind.in. You can change the title on the block, limit the maximum number of records returned, specify which event the talks should come from and also indicate if you’d like the order randomised. You can see the plugin in action on techPortal, where it is picking a few sessions at this year’s Dutch PHP Conference to tempt you with!
I hadn’t written a wordpress plugin before although I was very familiar with the joind.in API and how to work with it from PHP. The plugin was relatively easy to write, there are plenty of tutorials on the web and I didn’t need to do anything particularly clever. I looked at a twitter plugin, tweetblend, which was a similar sort of idea in that it had settings, talked over an API, and stored data, and used that when I got stuck. My plugin is much simpler but that’s OK (and probably makes it a good example for me next time I want to write one of these things!!)
The plugin creates a database table when it is activated (and drops it when deactivated) which caches the data pulled from joind.in for a few minutes. This helps avoid lots of users having to wait for the data to load and also hopefully stops the plugin from pushing too much load to the joind.in servers. Since there is no limit or pagination on the joind.in API, even though only a few records are shown the whole result is cached. This means that if you turn on the randomise then the cache is still useful! The “random” is a bit contrived in that it just picks elements out of the array that haven’t been used but it looks fine to me.
Initially I was just going to put something together and upload it to the techportal site but I was persuaded that it would be a useful thing to share – so there it is. Comments and suggestions are all welcome – and if you are using it to publicise your event, let me know!
As a conference organiser I work extensively with the site joind.in, which allows attendees to comment on sessions at a conference. Recently the site has also started supporting sessions with both times and tracks, making it indispensable as a way of keeping track of all the sessions during an event. The only downside is entering all the data into it!! Joind.in does have some import functionality, which I recently rebuilt to reflect the timings and track changes, however this only accepts XML at present, so there is still some preparation work to get your data ready to import.
I know I’m not the only conference organiser who will have this problem so here’s my step-by-step guide to getting talk information into joind.in, easily and quickly. For up-to-date documentation on the joind.in import process and the official data format description, see http://joind.in/about/import.
Step one is to submit your event to joind.in. When it is approved by the administrators you will receive notification and it will appear publicly on the site (joind.in also supports private events, see the website for more information).
Once it is approved, make sure the timezone is set correctly by editing your event. For me this is Europe/Amsterdam, since I’m setting up data for the Dutch PHP Conference.
If you are going to include information about the different tracks, either rooms or subject tracks, you can set these up now (if not, then skip to the next section). When viewing an event, if you are logged in and have admin rights on that event, you will see an “Event Admin” box. The “Event Tracks” screen will let you add, edit and remove the tracks for your event.
I had the talks in a spreadsheet and I found this was a good starting point. Each row is imported independently so each one needs to contain all the information about the session. My spreadsheet had the following columns:
There was a lot of duplication here, for example lots of copied and pasted dates, but for each row to be evaluated separately, we need it to look like this. At this point I exported the spreadsheet to .csv format but joind.in currently only supports XML so I still had to built the format it could understand.
I wrote a little script that processed my CSV file and spat out the XML that joind.in was expecting. There are a few pitfalls with this step:
By now you can guess this use-once script is a bit of a mess but in case it is useful I am uploading it here (if nothing else, I guess I might use it again!). I considered adding support for CSV files into joind.in itself (I’m a contributor) but I was short on time – if this would be useful to you or if you have any other comments on the process then add them here and I will do my best to reply!
None of it is rocket science but these are important topics often skated over by writers wanting to get to the complicated bits! Hopefully these posts bridge the gap between the very dated introductory PHP content that is still lying around on the web and the tutorials about shiny new stuff that are more typically found elsewhere. The community over on Think Vitamin is great, the comments and retweets have been very constructive and I’m very excited to be involved.
I find I’m writing for a few outlets other than just my blog these days and often want to refer people to that content as well, so I’ve added a “Publications” page, linked from the left hand sidebar. This will keep up with the articles I’m posting elsewhere, interviews, and anything else along those lines, all in one place.
Hope to see you there!
This year I had the privilege of speaking at this event, although I was concerned that I had to stay coherent and alert right through to the graveyard slot at 4:30pm (conference organisers take note: I really am much sparklier in the mornings!). I kept myself awake by attending what I affectionately refer to as the “Ibuildings track” – with 4 speakers at the event, it did feel like a bit of an invasion by myself and my colleagues. In our defence I can only say that we are a pretty big local PHP employer and, as a developer, I’m happy to be working for someone who sends all their developers to these events, and even happier to be in the company of those other excellent speakers as colleagues!
