Joe’s Amazing Technicolor Weblog

or, Why To Use Dedicated Layouts When Connecting To FileMaker Via PHP

I’d read that it’s a good practice to always use a dedicated layout for any PHP scripts you have that are talking to a FileMaker database. While I’d seen reasons of efficiency and reliability, today I learned another reason that’s true: it can eliminate otherwise hard-to-debug problems.

At first when working on my current FileMaker <-> PHP project, I was attempting to reuse an existing layout that had all the info I needed. While my permissions seemed to be fine for the data file and layout I was attempting to access, actually running the script kept resulting in “Error 100: File is missing” coming back at me as soon as I added any criteria to my search. FileMaker doesn’t bother putting anything useful in its server logs, either, so it wouldn’t have been much fun picking through the layout & figuring what linkage(s) were to blame.

However, by simply creating a dedicated layout, everything started working as planned. A practice I’ll be following in the future.

I’ve had a number of experiences setting up rich text editors online over the last few years, usually in the context of a Drupal site, and it’s always been a pain.

My most recent experience has mostly been the same, except it ends a little better than usual:

1. Start with TinyMCE, which has more-or-less worked in the past. This time around with Drupal 6, unfortunately, my experience was mostly less: it just wouldn’t respond to the customization settings I was setting in the Drupal backend.
2. Do some more research, find excitement about the YUI editor. It seemed promising, but ultimately failed to allow image uploads despite hours of fiddling.
3. Turn to the other oft-mentioned option, FCKeditor. After a few minutes of fiddling supported by the included readme.txt, it’s actually working and uploading images easily. Amazing!

Not everything in FCK is customizable through the web, but that’s fine. It’s probably easier to comment out a line in fckeditor.config.js, anyhow. I started with the DrupalFull toolbar & took off a few things we don’t want.

Since versions are so often key with these things, I’m using Drupal 6.6, fckeditor-6.x-1.3-rc3 (the drupal module), FCKeditor_2.6.3 (the javascript bit).

Including a reasonably debugged WYSIWYG in the Acquia distribution would get me to take it for a test drive next time around, because this cycle is such an amazing waste of time whenever I go through it.