New PHP_CodeSniffer blog

Squiz Labs (the R&D arm of Squiz, and the company that I work for) launched their new blog last week, developed in our new MySource Mini CMS. This blog covers the CMS products we produce, but also has a dedicated section for PHP_CodeSniffer.

I'll be blogging about PHP_CodeSniffer over there, so subscribe to that dedicated PHP_CodeSniffer RSS feed if you want to keep up-to-date with what is happening on the project.

The RSS feed URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SquizLabsBlog-PHP_CodeSniffer
The PHP_CodeSniffer blog URL is: http://www.squizlabs.com/php-codesniffer

Not much there right now, but I did at least remember to post a notification about the 1.2.1 release even though I forgot to post about it here.

Running the MySource Mini VM with VirtualBox

If you don't have access to VMWare player to give the MySource Mini virtual machine image a try, you can use the free VirtualBox player instead. VirtualBox has the ability to use the HDD image from VMWare without the need to have VMWare installed. You do need to set a couple of options though, which I'll run you through.

The first thing you need to do is download VirtualBox. Make sure you have the latest version (I'm using 3.0.10) as I've read that older versions may not have all the options we need.

Now you want to create a new virtual machine. Give it a name (MySource Mini is fine) and it will ask you what type of OS it is. You want to pick Linux, Debian (64 bit).


You'll need to pick how much memory you want to give it. I gave mine 512MB but it doesn't really matter as you can change this later.

The next bit is the virtual hard disk. You want to use an existing hard disk. Click the icon to launch the Virtual Media Manager. Click Add and then locate the MySource Mini folder that was extracted from the MySource Mini download. Select the file MySource Mini.vmdk and then use this as hard disk for your VM.


Now you can finish creating your VM. It will appear in the VM list once it has been created, but you need to configure a few more things before you can start it up.

Select the VM and click Settings. Go to System and make sure Enable IO APIC is selected.


Now go to Storage, select Enable Additional Controller and make sure SATA (AHCI) is selected from the drop-down. In the Attachments section at the bottom, click IDE Primiary Master and select SATA Port 0 instead.


You may need to fiddle with your Network settings as well. I had to use Bridged networking for some reason, but I haven't looked into why NAT was not working for me.

If everything works, your VM will boot and entering ifconfig eth0 should show you a valid IP address you can connect to. Now you can follow the VM Quick Start guide and have your MySource Mini system up and running in a few minutes.

MySource Mini now free to download

The big news (for me) at the MySource Matrix International User Conference (MMIUC) this year was that MySource Mini can now be downloaded for free as a virtual machine image. You'll need VMWare player to run the image, but you are also free to convert it to another format if you want.

In addition, Squiz showed its commitment to open source by announcing that MySource Mini will be released under the GPL and will have a public SVN repository. We're in the process of getting this ready and we'll have it done in a couple of weeks.

Sticking with our goal of keeping everything about MySource Mini simple, the virtual machine is easy to install and you can subscribe to the automatic up-to-date system to have it upgrade itself. A personal subscription is only $250 a year and when you take a look what has been added in just 6 months, it's great value.

I showed a demonstration at the MMIUC of the new features added since the MySource Mini launch in April this year. The main features I showed were:
- multi-site support
- embedded videos and automatic conversion to FLV files
- embedded and lightbox-style image galleries
- track changes functionality built right into the inline WYSIWYG editor
- improvements to the help system for new users
- an integrated bug-tracker based on Bugzilla

I've been saying how good MySource Mini is for a while and how its powerful functionality is made simple through great user interfaces. But now you don't have to take my word for it. Grab the VM and have a play around yourself.

Product site: http://mini.squiz.net
Download page: http://mini.squiz.net/download

Managing videos in MySource Mini

In the next couple of weeks, we'll be releasing a MySource Mini update that contains much more advanced video management functionality than the first release. In typical MySource Mini style, it's simple and sexy while still being very powerful. And I've got some screenshots of the feature in development as a bit of a teaser.

Our end goal for this development was to allow users to upload any common video format and be able to embed it in their websites in a way that made it available to the highest number of site visitors. Like most video sharing websites, we decided on a Flash-based player and we will be creating our own player so we can skin it in the way users want.

We also had to take editing, thumbnails and versioning into account so movies fit seamlessly into the MySource Mini graphical environment.

Uploading a movie is as easy as uploading an image.


Once you've uploaded your movie, it is converted to an FLV file automatically so we can play it using our flash player. The original file is retained so you can link to your high quality MOV/AVI/etc. if you'd like. We also extract thumbnails from the movie so you can select the one that fits the best without having to create your own.


In the future, we'll be adding an option that allows you to replace this thumbnail with one you have created yourself, but we want to keep things simple to start with.

Now that your movie is loaded into the system, you will be able to embed it into any page using the Viper WYSIWYG editor. It will be the same process as inserting an image, but we are still building this WYSIWYG plugin so I can't show you any screens of it yet.

Versioning is great feature of MySource Mini and movies fit nicely into the whole system. Just like with pages, you can flick through different versions of your movie by looking at quick-loading images. Even if you've uploaded a large movie, this montage-based preview allows you to quickly scan through versions without having to download each one. When you've found the one you like, you can download it as normal.


The movie shown above is an old preview of the MySource Mini caching system, so the whole movie looks similar. I've also got a more interesting image for an old versioning system preview movie.


For more information about MySource Mini, see the MySource Mini website, or follow @mysourcemini on Twitter.

