Up until recently, the forms were running great – then the RAID array they were hosted on went south. The server admin wasn’t running backups so I thought I had lost them for good – but fortunately I managed to find an old archived backup from 2007 on a file server. Tonight I took a peek at the source for the first time in years and, after expecting to grimace at the sight of it, was surprisingly intrigued. It was one of my first “real” websites so I think I have more of a nostalgic connection to it than any other project I’ve taken on. When I see code like this,

Dim Conn, ConStr
Set Conn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
 
'Create the connection to the access database
ConStr = "DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)}; DBQ="
ConStr = ConStr & Server.MapPath("/WWW2.mdb")
 
Conn.Mode = 3
Conn.Open Constr
 
' Create TicketID
CurDay = Right("00" & day(now),2)
CurDay = CurDay & Ucase(MonthName(month(now), true)) & Right(year(now),2)	
 
sqlGetTicketNo = "SELECT MAX(Ticket_ID)AS TNUM FROM Tickets WHERE (((Ticket_ID) LIKE '%" & CurDay & "'))"
 
Set rsGetTicketNo = Conn.Execute(sqlGetTicketNo)
IF isNULL(rsGetTicketNo("TNUM")) Then
 GetTicketNo = "0001-" & CurDay
ELSE
 CurTicketNo = rsGetTicketNo("TNUM")
 NewTicketNo = trim(left(CurTicketNo,instr(CurTicketNo, "-")-1))
 NewTicketNo = "00000" & (NewTicketNo + 1)
 GetTicketNo = Right(NewTicketNo,4) & "-" & CurDay
End IF
rsGetTicketNo.Close

Not only does it make me wonder what I was thinking to come up with a mess like that, but it also brings back somewhat fond memories of late nights with Google and brief cursing.

But, I digress. What seems to be plain old boring code to you oddly strikes me as meaningful. Perhaps it’s just a programmer thing? A certain attachment to our first creations? As it turns out, as far as web languages go, I did not continue on much with ASP. I dabbled a bit with ASP.NET, but eventually moved towards PHP at the persuasion of a few friends and the need to learn it in order to understand and modify IP.Board. I imagine the next couple of weeks will be amusing as I take a closer look at some of the forms I wrote while I port them over to my PHP framework.

The iMac is the center of most of my work. I typically use the following applications daily,

• Safari 4
• OS X Mail
• iTunes
• TextMate
• Versions
• FileMerge
• Cyberduck
• MAMP
• Photoshop CS3
• Adium
• TweetDeck
• Terminal

That’s it. Nothing that sticks out really. I’m actually a recent convert from PC, on which I used the lovely UltraEdit, so I was extremely worried about taking on a new editor. Fortunately, TextMate filled UltraEdit’s big shoes and has been quite a joy to work with after installing some plugins. It still lacks project searching (and project management, in general), so much that the Find in Project tool is almost completely useless. Maybe not completely useless, but definitely on the annoyingly useless side. You get the point.

The applications are largely split up into two categories: development and communications. I work from home, so communication between myself and others is key. OS X Mail, Adium, and even TweetDeck covers that nicely. Then you have the development aspect which of course encompasses everything from TextMate to Terminal. iTunes is also thrown in there, but how can you even begin to program without a little noise in the background?

The MacBook has similar programs, with a few additional browsers for testing. I don’t like cluttering up my iMac with applications I rarely use, so they usually get pushed off to the MacBook. I take it with me when I have to go in to work for meetings or presentations. It’s my latest toy and the novelty still hasn’t worn off :-)

Links System 3.1 is an application that extends the functionality of your IP.Board 3 install, adding on a community driven Links section. Members can go to this area to submit links to websites, comment on and rate submitted links, and much more.

• Submit links to websites along with a title, description, and an image.
• Comment on and rate submitted links
• Ability for users to report potentially offensive content or broken links using the built-in Report Center
• Search integration: search links along with the rest of your board’s content
• Supports item marking, allowing your users to see what links have been added or commented on
• Integrates into “View New Content” and “View Active Content”
• Drag & drop reordering of categories in the ACP
• Ability to specify which categories, if any, allow image submissions with it’s links
• Provide “link back” images and code so other websites can link back to yours
• Mark links as official affiliates and display them in a different section on the links index
• Group permissions allowing you to specify who can add links, moderate links, add comments, search links, and more
• Specify which BBCodes are allowed in the link descriptions and their comments, and whether emoticons are allowed
• Multi moderation: Mass move, approve/unapprove, pin/unpin links
• Sphinx search supported

Links System 3.1.1 includes a few bug fixes and three new hooks to play with. All three hooks add content from your Links System into the sidebar on your board index and are configurable from your settings. One hook will add an “Our Affiliates” section, another will list out the latest submitted links, and another will list out popular links based on the criteria you specify (number of hits, rating, number of comments).

You can download this application from IPS Resources here:
http://resources.invisionpower.com/index.php?appcomponent=downloads&showfile=2335

You can also view a live no-registration demo here:
http://links.brandondavie.com/

Earlier today saw the release of these modules. I wrote up the original planned Joomla module, IPC.Joomla, the WordPress module, IPC.WordPress, and an unexpected but welcomed third module for WordPress MU: IPC.WordPress MU. For those of you who don’t have a clue what IP.Converge is or what it does you may be wondering what point I’m trying to make here. IP.Converge is an application offered by IPS free of charge to any customer with a current active support license. It is designed to provide a central location to perform user authentication and management requests  between different web applications. Previous to 1.1, IP.Converge had only seen a select few of IPS applications in its arsenal, but with the most recent update it has become possible to make other applications, such as Joomla, “converge ready”. This is what we have done here, by writing these modules we’ve successfully made Joomla, WordPress and WordPress MU converge ready.

So what does this mean? Any application that you converge will immedaitely begin sharing the same user base. Users from one application can log into the other without creating a second account. New account regisrations will filter over to the other converged applications. Any changes made to a user’s account details will filter over to the other applications and single sign-on is a breeze.

While this is the integration a lot of people have been clamoring for, and for a long while at that, we figured it’d be insane on our part to stop here. After these modules exit out of their development stage and become stable, we will turn our attention to developing additional extension sets for the modules. These extension sets will provide varying levels of integration between two specific products that you have converged. Some of the more popular combinations would of course be IP.Board + Joomla and IP.Board + WordPress (and/or MU). You will be able to choose from the sets available, with the ones targetted at further integration introducing not only user but content integration as well!

I’m pretty excited about this project and I hope a lot of you will find it useful. Please, feel free to try out the BETA versions of the modules available now and post any feedback and suggestions you may have on the IPS company forums.