Eric Barnes

One great feature that I don’t see used all to often is include templates. These give you the ability to break your template down into small workable sections and include them as needed. For the latest site I built I used these in lots of places and it made my job a whole lot easier.

Include templates can be used for anything and I have seen them used for headers, footers, sidebars, etc. But what brings you lots of power is to use include templates inside loops, assigning them to variables, and adding variables to the includes.

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Today I decided I should share how I built the news module for a recent site I worked on. The goal of this tutorial is to hopefully help you better understand the 68 Classifieds module system and how to build your own modules. For this tutorial I kept the module pretty basic but it should do just enough to be a workable system.
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Something I have wanted to do for a long time is figure out how to export just the changed files between revisions of a SVN repository. To be honest I have searched for this functionality for a while now, probably over a year, and I never could find anything simple and easy that I could use. With exception of Tortoise SVN which is only for windows.

But today just now all that changed. I found this great little bash script on Interspire’s Developer Network.

Here is the nice gem of code:

for i in $(svn diff --summarize -r 1403:1438 http://server/svn/project/trunk |
awk '{ print $2 }'); do p=$(echo $i | sed -e 's{http://server/svn/project/trunk/{{');
mkdir -p $(dirname $p); svn export $i $p; done

I know not very exciting to most folks but a real great find to me and probably my customers too.

PS: Be looking out for diff downloads in our next release.

I am not sure how many people using 68 Classifieds that also use TextMate but I wanted to share two of my favorite bundles that have saved me numerous hours over the years.

The first one is PHP Smarty available from the TextMate SVN and Mike Zornek has instructions for installing it. This one has been a life safer for me when building custom templates or just altering existing ones.

The next one is a completely custom one I built. Although very basic it does a few important things. 1. It auto creates a module config file, 2. It auto creates the hooks file, and finally it auto creates the core layout template. Here is the link to the direct download for those interested.

» Download 68 Classifieds TextMate bundle.

With these two plugins installed TextMate is now my text editor of choice. It is small, simple, and very light weight yet still functions amazingly.

I just finished up doing a complete overhaul on Suzuki Kawasaki of Gastonia’s website. The new one is now running completely on a stock 68 Classifieds Developer edition with a custom template, custom modules, and plugins. I was amazed but I didn’t have to make any core code changes to build this site and from now on upgrades should be quick, easy, and painless.

Suzuki Kawasaki of Gastonia

They are coming from a custom dealership management system that was about 7 years old. So it was time for an upgrade and originally I was just going to continue using what they already had but the code was such a mess I believe it would be easier to move to a commercial product.
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