About Me
My main interest is in software engineering. I’m very proficient with Linux, Apache, MySQL and, especially, PHP. I’m still fairly young, and my locality doesn’t offer much in the way of employment opportunities for developers who are just starting out, but I do what I can on a freelance basis, working with small businesses to develop a healthy marketing portfolio.
Over the past few years, I’ve been involving myself in the documentation development for the PHP programming language. It started with working on a new set of documentation for the PHP-GTK project, and evolved into addressing bug reports for the main PHP documentation.
Lately I’ve been focusing on library development, integration work and offering consultation on technical matters. I maintain the most popular PHP-based library for the Mindbody API. As well as libraries for handling the NBT and BLF (McRegion) file formats, which are used by Minecraft.
#1 by Michael K on November 5, 2010 - 2:49 pm
Hey Justin,
wanted to see how things were going with MBO? We are getting ready to start working with the API as well, but mostly just to consume the scheduling information. You probably have some good ideas and lessons learned.
Cheers,
Michael
#2 by bill patton on May 1, 2012 - 9:50 am
hi – i’m trying to create what I thought would be a simple set of php pages:
1. show all courses offered at a specific location
2. click on a course to see list of offered dates from (now-5days to now+5 days)
3. Click on a course date to see list of members signed up for that class (with member email info, fname, lname, gender, DOB)
I’ve been through documentation and found the respository but sadly can’t use pear installer or set up allow_url_fopen to be enabled (which means I don’t think i can use sample code/classes?)
What do you think about my hiring you to create the basic framework for above so i can then iterate from there?
Thanks!
-bill
#3 by Justin Martin on May 2, 2012 - 8:07 am
Hi Bill,
The things you mention wanting to do are fairly simple indeed. However, one fundamental requirement for the server environment is that it be able to access remote HTTP resources, as that is how the MBO API is served.
I realize that allow_url_fopen is often disabled on shared hosting environments such as those provided by GoDaddy. Because my MBO API library utilizes the SOAP extension in PHP, there is no way to override that requirement, that I’m aware of.
I’ve reviewed the source for the SOAP extension, and because it itself checks whether allow_url_fopen is enabled, there is no work-around.
My suggestion would be to contact GoDaddy support and see whether they can enable that setting for your account. They may require an upgrade to your account, as GoDaddy is pretty bad. It’s my suggestion that you go with someone better, such as Dreamhost, if you wish to provide shared hosting to clients.
As for hiring me, I’m currently fairly busy with a new job with Media Devils Inc., so hiring me directly is not feasible. However, I’ve made my employer aware of the demand for custom solutions in the area of Mindbody integration, and with us being a boutique software company, we may seek to take such projects in the future.
#4 by bill patton on May 2, 2012 - 8:15 am
Justin:
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I actually use hostmysite.com (i’ve used godaddy and found them terrible from a dev standpoint).
i’ll try creating a dreamhost account and then testing the code to see how far i can get…
regards
bill patton
http://www.logsitall.com
#5 by Justin Martin on May 2, 2012 - 8:48 am
Hi Bill,
Sorry, I did a whois on your domain and saw it was registered with GoDaddy, so I made an assumption. ;)
Dreamhost is probably a fair bit more expensive and GoDaddy or hostmysite in terms of entry costs, but they essentially offer unlimited everything on shared hosting, very few restrictions on what you can host, and the settings are almost completely open. You can even run your own copy of PHP, so you *can* have complete control over your web server.
I use them because I host a lot of little projects, and often host clients’ development sites for my own work. They’re very good.
If you just need to test your code, you can also set up a webserver locally without much fuss, or you can roll a simple Ubuntu Server virtual machine in VirtualBox.
I should mention that, while my employer’s plans for developing packaged Mindbody solutions are future tense, if you have the budget to hire us on a project exclusively, we’re likely to take it (and so, you’ll get my expertise :) ).
#6 by bill patton on May 3, 2012 - 7:10 am
Justin:
I would like to explore hiring your company to build the custom solution.
That said – i have a VERY simple code base and needs.
from an existing dreamhost account (i’ll set up)…
1. show all courses offered at a specific location
(api credentials and location id hard coded)
2. click on a course to see list of offered dates from (now-5days to now+5 days)
3. Click on a course date to see list of members signed up for that class (with member email info, fname, lname, gender, DOB)
Would this be a project that i could retain your business to put together? It seems as though this would be a fairly short project (10 hours?) total. Please advise.
-bill