I keep seeing people asking the question “How do I get code completion to work in Aptana and Eclipse PDT?”. A lot of the time I see the Helper fix but nothing else! With a bit of fiddling I’ve finally got a complete solution that works! Here how I did it:

Follow this guide to enable the .thtml or .ctp file extentions: Setting up Eclipse to work with Cake

Create a dummy file in your cake root directory with the following code:

<?php
   exit();
   //declare and define all of the helpers
   //to helper enable codecompletion
   if(1 == 0) {
        $ajax = new AjaxHelper();
        $cache = new CacheHelper();
        $form = new FormHelper();
        $html = new HtmlHelper();
        $javascript = new JavascriptHelper();
        $number = new NumberHelper();
        $session = new SessionHelper();
        $text = new TextHelper();
        $time = new TimeHelper();
    }
?>

Then to get the Model code completion from within controllers create an app_controller.php file in you app directory and add a dummy function with the following code:

<?php
    class AppController extends Controller {
        public function dummy () {
            //for each of your models add a definition and declaration
            //like the ones that follow
            $this->User = new User();
            $this->Post = new Post();
        }
    }
?>

So with a bit of luck this will help you on your way. Thanks for reading!

The MySQL REPLACE function is one of the most useful function MySQL has to offer. It’s great if you need to do a bulk find and replace on text in your database table. It’s very useful for migrations from one domain name to another and I have used it countless times to move Wordpress installations from a testing to a production environment to re-point images. Here the code:

UPDATE table_name SET column_name = REPLACE(column_name, 'find_string_in_quotes', 'replace_string_in_quotes');

Hope you find this useful. If you know a better way please leave a reply!

Version 1.5.0 has now been released.

* This Plugin Requires CURL To Work *

This Wordpress Twitter plugin is a nice simple plugin. All it does is post updates from your blog to your twitter account when you create a fresh post and allows you to tweet from you blog. Some other features are:

• Auto shorten URL’s with tinyurl
• Validation to make sure you can tweet or warns you if you cant
• Automatic character limitation to make sure you don’t post anything over 140 characters
• Good for SEO, creating automatic links to your blog and it’s posts

Installation

All you have to do is download version 1.1.0 from the link below, unzip it, upload it to your plugins folder and activate it from the plugins menu.

Hope you like it :)

Download WP Post To Twitter

Have you ever heard of an SQL injection attack? Ever wondered how it’s actually done? Well here’s a great video showing you how:

Blind SQL Injection Attack Video

You don’t often get to see a demonstration of how an attacker will actually use techniques such as this the infiltrate a site. My belief is that if you need to defend yourself or your application against it you need to see it in action. milw0rm is a great place to see what applications are vulnerable to attack, how, why and has it been fixed.

What could have been done to prevent this attack?

Lots of things could have been done to prevent this from happening, but often is the case in large applications or small one’s built by an inexperienced developer holes are left in the security of an application. One thing to remember when developing an application that any user submitted data should be treated as hostile. It should be checked via Regex, cleaned, Type Casted and validated to ensure what your getting from the user is what you expected.

In the video a function as simple as mysql_real_escape_string could have prevented this but here are some other things you should know about:

Hash your passwords

I don’t know if you noticed in the video but the attacker acquired a plain text password. This was the application developers first mistake. If the password had been hashed, even if the attacked had got the entire hash it would have been useless. If you put another hash in it will just be converted to guess what, another hash. This would have rendered this attack fruitless. MD5 is a great Hashing function that comes pre-packed with most programming languages and would turn this “password” into this “5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99″. Even if one character changes the hash would be completely different.

Use a Database abstraction layer

In PHP a great example of this would be the MDB2 class. This class comes with a whole list of security features including some great sanitisation functions. Using a single gateway to your database will greatly reduce the margin for error. You could even develop your own with automatic data cleaning.

Use an odd admin section name

One issue with applications with an integrated CMS is the admin section is simply called “admin”. In this case if the attacker armed with a username and password couldn’t find your admin section he would have had to employ some more sophisticated tools to monitor where you where going to update your site. At this point they may get bored or more often than not, it’s an automated attack. In this case the application may try to guess where it is, fail and move on. So try to name your admin sections more carefully!

Well I hope someone finds this of use and I look forward to your responses!

At the start of the year I wrote an article over on another site detailing the different methods you could use to select elements using the powerful jQuery attribute selectors. Because I no longer work for that company any more and the article is no longer being maintained, I’ve decided to create a second version of the article so I can update it and extend it’s usefulness.

jQuery selectors and attribute selectors are some of the best features jQuery has to offer when it comes to DOM manipulation. They allow you to quickly select all elements or groups of element of a given tag name, attribute name or their contents and allow you to manipulate them as a group or a single node. This article can be used as a beginners guide to selectors or as a cheahsheet or reference.

The following table lists the different methods you have available to you to select nodes when using jQuery. All of the listed selectors should be wrapped in the following to stop your jQuery scripts conflicting with other libraries:

    (function ($) {
        //Your code here
    })(jQuery);

jQuery selectors and examples

Below are a slip tabular list of the different selector and groups they seem to fit into.

• jQuery Simple selectors
• jQuery CSS style sudo selectors
• jQuery XPath style selectors
• jQuery form selectors

Well I hope that version two of “jQuery selectors and attribute selectors reference and examples” is more helpful than V1. With a bit of luck you’ll find the grouping a little better too. Thanks for visiting! Please leave a message!