Wigbi 1.2.0 is out

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.

Wigbi 1.1.3 is out

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.

Two data plugins done

I have just finished rewriting two old data plugins – User and Rating – into a much nicer implementation The new plugin classes are fully tested and will be included in the next alpha release.

During development, however, I came to the decision that all functions that returns an error code/array when an operation fails should throw an exception instead (except the validate function, which returns any errors). The Wigbi AJAX handler should then always return a [result, error] result, which the Wigbi.ajax callback method will always receive as a parameter.

This makes it possible to implement a really clean solution, where server exceptions and AJAX errors are exposed in the same way. I will rewrite my code so that it behaves in this way, which will be the big difference between the alpha 1 and 2 releases.

Wigbi 1.0 system and core packages almost done

I have almost completed rewriting all the Wigbi 0.99.3 system and core package classes. The new Wigbi version is fully test-driven, which is a huge improvement from earlier versions. All in all, the new version features a lot of improvements, some class/method removals and a much more slick framework.

All system and core classes are now entirelly independent of the Wigbi class. Only one static class remains (SessionHandler) – the rest have been made unstatic, with default instances that can be accessed via the Wigbi class.

I only have the Wigbi and WigbiDataPlugin (previously called Seed) classes left before I start to convert all the various plugins. All in all, the plugins should be a rather short business to convert, since they all benefit from functionality in already tested base classes.

The documentation will be slicker than before as well. I am currently considering to NOT write demos for all the various system classes and plugins, since the web site has few visitors. Instead, I think I’ll make it possible to request demos to be written, so that I only have to write demos when people need them.

Finally, the AJAX pipeline previously only supported functions that used base type parameters, like strings, integers, booleans and arrays. In Wigbi 1.0, I want to make it possible to serialize/unserialize data back and forth between PHP and JavaScript, and would thus need a serialize/unserialize implementation in JavaScript. Please let me know about any such implementations that gets the job done.