The CakeFlash Soundtracker is a simple mp3 player:

The mp3 player is translucent (should look good on many backgrounds), 160wide x 25high , and takes two arguments; title, and mp3path. You could load the movie from the location bar by pasting in the following:

http://cakeflash.com/swf/cakeflash_soundtracker.swf?title=Paris Fashion Show&mp3path=http://rpitmedia.com/mp3/ParisFashionWeek10_10_2006.mp3

Download to the player

To embed it using the swfobject method:

<div id=”cakeflash_soundtracker”> </div>
<script type=”text/javascript”>

var so = new SWFObject(”http://cakeflash.com/swf/cakeflash_soundtracker.swf”, “cakeflash_soundtrackerMC”, “160″, “25″, “6″);

so.addParam(”wmode”, “transparent”);

so.addParam(”scale”, “exactfit”);

so.addParam(”allowscriptaccess”, “samedomain”);

so.addVariable(”mp3path”, “http://rpitmedia.com/mp3/ParisFashionWeek10_10_2006.mp3″);

so.addVariable(”title”, “Paris Fashion Show”);

so.write(”cakeflash_soundtracker”);

</script>

Dries Buytaert, 29, 2008 Young Innovator

Drupal

Simple, flexible Web publishing

The Internet has made publishing on a global scale almost effortless. That’s the rhetoric, anyway. The truth is more complicated, because the Internet provides only a means of distribution; a would-be publisher still needs a publishing tool. A decade ago, people who wanted such a tool had three choices, all bad: a cheap but inflexible system, a versatile but expensive one, or one written from scratch. What was needed was something in the ­middle, requiring neither enormous expense nor months of development–not a single application, but a platform for creating custom publishing environments. For tens of thousands of sites and millions of users, that something is Drupal.

Created as an open-source project by Dries Buytaert, Drupal is a free content management framework–a tool for building customized websites quickly and easily, without sacrificing features or stability. Site owners can choose from a list of possible features: they might, say, want to publish ­articles, offer each user a profile and a blog, or allow users to vote or comment on content. All these features are optional, and most are independent of the others.

With Drupal’s high degree of individualization, users can escape cookie-cutt­er tools without investing in completely ­custom-­made creations, which can be time-­consuming, costly, and hard to maintain. The Howard Dean presidential campaign used Drupal in 2004, and today it’s used by Greenpeace U.K., the humor magazine the Onion, Nike’s Beijing Olympics site, and MTV U.K., among many others.

The diversity of its users has led to many improvements, Buytaert says: “The size, passion, and velocity of the Drupal community makes incredible things happen.” There are tens of thousands of active Drupal installations worldwide. Thousands of developers have contributed to the system’s core, and more than 2,000 plug-ins have been added by outside contributors.

Buytaert began the work that became Drupal in 2000, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Antwerp. He had a news site called Drop.org, and he needed an internal message board to host discussions. After reviewing the existing options for flexible message boards, Buytaert decided he could write a better version from scratch.

The original version of Drupal (its name derives from the Dutch for droplet) worked well enough to attract additional users, who proposed new features. Within a year, Buytaert decided to make the project open source. He released the code in January 2001 as version 1.0.

Since open-source projects tend to attract expert users, they often lack clear user interfaces and readable documentation, making them unfriendly to mere mortals. But Buytaert understood from the beginning how important usability is to the cycle of improvement, adoption, and more improvement that drives the development of open-source software. The core Drupal installation comes with voluminous help files. The central team regularly polls users as well as developers (which is unusual in an open-source project) to decide what to improve next. The process reveals not just features to add, but ones to remove, and ways to make existing features easier to understand. For example, the project’s website has been redesigned to help people new to Drupal figure out how to get up and running.

Buytaert has also founded a company, Acquia, to offer support, service, and custom development for Drupal users, especially businesses. He calls Acquia “my other full-time job” and likens it to Linux distributor Red Hat, which provides custom packaging and support for its version of the open-source operating system.

With Drupal version 7, due later this year, Buytaert hopes to include technologies that will make sites running Drupal part of the Semantic Web, Tim ­Berners-­Lee’s vision for making online data understandable to machines as well as people. If Drupal hosts a website containing a company’s Securities and Exchange Commission profile, for example, other sites could access just the third-quarter revenues, without having to retrieve the whole profile. The goal of sharing data in smaller, better-defined chunks is to make Drupal a key part of the growing eco­system of websites that share structured data. If this effort succeeds, it will ensure Drupal’s continued relevance to the still-developing Web. –Clay Shirky

Drake: Drupal - CakePHP Bridge - Run Cake Apps from Drupal.

Want to display the CakePHP flash message within your flash header? Here is a quick (and maybe dirty) way to do so.

