This trick can be enhanced even further by storing a list of unique IDs in the write cache that can be replaced when an objected is updated before one of it’s previous writes was processed. This means that what would have been two database writes is now one! This requires storing a list in cache as well as the objects, which is done very effectively with Redis.

When used correctly and with a properly designed database that reduces the number of unique objects, your writes are faster and fewer! With a few more tricks this system can also be used easily and effectively in a cluster environment. More on that later.

After setting up SVN and a repository for the intranet files, I had to figure out a way to set up the web hosting. In order to provide hosting for all individual copies and for the main copy I had to set up network drives for each user. Each individual copy was in a named folder all under one common folder. I used samba to allow users to access their files and set up apache to serve the PHP content out of each folder. Each user then mapped the folder on their workstations and used whichever SVN tool they wanted to check out the files into their new network drive. Their individual copies were now set up and ready to use.

This system is meant to manage the content for our development copy of the intranet only. After files were pushed through SVN they should then appear in the main development checkout. I set up a cron job to pull updated files from SVN and put them into our primary copy of the development intranet. This was our main beta for our changes to be tested and that primary revisions would be pulled from and pushed live.

This was the best solution I could come up with for this problem. To my surprise I didn’t find anybody else on the Internet with similar problems. This way seems to work just fine for us though and will hopefully help out anybody else looking to manage a project like this.

One of the requirements was the connection had to be through a secure tunnel. So using Apache, PHP, php-ldap module, OpenLDAP and OpenSSL on Fedora Core 5 I was able to do this.

The system started with the Apache, PHP and the php-ldap module installed. A custom configure of OpenLDAP had to be done. I downloaded the newest version from the site and configured and installed it with –with-tls –enable-slapd. After installing OpenLDAP, I had to add the line TLS_REQCERT never to the end of /etc/openldap/ldap.conf. This option may be needed if you are having certificate troubles.

The following are the two functions i used in PHP to actually do the authentication.

function ia_ldap_search($ds, $user) {
$sr=ldap_search($ds, “o=NIU”, “cn=$user”);
$info = ldap_get_entries($ds, $sr);

return $info[0];
}

function ldap_auth($user, $pass, $search=false) {
$ds=ldap_connect(_IA_STREAM);

if($search) {
$info=ia_ldap_search($ds, $user);
$user=$info['dn'];
} else $info=$user;

$r=@ldap_bind($ds, $user, $pass);
ldap_close($ds);

return $r ? $info : 0;
}

_IA_STREAM is a define I provided previously that is the URI of the LDAPS server (ldaps://host:636). These two functions should provide you with the basics from LDAP authentication over SSL. The ldap_auth function takes the username and password and returns the user info if validated, or 0 for failed. Username search can be done by providing the username and settings $search to true when calling the function.

Navigate to your wp-admin folder in your Wordpress installation. Edit admin-functions.php and head to line 2228. You should find this line:

$max_side = apply_filters( 'wp_thumbnail_max_side_length', 128, $attachment_id, $file );

The default max size is 128px. You can choose what you want for this now. This size determines the maximum size of any side of the image. For my template though, I only care about width. I always want the thumbnail to be as wide as the template. To make that change, go to line 2276 of the admin-functions.php file. Change the following line:

if ( $image_attr[0] > $image_attr[1] ) {

To:

//if ( $image_attr[0] > $image_attr[1] ) {
if (1) {

That’s it! Now Wordpress will always scale the thumbnail according to the width. Save your changes and try em out.

$facebook->api_client->fql_query("SELECT uid FROM user WHERE has_added_app=1 and uid IN (SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = $user)");

This returns a nice quick list I can use in the multi-friend selector for excluded IDs in the ’share’ part of the application as well as a quick number for how many friends have already added the application. This can be very useful.

The app so far is very simple: it is scheduled to pull quotes from you and your friends’ profiles and to break them up and place just single quotes randomly on your profile in the QuoteShare box. Check out the screen shot below.

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<img src="http://www.artviper.net/screenshots/screener.php?url={$link.URL|escape|trim}"
alt="Thumbnail" />
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That should be it! The thumbnails take a bit to be cached, but after they’re loaded once they should load quickly.