Toni Epple's Blog

Just one more day: Tomorrow at 5 pm the Continuous Integration Camp ( https://www.xing.com/app/events?op=detail;id=245435 ) in Heimstetten near munich will take place. Tomas Musil from the NetBeans team in Prague will show how Hudson is used in NetBEans Development and QE and how to use the new simpletest infrastructure for functional tests of RCP apps. If you’re eager to learn more about Tomas’ commitment for simpletest which replaces xtest in nb 6.5 have a look at these resources:

http://blogs.sun.com/coreqa/entry/xtest_is_dead_long_live

http://wiki.netbeans.org/FitnessTestsWithoutX

http://blogs.sun.com/tm/

Janos Koppany from Intland will show how CodeBeamer, the software used to run JavaForge (which by the way has a great NB plugin ) leverages Team development.

http://www.intland.com/products/codebeamer.html

http://www.javaforge.com

SIGS DATACOM has sent us some free copies of the JavaSPEKTRUM with a CI Article about CruiseControl, FitNesse and Selenium. (make sure to take their annual survey http://tinyurl.com/4ureqc ).

The biggest thank you goes to Sun Microsystems Inc. in Heimstetten for sponsoring this event (room, softdrinks, snacks and also some nice NetBeans shirts )! I’m really looking forward to this event.

P.s.: If you want to join us for this event send me a mail to ci_camp at eppleton dot de or simply show up tomorrow in Heimstetten!

I went through the wordpress tutorial for NetBeans 6.5 and it worked like a charm. My blog is also running on wordpress, and I wanted to give it a new theme for a long time. So why not use NetBeans to do this?

Here’s my old blog layout:

In this first of two blog entries I’ll show you how to create the basic structure for your theme. In the second posting we’ll add the dynamic content. We’ll use a ready made xhtml/css template and adjust the paths, so it can be used in wordpress. To get started, all you need is a index.html + style.css, like you find them here:

http://www.free-css-templates.com/

I’ve used this one:

http://www.free-css-templates.com/preview/spiderCity/

Download the theme and unzip it in your wordpress project’s “Source Files/wp-content/themes” folder. Wordpress will look for a screenshot.png for the theme selection in the admin backend. You can use the one above and add it to the spicerCity folder, your project should look like this:

Now rename index.html to index.php. That’s tricky, because NetBeans won’t let you change the .html extension. You can do it via the filesystem ( or you can create a new php file via New File > PHP > PHP File, name it index.php, copy the content of index.html to it and delete index.html afterwards ).

Time for a first test. Right click the project node and select “Run”. Go to the admin panel ( should be something like http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/), login and switch to design > themes. Your new theme will be shown. Activate it by clicking on it:

If you check out the frontend you’ll be disappointed, because style.css is not used. That’s because relative links don’t work here. To make the style.css available you need to replace the link to it in the head section:

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”style.css” />

with this:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />

Now run your project again.

That’s better, but the images are still missing. You need to change every reference to the images folder following this scheme:

<img src=”images/image.gif” >

To:

<img src=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/images/image.gif” >

Run your project again. This time the images should show up. ( For some weird reason they didn’t show up in my case, since they weren’t copied to the server. It only worked after I deleted all gif files from the images folder, added them again and re-ran the project. ).

Now the style is ok, and we’re done for now. In my next post I’ll show you how to put the different sections of the index.php file in separate files and drop in some more php tags to add dynamic content.

I’m not a PHP developer, but when NetBeans 6.5 features PHP support I must try. I’ve got 6.5 beta with the PHP plugin installed. As a first example project I’ve decided to use snews, which is an extremly lightweight CMS with a friendly user interface. Here’s how I’ve set up the project on Ubuntu with Apache and MySQL running locally:

You need the typical stuff (Apache, MySQL, PHP) installed before you get started. snews rewrites urls to be search engine friendly, so you might need to enable this in your test system http server. For apache2 on ubuntu you do it like this:

1. In the terminal type “sudo a2enmod”.
2. You’ll be asked for the module to activate: type “rewrite”.
3. force a reload “sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload”

Next you need to enable it for your path:

1. Edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default and in <Directory /var/www/> set AllowOveride from None to All (or use more fine grained settings).
2. In the terminal cd to /var/www/ and create a folder: “sudo mkdir cms”.
   
3. chown it to your user “sudo chown <username> cms”.
   

Now you’re ready to download and unzip snews (I’ve put mine in the NetBeans Projects folder). Rename the unzipped folder to “cms”. Open the readme.html in a browser. Setup the database and tables as indicated there and launch NetBeans.

1. In NetBeans go to “New Project” > “PHP” > “PHP Project with Existing Sources” and click “next”.
2. Point the “Sources Folder” to your unpacked snews ( e.g. “/home/toni/NetBeansProjects/cms” ) and click “next”.
3. Check the tick box “Copy files from Sources Folder to another location” and enter “/var/www/cms”, Click “Finish”.

A new project will be created and open the “index.php” page in the editor with nice syntax coloring and code completion. Time for a first test: From your projects context menu select “run”. This should bring up your browser and launch the index.php. If you already went through the whole readme.html and made all the changes to the snews.php everything will be fine. If you’ve waited with these edits to use the cool new editor, since this is what we’re here for, you’ll get an error message that my database is not configured correctly.

To fix this you will need to make some changes to the snews.php file in your project as indicated in the readme.html. Run your application again and you should see this:

The project is up and running. You can check out the snews site on how to customize snews. snews uses css for style, and you can start playing around by changing the style.css in your project with the NetBeans css editor or download a XHTML / CSS template to adjust it to your needs. I’ve got no comparison to other PHP IDE’s since I used command line tools for my (few) PHP test projects, so my judgement is of limited worth, but my first impression is that the tooling is very nice, projects are easy to set up, and the usability is great. It definitely satisfies my PHP needs, now check out if it satisfies yours :-).

the date of munich Continuous Integration Camp is getting closer. Perfectly coordinated with the start of the annual Oktoberfest we will hold our first Munich Continuous Integration Camp. We are looking forward to intersting talks and lively discussions about cool tools and how to make team development successful. Topics covered include Hudson, Continuous functional testing for NetBeans RCP applications, Intland’s ALM (as seen on JavaForge) and what you’d like to talk about. If you’d like to participate join us on September 19th in Heimstetten near munich.

The Continuos Integration Camp is organized by the Munich NetBeans User Group (NUGM). Registration is open, if you’d like to attend this free event please register either via XING registration form or via mail to NUGM registration .