After some nightly hacking, the brand new Wigbi 1.2.0 is out. Check out the details at http://www.wigbi.com

I will try to write some short blog posts about the various improvements, as well as create updated video tutorials,but I believe that baby #2 (ETA today) will delay this a little. Time will tell.

Release notes

The Wigbi AJAX pipeline is really convenient, but could expose the system to bad stuff, since any class method can be executed. Therefore, this new version features improved AJAX security, which as a bonus also causes size reduction to the data that is passed between the client and the server. Safer and faster…well, a bit at least.

I have also fixed two invalid DOM selectors in the TinyMceExtender JavaScript code. The ones in the old version had an incorrect space in them, which caused textareas to not be converted into WYSIWYG editors. This is all taken care of now, so the extender should work even with the new version of Tiny MCE.

For more details, check the release notes in the download bundle.

In Wigbi 1.1.2, I added a new .htaccess file that did not contain the magic quotes line, since that line made Wigbi crash if the PHP installation did not support magic quotes. However, I managed to remove the line in the incorrect file, which made all Wigbi AJAX pipeline operations fail. Great scott!

I have added a hotfix (love the name) which is available as Wigib 1.1.3 at github and wigbi.com – get it if you managed to download the crappy 1.1.2 version.

And while I am at it, I can as well talk a bit what will be included in the upcoming Wigbi 1.2. You see,  the Wigbi AJAX pipeline is really convenient, but can expose the system to bad stuff, since any class method can be executed as long as Wigbi is aware of the class. I will therefore add a new configuration file parameter In Wigbi 1.2.0. It is named ajaxClasses and is a comma-separated list with the names of all the classes that can be used with the Wigbi AJAX pipeline. Every data plugin can be used without adding its class name here, as well as Wigbi, but all other classes must be added here before you can go AJAX on them.

Finally, after today’s demo, I have decided to develop another start package called Wigbi CMS, which will feature a (basic) CMS framework. It will be released with Wigbi 1.3.0…which will be out…uhm, soon.

Either replace the .htaccess file in the Wigbi folder with the NO_MAGIC_QUOTES.htaccess file, or download Wigbi 1.1.3.

Bad Daniel begs for forgiveness!

The story, in short, is that I never had any problems with Wigbi when working with it locally or hosting Wigbi-based sites at my hosting company. However, after developing a site for a friend of mine, Wigbi AJAX updates (e.g. when updating HTML content) started receive corrupted strings, where new lines were converted to \n etc. Then, one day, the same thing started happening at my hosting company. It turned out that they had enabled magic quotes.

So, in order to never let those quotes ruin another Wigbi site, I added a line to the wigbi/.htaccess file, which disabled magic quotes. The problem with this approach, however, is (which I was informed of a couple of days ago) that not all PHP installations have the magic quotes feature. For such installations, the .htaccess file in question stops working…and Wigbi does as well.

In Wigbi 1.1.2, the magic quotes wigbi/.htaccess file is separate from the original one. If you experience problems with magic quotes, just switch the .htaccess files for that server.

So, yesterday evening, I finished putting together Wigbi 1.1.0, which is a better wrap-up than the 1.0.3 release…and today, I decided to release a quick hotfix – Wigbi 1.1.1.

Wigbi 1.1.1 takes care of an .htaccess rewrite bug that caused the MVC engine to ignore any defined query strings. Two big thumbs up to Fredrik Bonander who helped me out with the regexp bug handling!

Wigbi 1.1.1 comes with an already configured MVC template set that features a basic, but fully functional MVC routing .htaccess file, a controller handler that receives all registered routes in the .htaccess file, as well as a default Home controller, a target Index view as well as a simple master page.

This setup will probably help you get started a lot quicker than if you were to start off from a clean slate. I also uploaded a new video tutorial that demonstrates how to download Wigbi and get it up and running. If you decide to give Wigbi a try, let me know what you think.

Download Wigbi and watch the video tutorial here.

So, instead of the index-wigbi.php page, Wigbi now comes with a brand new file called REMOVE_THE_FILENAME.htaccess. Just remove the file name (yes, just like the file name told you) to make it into an .htaccess file. This is the file that will be responsible for the MVC routing.

Also…the MasterPage class has changed quiite a bit compared to Wigbi 1.0.3. Since the View class can be used to push data to views, variable handling in the master page class is no more. Furthermore, the file path must now be set separately and not when calling build. Finally, all the content area related methods are now removed to openContentArea, closeContentArea and getContent.

So, now, it is a lot easier to start Wigbi in 1.1.0. No starting / stopping must be added to the master page, or any page at all. It is all happening in the controller start point. Good stuff!

I will update the start page video so that it shows the most current setup. Until then, you can download Wigbi 1.1.0 here.

Wigbi uses URL rewriting, which by default is disabled in WampServer. To enable it, click on the WampServer icon in the system tray, navigate to Apache/Apache Modules and enable rewrite_module.

After this, Wigbi should work without any problems whatsoever

I will record a new video with adjusted audio, better resolution and improved English (hey, let me keep my hopes up regarding my lingual abilities, will you

The video will be up soon.

When doing so, I noticed a few minor flaws, like mySQL warnings being displayed on the page if no database connection data is specified. I will fix this asap. However, a far more serious problem is that the .htaccess file in the ~/wigbi folder seems to be invalid. No files within this folder can be loaded, which means that css/js file bundling does not work at all. Neither will any AJAX-based calls that go through the Wigbi AJAX pipeline.

If anyone knows knows what seems to cause this problem, please let me know.

However,as I yesterday sat down to migrate the old plugin so that it would work together with the new Wigbi version, I thought “hey, three years have passed – there MUST be an even easier way to upload files”.

Believe it or not…there was.

The people behind Tiny MCE have created a really nice file upload component called Plupload. It supports several ”runtimes” – from jQuery-based file upload in HTML4/5 to Flash, Silverlight, Gears etc. and is insanely easy to configure. You can tell Plupload which runtimes you’d prefer to use, which file types to support etc. The users can then upload files either with a regular “select file(s)” dialog or by dragging files from an Explorer/Finder window.

To make Plupload work flawlessly with Wigbi, I moved the upload.php file to the ~/wigbi/pages/ folder and added some extra functionality, like starting/stopping Wigbi and being able to adjust the target folder with a query string variable. All in all, adding Plupload to my Wigbi-based site took 10 minutes and worked perfect.

Due to this, I will not create a new version of the old FileUploadForm plugin. I will rather add an upload.php dummy page to the ~/wigbi/pages/ folder, that describes how to adjust the upload file that is included with Plupload.