Categories
Open Source PHP Technology Web Development Zend Framework

New Zend/AEA Framework based Intranet deployed @ work

Today we put live the new Intranet at AEA which has been Kat’s major project (should get to spend more time with her now its launched!) with some support from me and impressive efforts from the dev team.

Previously we had a static HTML Intranet which wasn’t really serving the needs of the business as well as it could. The new site is based on the AEA Framework – which I’ve blogged about a bit before. Essentially an extension of the Zend Framework glueing Silverstripe and other 3rd party components together with a single sign on approach (in this case we are also using LDAP to do logins from our current Novell infrastructure). We built on our HTML content crawler tool to hoover in the static HTML into the Content Management System.

Over time we will leverage the framework to create more efficient web 2.0 style business processes and work with PPC to combine it with other off the shelf tools that they specialise in; and hopefully push it globally across the group…

I’ve also had some exciting news this week which I will share when I can.

All exciting stuff!

Categories
Open Source PHP Ubuntu Web Development Zend Framework

Zend Framework to be bundled with Ubuntu Hardy (8.04)

Interesting & good news – Zend Framework is being bundled as part of Ubuntu Linux: http://devzone.zend.com/article/3232–Zend-Framework-to-be-part-of-Ubuntu

Direct link to article: http://andigutmans.blogspot.com/2008/02/zend-framework-to-be-part-of-ubuntu.html

Also found an interesting presentation on version 1.5 of the Zend Framework.

Categories
Environment PHP Web Development Zend Framework

Latest project – London Green500 goes live

Green500 site Screenshot

London Green500 is an exciting project I’ve been working on for the last few months. The full details of the programme for the London Development Agency will go out next week.

In a nutshell its a Carbon Management program for large organisations in the London area – aimed at reducing CO2 emissions by 1.5 million tonnes over the next couple of years. Today the marketing site went live (which is mainly a Content Management System), later in the month the Customer and Administration parts will go live. This post also has a bit of an ulterior motive – getting the site into the search engines – as its brand new and I know my blog is crawled by Google etc.

From a development standpoint the Customer and Admin areas are more exciting as they are powered by the “AEA Framework” which is major initiative I have been working on since I joined AEA earlier in the year as Architect/Senior Developer. Zend Framework (and therefore PHP5) powered, with Smarty for views (of the MVC part) some nice templating and other modules to support the various projects at AEA.

When I can spare a bit more time I’ll post some more stuff on the AEA Framework. All I say for now is that at the moment I’m putting the finishing touches to what we are calling Advanced Forms. Forms that (as an Administrator) you can edit via the site right down to the field and validation level. So you can build complex multi-page forms and ultimately processes with less code – actually mostly from the site itself). We are also integrating YUI components such as the Datatable. Can’t wait to write more about it!

Update on Green500 – see http://www.londonclimatechange.co.uk/greenorganisations/making-it-happen/green500/
and http://www.london.gov.uk/view_press_release.jsp?releaseid=14873

It made it on to the BBC news site too – which is good news.