HijriDate on phpBB and serendipity

We’ve been rather busy here at YSE which explains the lack of any news for a while, we are very dissatisfied with the hosting company for refusing to enable FreeType support for the HijriDate wizard which was due for release back in April and unfortunately we still haven’t had any progress (about 50 emails have been sent in request).

We are happy to find that the HijriDate service is expanding over new platforms thanks to some induviduals from the online community.

Serendipity

Serendipity is another open source blogging platform. Abdussamad has written a tutorial and a script to adding the hijri date to blog entries on his website.

phpBB

phpBB is a very popular forum software that has been available for a very long time. Khurram has written a mod for phpBB which enables the hijri date to come alongside the gregorian date on the index page.

Thanks alot to these brothers and I hope that come in useful. They are available on the Hijri Date page.

HijriDate Wizard Completed!

One thing I’ve realised about working a project is the initial spur that gets you going. When you have an idea and a vision you can really feel determined to get it done. Often you loose this momentum as you encounter hurdles and problems that slow you down. This is the first time where I’ve decided that I wanted to make something and I’ve done it (with some help) in only a few days.

Local testing helps immensely when working on a new project - why? Because you can test your script in seconds, and the best way to see if something works is to keep testing it. I’ve been using XAMPP with PHP5, Apache2 and MySQL5 on one of my Windows machines to get the job done. Alternatively if your running Linux or Mac then you (should) have these facilities only a few clicks away.

I also find that looking at other open source scripts can be extremely useful. You might know how to do something one way but you may find that someone else has done it in a more efficient and easier way then yourself. The great thing about open source is that you are no obliged to use someone elses scripts, and if you do use it then you are free to change it as much as you like to suit your needs (depending on what license it’s under).

Anyway back to the HijriDate Wizard. It has been completed and is working really well, but - yes there is a but. This webhost is not currently supporting ‘FreeType’. What does that mean? Well basically the script will not run on here. I have it running on an Usayd Networks server but I am not allowed to release it publicly till it can be hosted here. The script has been tested by around 25 people so far and the evaluation has been very positive. I’m afraid all I can offer to you right now is a screenshot of it in action, and I will keep emailing this pathetic webhost to enable FreeType.

Getting somewhere

We weren’t going to start working on the next edition of the Hijri Date service just yet but I couldn’t help myself and we have actually had some progress. The only major thing that we now need to work on is creating an easy to use wizard and getting this annoying webhost to install/enable FreeType as discussed in the last article. So far we have managed to get the script to allow the user to define the following:

• Font
• Font Size
• Font Colour
• Background Colour
• Transparent Background

Essentially all we really have left is to give the user the three standard options of HijriDate (Hijri + Gregorian), Hirji only and Gregorian only and the wizard. We are using the Vera font set from GNOME (open source) and eventually expanding to other open source font sets. Of course, here’s a demo for you:

Time to email Netfirms again…