Karma's Nucleus DevBlog

In Nucleus 3.2, there are some changes to how comment and member mail forms work. To the end user, this is visible in two ways:

1. When an error occurs, the error will appear together with the comment form, rather than on a separate page.
2. When an error occurs, the comment form is pre-filled with what the user had originally entered. This solves the problem of finding out that everything you wrote has gone after hitting the back button on an error page.

This article describes how all of this works, what has changed and how you can style the error message using the error class.

My personal computer appears to be plagued by a hardware failure, probably something to do with the hard disk. For some hours now, a spontaneous reboot has occured about once every 30 10 minutes on average. Not so fun if you're in the middle of doing something :(

Update: It turned out to be a defective memory module, which has now been replaced.

Just a stupid experiment: An image that isn't.

Last week, the dutch website Naar Voren (a site similar to A List Apart, but in dutch) published an article of which I was a co-author: Fout! - Haalt je bezoeker de eindstreep.

The article is about writing a friendly form that can deal well with errors, and guides the user to the finish line. Also, it highlights the importance of friendly error messages and of keeping forms limited to the information that's really needed. My part in the article mainly was the PHP script.

Anyway, I've put up a translated demo and the accompanying code here on this website. Maybe someone finds it interesting.

I stumbled across a free e-book on PHP today: A Programmer's Introduction to PHP 4.0 from Apress.

Note that at the time of writing, the current PHP version was 4.0.3, so it might be slightly outdated.

No Nucleus news today: I spent today on the Microsoft Developer Days in Brussels (Belgium), and will be going over there tomorrow also.

Obviously, this event is targetted towards developers that develop on Microsoft platforms (which is what I do in my daytime job). But I wanted to share this with you guys anyway.

If you're interested in which track I took, read on.

Updated! Added information on the sessions of day 2