This entry is a work in process… (think I’ve got the important parts here now)

In your Controller:

-----------------

if ($this->Zticky->save($this->data[’Zticky’]))
{
// usual way of displaying a flash message:
//$this->flash(’Your zticky has been updated.’,'/ztickies?sortBy=created&direction=DESC’);

// Send the message out using ajax layout:

$landing=’/ztickies/edit/’.$this->data[’Zticky’][’id’]; // set redirect
$this->Session->setFlash(’zticky with ID: ‘.$this->data[’Zticky’][’id’].’, has been updated.’,$layout = ‘ajax’);

// here we redirect back to the edit form ($landing above), but it could go anywhere
$this->redirect($landing);

}

Now in your default.ctp you need to pass the cake flash message to a variable flash can read:

Cake (default or site) Layout:

----------------------------

I’m using swfObject in this case, so to pass the cake flash message to your flash header (here I’m using flash_txt, add something like:

<div id=”pagehd_content”>
</div>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var so = new SWFObject(”/zticky/swf/z_content__hd.swf”, “pagehd_content”, “680″, “30″, “6″);
so.addParam(”wmode”, “transparent”);

etc, etc,… to the important part:

so.addVariable(”flash_txt”,’<?php

if ($session->check(’Message.flash’)):
$session->flash();
else:
echo “Ready”;
endif;

?>’);
so.write(”pagehd_content”);
</script>

An now in your flash header you create a dynamic text field (in this case it is not set as a target):

Actionscript:

-------------

onLoad () {
_root.flash_txt = _root.flash_txt;
}

I’m not sure where I came across the answer to sending the cake flash message to a division on the page you’re redirected to (instead of the default interstitial message page), but if you know, let me know so I can give proper credit. Getting it to behave the way I wanted was a matter of tacking on the ,’layout=’ajax’ to setFlash() which cleaned up the div tags so the flashvars got happy.

:)(: Roland

If you have Wordpress on a shared host running MySQL version 5.0.51., you can use this plugin to fix the post sorting in reverse problem:

[?php
/*
Plugin Name: 123 No Group By ID
Plugin URI:
Description: Changes the GROUP BY id in
GROUP BY post_date (Problem from MySQL 5.0.51).
Author: Ingo Henze
Version: 0.10
Author URI: http://putzlowitsch.de/
*/ 

    // GROUP BY auswerten
    function plw123ngb_posts_groupby( $groupby ) {
        if( preg_match( "/(|[ ,.])id(|[ ,])/i", $groupby ) )
            $groupby = 'post_date';
        return $groupby;
    }

    add_filter( 'posts_groupby', 'plw123ngb_posts_groupby' );

?]

Save it as something like “plw123_wpfix.php” to your blog’s plugins folder (replacing the brackets [ ], with < > ) and install it from the dashboard.

:)(: Roland

While I have not fully implemented this software into my Cake apps as yet, it looks very promising indeed. Take a look yourself: PHP/SWF Charts

PHP/SWF Chart Gallery

@thekeyboard’s CakePHP and PHP/SWF Charts tutorial

Once I do get it working the way I like, I’ll share what I’ve learned here.

From Frequency Decoder:

There are a multitude of date-picker scripts available on the internet but, with only a few exceptions, they all require either the use of a nasty pop-up window or the inclusion of an embedded JavaScript block within the HTML.

No one in their right mind likes pop-up windows and personally, the thought of embedding JavaScript blocks within the (X)HTML just doesn’t do it for me, so, I decided to spend a couple of my infamous “shaky Sunday mornings” coding an unobtrusive date-picker that was accessible using the keyboard and suitable for use within documents served as application/xhtml+xml (as no document.write statements are used).

See the demo

Tuneshout.com
Discover a New Sound.

Welcome to the next generation of online music. TuneShout is the first community-controlled website exclusively dedicated to indie artists and listeners.

I haven’t put my music up there yet, but plan to soon.

Tag clouds. I came across a few interesting articles on this topic & plan to try several techniques…

http://www.codeprofessor.com/journal/2006/03/15/building-a-tag-cloud-in-wordpress/

http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/tag-cloud

once I get that going, I’ll integrate that with a flash component to try some animation.

Putting up a ‘thematic’ background controller (’player’) on the lefthand sidebar so visitors can change backgrounds at will. Driven at least for now, by an xml file on the server. Perhaps later I’ll have it read the backgrounds folder and include them that way.

2 backgrounds to chose from whoohoo! There’s a version that works with FlashLightbox on the Views page, check it out.

Sorry to 800×600 resolution users in advance, as the layout will work best at 1024+, and the backgrounds will typically be 1280×960+.

If you’re interested in using it, or have something to say, comment away…

UPDATE: You can now “Toggle Background/Foreground” in the flash Thematic. Check it out.

We’re undergoing renovations, check back soon.

CakeFlash is about custom and self-contained xml driven flash based content players, including mp3 audio and video streaming (with rewind and fast forward queueing ) for CakePHP and Wordpress. We plan to include intuitive tutorials so you can plug them in and go.

What’s the motive? Simple actually, it’s the give & take. I’ve learned a lot from online tutorials (the take part), so now it’s time to give a little, or a lot, we’ll see. Also it’s going to be nice to have a place to put it all together without necessarily a lot of content - sparse but clear.

Update: I’ve decided for the time being to go with Wordpress to deliver the players/widgets/tutorials/whathaveyou… that’ll free up more time now, for the good stuff. Eventually I’ll be integrating CakePHP & Wordpress here when that looks like a good idea.

Feel free to comment (comments are moderated so there may be a delay between the time you post and your post’s appearance here).