Missing/Back in action

It's been about 2 months since my last post. A lot has been happening and I've been really busy. If I had posted over the last couple of months, the posts would have covered:

MySource Mini, MySource Mini and more MySource Mini. I've been so busy getting this product ready for launch that I've been almost completely consumed by it. It's a terrific product though and I'm very proud of we we've achieved. We had the launch last week (a great review here), had a great team dinner at Sydney Tower on the weekend to celebrate and are now busily preparing units for delivery. Along with that, I'm also working hard on the MySource Mini product website (running on a Mini of course) and getting the news out via Twitter.

Sadly, I've neglected PHP_CodeSniffer over the last few months as a result. The bug reports started piling up but I'm happy to report I'm getting on top of them now. I think there is currently one outstanding at the moment, which isn't too bad. Downloads of PHP_CodeSniffer have been through the roof over the last two months so I'll be putting out an RC2 soon for people to try out before the next stable release.

I'll start posting again soon. In the meantime, follow me on Twitter.

Interface design; an interative process

I was looking back at some old mockups and screenshots of the MySource Mini today and it is really amazing to see how the product's interface has progressed over the last 12 months or so. It's interesting to see how elements of the design changed, and while not all these mockups were built, all contributed something to the design we have today.

In this post, I'm going to show you the mockups we produced of the Settings/Administration interface. This is where you configure things like designs and caching for individual assets and for the site as a whole.

This first mockup was implemented in early 2007 and represents the first interface of the MySource Mini. We went for a desktop feel with large icons, but it gave us very little space to fit the actual editing interface. We still love large icons, and the concept of icons to represent different systems remains today.


It was soon clear we needed more space for the editing interfaces, so we went full screen. That meant sacrificing the large icons we loved so much and moving to a toolbar along the top, a concept that remains today.


The start of 2008 saw us bring on a dedicated interface designer who began reworking the main concepts of the interface. At the time, the inline content editing interface was progressing well and we wanted to bring the context you get from that interface into the settings screens. So we scaled back from full screen a little so you could see the page underneath.

This mockup was done in January 2008 and implemented soon after. It was the first time we really tried to bring that context into the rest of the interface, which we have now done using thumbnails of the page. Notice the side menu, which is almost identical to the current multi-add wizard interface.


One thing that always bothered us with this temporary interface was how dark it was. We didn't want to go for the desktop-inspired background image from the earlier mockups, but we wanted something lighter to contrast well with the black MySource Mini toolbar.

This mockup was done in March 2008 and was not implemented. It was used in most of our mockups for quite a while and was growing on us. It was light and looked fresh. It didn't have large icons, but the chunky menu buttons made up for it.


There was one thing lacking though; context. We needed somewhere to put our thumbnail and asset information.

This next mockup was very close to being the final interface. It was designed in May 2008 and implemented, although all the system icons were the same at the time. It is the first time the blue info box made an appearance, which gave us room to add a thumbnail and asset information.

In this mockup, an administration screen is shown, so the blue box does not contain asset information, but you should be able to see how we jumped to our final interface design from here.


In August 2008, we changed our minds again. The grey bar at the top was looking too much like a second toolbar and didn't feel polished enough. The whole interface was looking a bit too much like an old desktop application and we wanted something fresh.

We decided to lighten everything up and add the large icons back in. We had heaps of room for the content editing area, so we could go very web 2.0 with large menus and bright colours.


I've promised the team that I wont change my mind again, so this is the interface we will be using in the final MySource Mini release. I'm sure you'll agree it is a big improvement over our original interface and I hope you've enjoyed this small insight into our interface design process.

MySource Mini demonstration

Update: After being featured on Ajaxian, Vimeo decided they don't want to host my videos any more and deleted my account without warning. I've re-posted the 30 min demo below, but be warned - it is 117MB!

I recorded the 30 minute demonstration of the MySource Mini that I gave at the MySource Matrix International User Conference a couple of weeks ago. I've posted the demonstration online so everyone can check out this new product from Squiz, even if you couldn't make it to beautiful Coogee for the conference this year.

MySource Mini hands-on at the MMIUC 2008

The MySource Matrix International User Conference for 2008 finished up just over a week ago. On the final day, I gave a 30 min live demonstration of the MySource Mini, which was followed by an afternoon of hands-on demonstrations with conference attendees on three test systems we had made available at the conference.





We all use Macs for development, but rest assured that the MySource Mini will work on Windows and Linux as well!

The whole MySource Mini team was available to walk people through the product and answer questions about both existing and upcoming features. The test systems were very popular and the developers kept busy throughout the afternoon.







Congratulations to the whole MySource Mini team for producing such an amazing product and for being such fantastic instructors on the day. The Mini was well received and plenty of people are looking forward to its release in March next year, so get back to work!

MySource Mini at the MMIUC 2008

I've been really quiet on this blog for a few months, and have even let some PHP_CodeSniffer bug reports go unfixed for several weeks. That's pretty unusual for me, but I've been both sick and very focused on the MySource Mini that will be presented at the MySource Matrix International User Conference 2008 in less than 2 weeks!

I can't say much about the Mini, but now that the agenda has been posted, I can at least use the name and confirm it has something to do with MySource4, which I've been babbling about on this blog for a while now.

I've gone a bit quiet about parts of MySource4 that we have been working on, but not because they are any less amazing than the features I have spoken about. Apart from our custom-built true inline WYSIWYG editor that I demonstrated last year, I'll be showing the caching system I've mentioned before, a versioning system to replace rollback that I've had to stop myself blogging about so I don't give away its secrets, and the most amazing context sensitive help system I've ever seen in any application. There will also be some systems available for conference attendees to play around with, and the whole MySource4 team (development, interface and documentation) will be there to answer all your questions.

Want to come along? Register here.