[Phpwebsite-developers] (no subject)

[Matthew M. <ma...@tu...>]

Greetings all,

There are some major changes in the core that need explaining.

First, CVS. The development team has been working on a new format for CVS.
The core will be separated into its own checkout. Modules will be put into
a different directory as will themes. There will also be levels of
permission on these directories. Expect these changes to go into effect
soon.

The second big change is a recoding of the core to allow register globals
to be turned off. This is in response to the direction PHP is taking.
Since they went to all the trouble of creating their predefined variables,
we might as well take advantage of them :)

What this means was a change in the way the core works. Traditional
globals are no longer used. They were extremely convenient but
unfortunately not so secure. Sessions also changed, but you will not have
to worry about them. The new code takes care of that.

So what is required of module developers? Well there is good news and bad
news.

The good news. Before, you had to "global" essential objects in your
function like so:

function foo(){
global $core, $OBJ_layout, $OBJ_fatcat;
..code

You can change those to:

function foo(){
extract($GLOBALS);
..code

The bright side is that you should never have to worry about not having
the object you need in your function.

Now the bad news. First, content variables are kind of goofy. Sometimes
you need to send your content variable to the GLOBALS array like so:

function foo() {
...
code
...

$GLOBALS["CNT_my_mod"] = $CNT_my_mod;
}

The old global was nice because if called you could read and write to the
variable and the changes would be made. Not so with register_globals
turned off. You must plug the information back into the $GLOBALS array.
Program accordingly.

Something else you will need to change are post, get, and cookie
variables. These processes do not initialize a usable variable. You will
need to call the variable from the appropriate array: $_POST, $_GET, or
$_COOKIE. On the bright side, they are automatically global, so you can
easily access them in your functions. You can also use $_REQUEST if you
are getting both posts and gets to your file.

I apologize if these are ideas you are already familiar with, but you will
probably need to make adjustments to your current modules to get them to
function.

One more thing, as the core has gone through many changes since I wrote
the old module compatibility, we are going to revisit this again later. We
have taken out legacy code and will rewrite scripts to handle them later.
Please ignore the documentation that explains conversions for now.

I hope these changes will make phpWebSite better in the long run. I think
it will. I thank the Sourceforge community for bringing it to my
attention.

Sincerely,
Matt McNaney
 -----------------------------
Matthew McNaney
Internet Systems Architect
Electronic Student Services
Email: ma...@tu...
URL: http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu
Phone: 828-262-6493
ICQ: 141057403