Are you wishing for some cooler weather yet? Before you know it we will be in football season then inundated with holiday ads. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves we would like to take a few moments to toot our own horn about some of our recent accomplishments, drop some exciting news and take look at what lies ahead.

RECENT LAUNCHES

We have been very busy over the summer and look forward to cranking out several new projects in the coming months. In case you missed some of our recent launches:

The Population Institute
This project was a complete rewrite of everything: infrastructure, design, content, content management, donation process and membership management. In a departure from our previous coding standards, we switched JavaScript frameworks from Mootools to jQuery. Both frameworks are very powerful and perform many of the same functions but it is always good for developers to have a varied arsenal of tools available. Their new donation system now accepts international donations! See the site at www.populationinstitute.org and blog.populationinstitute.org

Anthony Foxx for Charlotte Mayor
While we did initial development on the site, the campaign looked to take the site’s design and focus in a different direction. We worked with the campaign to come up with a fresh new design, direct integration with their e-mail blast software and better utilization of the Zend Framework’s YouTube application interface. Visit the site at www.anthonyfoxx.com.

Artists United for Health Care
Another client brought to us through Evolve Strategies (www.evolvestrategies.net), Artists United for Health Care is an initiative by LINC Philadelphia to provide affordable health care to artists. Evolve Strategies provided the design and Sononaco provided the back-end development through the Drupal Content Management System. See the site at www.artistsunitedforhealthcare.org.

Richard Aborn for Manhattan District Attorney
We are proud to launch and host the web services for Richard Aborn’s campaign for Manhattan District Attorney. Double Agent Design (www.doubleagentdesign.com) provided the design services and Sononaco hooked up the Zend Framework/Zend Server powered back-end to connect the web site contribution and volunteer tools with NGP. Check the site out at www.abornforda.com

APCO International
Sononaco has been working with the Association of Public Safety and Communications Officers (APCO) International for about the past year. We have worked to keep things up and running for them while developing new web initiatives for the vast services they offer their members. Just last month APCO moved their server hosting to Sononaco. There are a lot of more exciting things coming up for APCO. Josh and Sumi have been working like gangbusters (that’s a joke!) on the site. Visit APCO at www.apcointl.org

WE’RE EXPANDING!

We are very excited to announce that we are opening another office! To better serve our DC area/Amtrak route clients we are opening an office in the Washington area. The new office opens next week (the week of August 3rd) near Fort Myer in Arlington. The new address is:

Sononaco, Inc.
2300 N. Pershing Drive
Suite 201-4
Arlington, VA 22201

The new office has plenty of **free** parking, is located just a block from Route 50 and is an easy 10 minute from the Court House or Clarendon Metro stations.

What does this mean for the Charlotte office? Nothing. Well, except it’s going to have a little less furniture and plants. 212 S. Tryon is staying where it is. And yes, both the 704 and 202 numbers will still work. Keith will continue to split time between both offices. However, he will not be available this Wednesday through Friday as the gets the new office set up.

What’s brewing in the lab?

We have several exciting projects that will be released over the next few months that you will probably hear us going on about. A few are:

A web site launch that has been in development for over a year and a half!
A new multi-user CMS-powered web site specifically designed to provide unique content in multiple languages
A new application that takes content on an external host and makes it available to users on a separate system with syncing ability!

That’s all for now!

Thank you to everyone for your continued business! We look forward to an exciting second half of 2009 at Sononaco!

–Keith, Josh, Sumi & Leigh

We are in the process of upgrading all of our hosted sites and codebases to Zend Framework 1.8.1. If you are a developer please be sure to update your local copy of the Framework.

Zend released version 1.8 of the Zend Framework around the first of May. Sononaco is upgrading the Zend Framework running on all of our servers. There are several notable changes to the code but there is one issue that needs to be immediately addressed: the Autoloader.

Beginning today (May 13th) we will begin upgrading the Framework on our staging/testing server, (at 66.240.223.252) and our Zend Server. All Zend Server sites have been upgraded to use the 1.8.1 bootstrapper. All site on the “dev” server include any site with the domain name beginning with “dev” or “staging”.

How does this impact you? Unless you ar a developer, not much at all. If you are one of the developers using the Zend Framework then you will need to do a couple of things:

First, update your local working copy of the site. Effective immediately all Application codebases in Subversion should contain the code for the 1.8 Framework. The 1.8.x Bootstrapper code is not compatible with versions of Zend Framework older than 1.8.x!!

If you run the new Application code against the 1.7.x Framework you will see errors so be sure to upgrade your local Framework to 1.8.x.

For the moment we are not upgrading existing bootstrapers or Application layouts to the new Zend_Application_Boostrapper. All projects going forward will contain the new Bootstrapper system.

You can download version 1.8.x of the Zend Framework here.

Jim Plush at Panasonic has published an excellent article on why his company went with the Zend Framework for his enterprise applications. Sononaco is in a similar situation as Jim: we build all kinds of sites of all sizes for all types of clients.

We like to think of ourselves growing along with the language. All of our developers started out embedding PHP inside HTML documents. As PHP started becoming more object-oriented we moved on to writing classes and functions. We have developed and modified other packages such as Serendipity, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, just to name a few.

The move to Zend Framework is not limited to the developer’s perspective. We consider the benefits it brings the client and the user on the front-end as well. Easy search-engine friendly path navigation, integration with external services (YouTube, Twitter, All Things Google) and the fact that you can integrate any JavaScript Framework (we were big MooTools fans) are primary reasons we promote the Zend Framework to our clients. The speed we can develop an application and the ease of updating the Zend Framework on servers are bonus for our developers.

For the uninitiated, NGP Software is an excellent online tool for campaigns to help them raise money and manage constituents. They have an excellent set of APIs for submitting contributions, newsletter sign-ups and volunteer information. The problem is their APIs are mostly targeted toward Windows/ASP development. For what it’s worth, they do include an example using JavaScript.

The NGP folks have created a plugin for Drupal that integrates directly into the CMS. I tried installing it on a clean Drupal install and it didn’t work, giving SOAP errors.

Rather than reverse engineering the Drupal plugin I stripped out the basic pieces and put them together to work within the Zend Framework.

We don’t even use SOAP for this call, simply the Zend_Http_Client class.

The following are assumed:

1. You have received a valid form (using Zend_Form, of course).

2. Are a client of NGP or have a client login.

3. The CWP is set up on the site and you have generated your Credentials string.

4. You are using Zend Framework 1.7 or higher.

5. The $data[] array are reflections of the Zend_Form elements.

This would be the “process code.” Be sure to run a “convert to ASCII” code on the code block below, since WordPress like curlify-ing quotes.


$data = $this->_request->getPost();

$client = new Zend_Http_Client("https://services.myngp.com/ngponlineservices/VolunteerSignUpService.asmx/VolunteerSignUp");
$response = $client->setRawData($post, 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded')->request('POST');

A bit later I will be posting the Zend Framework code used for the contribution and newsletter sign ups.