So finally “finished” the layout of this blog and actually _wrote_ a blog post so now you guys can “enjoy” this blog ;) Jibby!
As some of you might know, I’ve been splitting Validate into smaller packages, so called subpackages, now why am I doing it you might be asking ? Well simply put, why should you need to download the whole freaking thing with US validation stuff and more when you only email validation ? :-)
We’ll try to release these great changes (hey we also have bugfixes and a lot of BC breaks! ;)) as soon as we can, but at the moment we’re kinda stuck because of time issues, Pierre is working at PHP 5.1 stuff and I\’m busy with other things like the “rewrite” of the PEAR Tree package, some LiveUser work and a lot of other stuff not needed to be mentioned here, plus we both have a real life … For real, I’m not lying O:-)
Short list of changes over all packages:
- BC breaks to unify names.
- Coding Standard fixes.
- Bug fixes.
- Almost all functions have Unit Testing (anyone that wants to help, place contact me! :))
- Some new functions added in many of the packages.
And a lot more I guess, just read the real changelogs if you need it badly :)
Anyhoo, here is a list of package that we will have when this all goes live:
- AT - CA (new locale, done by Philippe Jausions) - CH - DE - ES - FR - NL - PL - ptBR - UK - US - CreditCard - ISPN - Finance (might be renamed to IBAN)
And finally is of course the main Validate package that containes email validation and similar things, so we have a lot of goodies coming up for ya guys and for those peeps that whine about LOC, hey we brought Validate.php to less then 500 lines WITH comments! :-) Well okey I have not had time to add the new header standard file thing bingy that PEAR has, that will probably push it to 600 lines, but still it will all be comments. Ohh did I mention, most of those packages don’t use PEAR, not even the error stuff! ™ That will probably make some of you people dance ;-) For sure the main Validate packages doesn’t use the PEAR error handling, that I’m sure of.
Now, to talk a little about these 2 “new” packages, ISPN and CreditCard which previously were a part of base class of Validate.
ISPAN (International Standard Product Numbers, yes that’s a made up word) has validations such as ISSN, ISBN, ISMN, EAN8, EAN13, EAN14, UCC12, SSCC. What are those ? Well as the name describes, those are International Standard Product Numbers, for things like books, CDs, shipping numbers and more, just use google to find out more :-)
Now the CreditCard package is a really interesting one, probably a thing many people have looked at but were sure if they should use, now Philippe Jausions took that package and has made some impressive changes and it’s a lot more usable then before he took over maintaince so this is something you boys and gals should take a look at! We’re even hoping that Payment_Process will start using this package instead of their internal class to do this same thing.
Those that are interested in looking at how things are now should go to the cvs viewer and more importantly if you’re interested in gettnig a new validation package into PEAR (under Validate) then contact me or Pierre, we’re seeking for more locales and of course tho other kinds also!
Ohh yeah also, do note, authors of those local packages and such have gotten lead status over them so it won’t do any good to email me nor Pierre over addition to them, either email the given package lead or use the bug system, if everything fails and you get no answer at all then it’s okey to email me, just to make that clear, I’ve no time to maintain or answer questions for for ssn in Polland or something :D
Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson 