CustomScripts Blog

As a freelance developer, I’m always struggling to find the right billing application to send invoices to my clients.

I have used many billing applications (like freshbooks.com), but I’m not always happy with the limitations of a free license. For example you can only add 10 clients, send 20 invoices a month etc. For any person trying to start a business, you don’t always have money to spend on a billing application. You try to keep things as cheap as possible.

While there are many free applications you can use to do your billing, none of them really have all the features you require, or are sufficient enough.

So I decided to write my own billing application. I am a huge fan of open-source, so I decided to create my application as an open-source project. This will hopefully get the community involved, and help make a kick-ass application that will benefit many.

I’m basing the project on the Zend framework with the jQuery and jQuery UI library. The basic features I’m starting with is client management and send quotes and invoices. I’m hoping to add some project management modules, and some general features that will benefit every kind of business.

The first alpha release should be available in the next couple of months. Let me know if you think of any crucial features the application should have, or just leave your comments or ideas of what you think of a general open-source billing application

This component uses the WURFL API to detect any mobile or wireless device, and sets custom paths for your views and css, so you can easily create a mobile version of your website.

Lets get started.

The WURFL API

First of all, download the WURFL API package here (Make sure to download the 1.1 version).

Extract the entire WURFL folder in the package to your /app/vendors folder.
Create a directory /app/configs/wurfl, and extract everything in the resources folder to that directory.

In the examples/resources directory, extract the file in the wurfl-regression.zip to your /app/configs/wurfl directory.
Edit the wurfl-config.xml file to look like the following:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

    
		
wurfl.xml

web_browsers_patch.xml
        
    

file
dir=../../tmp/cache/wurfl
    
    
null
    

Create the folder /app/tmp/cache/wurfl.

The Component

Create a file /app/controllers/components/mobiledetect.php and put the following in the file:

< ?php
class MobiledetectComponent extends Object
{
    var $isMobile = false;
    function startup(&$controller)
    {
        $this->controller =& $controller;
    }
    function detect()
    {
		App::import( 'Vendor', 'WURFL', array( 'file' => 'WURFLManagerProvider.php'));
		$wurflConfigFile = CONFIGS.'wurfl/wurfl-config.xml';
		$wurflManager = WURFL_WURFLManagerProvider::getWURFLManager($wurflConfigFile);
		$requestingDevice = $wurflManager->getDeviceForHttpRequest($_SERVER);
		if($requestingDevice->getCapability('is_wireless_device') == 'true')
		{
                        $this->isMobile = true;
			$this->setMobile();
                        $this->controller->theme = 'mobile';
          		$this->controller->layoutPath = 'mobile';
		}
    }
}

In your app_controller, remember to include the component like this:

< ?php
var $components = array('Mobiledetect');
?>

and add to the beforeFilter function the following:

< ?php
function beforeFilter()
{
    $this->Mobiledetect->startup($this);
    $this->Mobiledetect->detect();
}

And thats it! Now you can create a custom layout file for your mobile website, located under /app/views/layouts/mobile.
You also need to put your css in a directory in /app/webroot/themed/mobile/css
and (optional)images in /app/webroot/themed/mobile/css/img.
Your views need to go to /app/views/themed/mobile.

Your done! Now you can create a mobile version of your website.

Many cakephp newbies might not know how to correctly generate a url for their app, for maybe a link or a redirect etc, especially if your cake app is in a subdirectory.

So let’s say you have a website www.example.com, and you have a blog written with cakePHP in a sub directory www.example.com/blog.

it is very easy to just make a link like this:

    <a href="/blog/post/view/2">link to post</a>

Of course you can’t just use ‘post/view/2′ as the link href, because you would then end up at www.example.com/post/view/2 or any other weird directory which is not what we want.

So the best way for cake to generate the correct url that we want every time would be to use:

< ?php
    App::import('Router');
    echo '<a href="'.Router::url(array('controller' => 'post', 'action' => 'view', 2)).'>Link to post</a>';
?>

With the Router class and its function ‘url’, cake would always create the correct url for all your links.
And another great thing about it is that you can move your app around to any directory or sub directory or sub domain and all your links would still work without a problem.

Of course it would be best to use

<?php
    echo $html->link('Link to post', array('controller' => 'post', 'action' => 'view', 2));
?>

in your views, but you can use Router::url() anywhere in your app, if for some reason you would want to create a link outside of a view.