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Well so much for increasing the frequency of PRADO Watch posts. Well my excuse was my wife having twin baby girls and I’m sting with it!

We have a lot for you today so I’ll try to be brief.

Just Checked In

Wildcards and IP filtering added to page configuration.
Pages attribute in the authorization rules can take relative page paths with wildcard ‘*’. For example, pages=”admin.Home” refers to the Home page under the admin directory, and pages=”admin.*” would refer to all pages under the admin directory and subdirectories.

IP rules are specified by a new attribute ip in authorization rules. The IP rules are used to determine if an authorization rule applies to an end-user according to his IP address. One can list a few IPs together, separated by comma ‘,’. Wildcard ‘*’ can be used in the rules. For example, ip=”192.168.0.2, 192.168.1.*” means the rule applies to users whose IP address is 192.168.0.2 or 192.168.1.*. The latter matches any host in the subnet 192.168.1.

TMemCacheSession
The new TMemCacheSession module provides access for storing sessions in memcache.

ForceSecureConnection
The ForceSecureConnection option was added to THttpRequest to force all generated urls to use the https prefix. If the url already is using https:// you can use $this->Request->setForceSecureConnection(false) to create links with http://.

PRADO Translations
There has been a lot of effort of late in the area of translating PRADO with kabayan putting in overtime on the Indonesian front, Eric.M and Tof have been upding and adding to the French, Shinya.K adding to the Japanese sections, xue making some updates for the Chinese translations and YOIS is doing a Spanish translation.

As a side note I’m looking for people to translate and publish PRADO Watch into more languages. More on that later.

TKeyboard
Sergey Morkovkin submitted his virtual JavaScript keyboard to the component repository back in March, well it mush have struck a cord as it’s now been added to PRADO well done Sergey.

TCaptcha and TCaptchaValidator
Well I guess xue cracked from the pressure and has included a CAPTCHA control to PRADO even with his resavations about it being beatable. Along with the validator this will be a very welcome addition to PRADO for some users.

TSlider
Hats off to tof for adding a JavaScript slider control to PRADO. Based on the script.aculo.us widget this is a great addition to the framework.

Consecutive Cells Grouping for TDataGrid
If you set the EnableCellGrouping in a column of a TDataGrid cell directly above of below each other will be grouped into one big cell. An example of what it may look like can be seen here.

The Community Component

XActiveDataGrid
Billed as full active DataGrid with the ability to do paging, sorting and editing, with praise from PRADO core developers like Carl. daneel has created a very excting component.

MediaHTMLCodeEmbedded
YOIS has created a cool component for easaliy adding videos and such to your page. With support for YouTou, Flash, Windows Media, Quick Time and Real players.

PRADO/Wordpress/BBPress integration v1.0
javalizard has out done himself with this on. In his own words.

“I’ve been wanting to share with all you something new and special. I’ve needed to use Wordpress Multiuser as blogging software (it’s supported and has new releases once in a while and people know how to use it) with PRADO. Auxiliary is the integration of BBPress too. Basically, it’s a single login system for prado, blogs, and forums.

Here’s what it integrates:

* Users management in PRADO uses Wordpress
* User roles in PRADO uses Wordpress
* Permissions and user capabilities in PRADO uses wordpress (more an extension of PRADO)
* User authentication in prado uses itself (sessions) and wordpress (cookies)
* initializes most of the Wordpress code libraries (so you get actions and filters!!)
* includes all the Wordpress plugins
* (and it’s relatively easy to integrate!)”

In The Wild

eioba.com
This amazingly well polished site, which is a social site based around articles users publish is a real gem of an application and well worth your time to poke around.

spcvideo.com.br
A DVD movie rental application helping with bad customers and occurrences of material damage, not paid rent, robbery etc….

Well I do have more to post but this is a good start, so another PRADO Watch will follow soon.

When Timani Tunduwani posted a message in the PRADO forums say that he had just made the switch from CakePHP to PRADO and had create prodezine.com my interest peeked and just had to find out more.
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Tell us a little about yourself?

I am a 24 year old programmer from Seattle. I am a freelancer at heart, UNIX/Linux, PHP, Python, but i currently have a fairly large, long-term project underway for a airfare consolidator. Basically worked as a network analyst for 3 years, then switched to web programming, had about two years of .net experience and then decided to make the switch early PHP4 and haven’t looked back since.

What were you using CakePHP for?

I am currently one of the lead programmers at Justfares.com and they are planning a major overhaul of their site. It was previously ASP.net and we switched to PHP5 rather rapidly, and as a team soon realized that we needed a standardized, scalable, mature, framework to manage and streamline development. CakePHP had rapid framework growth and development, good community support, and detailed framework documentation. Our main application is going to be a fairly comprehensive airfare engine that needs to get to its maximum potential, while working at an efficient rate.

What made you start looking around for another framework?

In the end we needed a framework that was flexible, powerful, versatile, and scalable so the company could grow and be efficient in a team setting. A new project arose spanning two large organizations with intricate data models, and they had said that the data management and management of business objects was becoming extremely complicated and was now a major issue to coordinate and manage effectively. CakePHP did not really address any of these issues directly so it was time for a new solution. PRADO.

Why did you settle on PRADO over other frameworks?

There are a number of reasons but primarily was the SQLMap Data Mapper. The ability to deal with the complex business logic that had arisen was pivotal. There was an extra but minor overhead, but a small price to pay and easily rectifiable through optimizing and using accelerators. Once we discovered the Data Mapper, more discoveries arose about the benefits of PRADO such as : the component structure, controls, strong event driven programming, team integration ability, power and simplicity to name but a few.

In detail how do PRADO and CakePHP compare?

The “average programmer” can grasp the concepts of PRADO fairly rapidly and the ease of configuration allows for ideal use in team situations. CakePHP has a steep learning curve and unless you have had some RoR it is not really ideal for adding to a team and productive time is wasted on training and understanding. A drawback not really found in PRADO, we have added programmers and with simple instruction they are able and easy to integrate into team environments without wasting too much time.

PRADO is good for all! Often working with designers can be a project within itself. They are focused on aesthetics and as a developer we prefer function. In PRADO a designer can complete his tasks without needing a great detailed understanding of the framework’s architecture. PRADO takes hold of certain tasks which can be done simply using controls(GridView, Repeater…..) vs CakePHP without having to do iterations through tables, rows, columns etc.

What do you miss from CakePHP?

PRADO’s Community is strong but CakePHP’s is stronger. Good support as well as rapidly growing community, and easily accessible applications with good documentation and snippets. It would be great if the IRC channel #prado was stronger, we can enhance the PRADO wiki, with a bit of effort from everyone to compete with the Bakery, and CakeForge which are well done. But most importantly promote the framework, and participate and promote PRADO HARD!!!!

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Wow! I know that I personally feel that Tim has really been able to find that sweet spot that PRADO fills for big team development something I’ve been pushing myself.

I hope you enjoy this interview look out for more PRADO verse other PHP frameworks posts coming soon!