WGOCakePHP Developer, jQuery Developer, Tim Roberts

Mutt is a fantastic terminal based email client that has all of the capabilities of its GUI based equivalents. One thing I always found annoying was being unable to read emails that have been sent as HTML only (ugh). Well, here is a nice fix that let’s you use a terminal based web browser to view the emails as soon as you load them, in mutt, with as much formatting as possible maintained.

1. First close Mutt down.
2. Make sure you have the terminal based browser lynx installed (e.g apt-get install lynx)
3. Create (or edit) a file in your home directory called .mailcap and add the following lines:
text/html; lynx %s; nametemplate=%s.html
text/html; lynx -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput
4. Add the following to your .muttrc file:
   auto_view text/html
5. Restart Mutt

Now you can start enjoying your HTML email from within Mutt.

I covered a very simple way to implement alternating table row colours with PHP in another post (6 years ago!). Here is a way to achieve the same client side using jquery. It could easily be used for any set of elements (e.g. li)

$('.table').each(function (i, e) {
if (i % 2 == 0) {
$(this).addClass('highlight')
}
});

All you need then is a .highlight rule in your css to do the styling.

There’s no point in me trying to sell mongoDB to you, just go over to the mongoDB site and read up on its excellence.

This is how I got mongoDB working on Debian Squeeze. It should work for other Deb based flavours – I’m thinking Ubuntu. I also have a PHP5x setup so you may need to adapt if you are running earlier versions. I’m also assuming you have git installed to fetch the drivers.

All you have to do follows:

First install the necessary mongo stuff (you need php5-dev also as we need the phpize functionality):

sudo apt-get install mongodb mongo-clients php5-dev

Now fetch the official mongoDB php driver from github:

git clone https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-php-driver.git

Change into the driver directory and run the following commands:

cd mongo-php-driver
phpize
./configure
sudo make install

Copy the driver to php extension dir. To find your extension dir run:

php -i | grep extension_dir

Armed with the location of your extension dir copy the file:

sudo cp modules/mongo.so /path/to/php/extension_dir/

Now create a file to load the driver into php at start up:

sudo vi /etc/php5/conf.d/mongo.ini

with the line:

extension=mongo.so

Now restart apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Then start an instance of the mongo server and PHP should be mongo friendly.

If you want to test this go grab a copy of the excellent phpMoAdmin and drop the file anywhere you load it through a browser. It should connect off the bat to mongoDB and you can start creating collections and objects in less time than it takes you to type “CREATE TABLE …”.

Enjoy.

It sells itself:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50

Feature: Tutor forums
	As a Tutor
	I want to be able to use the forums
	In order to communicate with other tutors
 
Scenario: View forums
	Given that I am logged in as a Tutor
	And I click on "Tutor Forums"
	Then I should see a paginated list of "Tutor Forums"
 
Scenario: Create forum
	Given that I am logged in as a Tutor
	And I am on the page "Tutor Forums"
	And I click on the link Create forum
	And I enter a Forum title
	And I click "create forum"
	Then I should be able to create a new forum.
 
Scenario: Edit forum
	Given that I am logged in as a Tutor
	And I am viewing a forum that I created
	And The forum was created within the past 15 minutes
	Then I should be able to edit the forum
 
Scenario: View threads
	Given that I am logged in as a Tutor
	And I am on the page "Tutor Forums"
	And I click on the title of a Forum
	I should see a paginated list of threads for that forum.
 
Scenario: Read thread
	Given that I am logged in as a Tutor
	And I am viewing a list of forum threads
	And I click the title of a thread
	Then I should see a list of message for that thread.
 
Scenario: Reply to thread
	Given that I am logged in as a Tutor
	And I am viewing a thread
	And I click "post reply"
	And I enter a reply
	And I click "post reply" button
	Then I should be abñle to reply to a thread
 
Scenario: Edit reply
	Given that I am logged in as a Tutor
	And I am viewing replies to a thread
	And a reply was posted by me
	And the reply was posted within the last 15 minutes
	Then I should be able to edit the reply.

It’s so easy you and your clients can learn it in minutes, and it saves everyone time and clarifies expectations.

PHP users should check out Behat.