My talk was entitled “Best Practices in Web Service Design” although perhaps “Things I Wish Web Service Creators Would Consider Before Writing Unclear and Unstable Useless And Frustrating Services” would have been a better title! I talked about web services in general, a bit about HTTP and the various service types, and also gave some general tips and tricks for writing good, stable services. In a bit of a break with geeky tradition, I then talked about services as a whole package, and how to deliver and document them in a way that helps users help themselves. If you are interested the slides are here:
http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/best-practices-in-web-service-design
The experience was overall very positive for me, I haven’t spoken at this conference before and I was very pleased to be included. My talk went quite smoothly, with my nerves nicely hidden away (I’ve had issues with this lately), and I also avoided falling over either the curtain or the piece of screen that was carefully placed to trip unwary speakers! I’d like to thank everyone who came and asked questions afterwards, and all those who saw my talk and left comments for me on my joind.in talk page – it all helps me to do better next time, thanks and I’ll see you all next year!
My boyfriend Kevin was thinking of developing an iphone app, mostly to find out more about the technology, and I suggested he take a look at the API for joind.in and consider building something on that. The joind.in project belongs to enygma, a.k.a. Chris Cornutt from phpdeveloper.org and he has the code available on github – so we grabbed it. The API wasn’t previously used by much so we were able to tidy it up a bit and then consume it from the iphone to suit our needs. Chris has accepted my alterations to his existing project with grace – even when I’ve totally broken the live site with them!!
The joind.in site is a classic MVC setup and the API already existed within the application. It is implemented with a separate set of controllers for the various actions supported by the API, which all inherit from a controller which handles the output formats etc for the XML and JSON responses. It isn’t the world’s best API but its perfectly sufficient for the task at hand – I intend to write some examples for using it but until then you can read this post from Derick about how he used the joind.in API to pull in comments on his talks onto his own site.
The app itself has the core functionality of joind.in that an attendee would want in his pocket at an event. The events and their details are there, along with the talks at each event. Attendees can leave comments on the various talks and socials, and these can be browsed in the app as well. To give you a little taste of the app, here are some screenshots:
If you have an iphone or ipod touch and you’re attending an event any time soon, then download the app – its under “utilities” in the app store. Comments, suggestions, bug reports and feature requests are all gratefully received (no promises about fixing/implementing them but we’ll do our best!). Our app went from submission to approved in 3 days which is very fast – thanks apple!
Imagine we have a multidimensional array in PHP that looks something like this:
$menu['starter'] = array( "prawn cocktail",
"soup of the day");
$menu['main course'] = array( "roast chicken",
"fish 'n' chips",
"macaroni cheese");
$menu['pudding'] = array( "cheesecake",
"treacle sponge");
echo json_encode($menu);
The output of this script looks like this:
{"starter":["prawn cocktail","soup of the day"],"main course":["roast chicken","fish 'n' chips","macaroni cheese"],"pudding":["cheesecake","treacle sponge"]}
This is pretty typical of a JSON output string – you can see the curly brackets to enclose the whole thing, then some square brackets to show the nesting levels within the key/value formats. JSON is an ideal format for many applications because it is easy to understand and debug, its quite concise, and many languages have built-in support just like PHP.
Once we’ve serialised the string, we might want to unserialise it again – and the PHP code for that is every bit as simple as the previous example, except that we use the function json_decode() instead of json_encode(). I’ve set the output of the previous script as the input to this one:
$json = '{"starter":["prawn cocktail","soup of the day"],"main course":["roast chicken","fish \'n\' chips","macaroni cheese"],"pudding":["cheesecake","treacle sponge"]}';
print_r(json_decode($json));
This decodes the string and then dumps it using print_r() – the output of my script looked like this:
stdClass Object
(
[starter] => Array
(
[0] => prawn cocktail
[1] => soup of the day
)
[main course] => Array
(
[0] => roast chicken
[1] => fish 'n' chips
[2] => macaroni cheese
)
[pudding] => Array
(
[0] => cheesecake
[1] => treacle sponge
)
)
Note that the data isn’t identical to how it looked when it went in – JSON can’t distinguish between arrays and objects, and doesn’t retain information about data types. So its perfect for a web service where we just want to convey the information, but may be too loose for other applications.
The examples here were taken from a talk I give about consuming web services – you can see all the slides on slideshare. If you have any additions or alternatives, leave a comment!
The conference itself was very well organised and the venue worked very nicely. I liked the hotel (I’m accustomed to London hotel rooms so European ones always seem huge), which was nice and had an English slant on breakfast since sausages were available alongside the cheese and pastries! The venue itself was just across the car park and had plenty of rooms with an open exhibition space which worked nicely – the two tracks were on opposite sides of this space so the footfall for the exhibitors was hopefully good! Full marks go to the crew:
I gave my talk “Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World” with some updates since I first gave it at PHPNW09 in Manchester. This is a nice best practices talk and although I didn’t have a lot of people in my talk, this was no surprise since Ivo was speaking in the same slot as me with his “PHP and the Cloud” talk, which I STILL haven’t seen! If you are interested my slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/passing-the-joel-test-in-the-php-world-phpbnl10 Thanks to my audience who were great and managed to stay enthusiastic despite my nerves and the late afternoon slot :)
Here’s to PHPBenelux 2011!
If you are attending, let me know and come and say “hi” to me on the night! I don’t know this crowd well but so far they are pretty friendly and I’m looking forward to the trip north :)