Si Jobling

Multipack Presents: The Design Process

This coming Saturday will be the last Multipack Presents event of 2010, this time shifting focus to the design side of the Web.

Multipack Presents: The Design Process will be hosted at One Black Bear’s lovely offices at Fazeley Studios in Digbeth, Birmingham and kindly sponsored by “the daddies” of email marketing Campaign Monitor.

To get your design juices flowing, we’ll have three Multipack regulars covering a broad range of topics, including:

• Paul Lloyd discussing Web Style Guides, taking notes from his unhealthy obsession with the BBC’s GEL guidelines.
• Gareth Brown showcasing some nice techniques with wireframes and A/B testing.
• Andy Higgs teaching us a thing or two about Photoshop techniques he’s picked up on his travels.

The talks start at 4pm with pre-talk drinks and lunch at nearby watering hole The Old Crown from 2pm.

There will be refreshments available during the talk and, if you’re early enough, a free pint and lunch at The Old Crown.

Make sure you follow @multipack on Twitter for updates and let us know if you’re attending on Lanyrd, Upcoming or Facebook.

Separators on CakePHP Date/Time Helpers

This is more a personal reference for a small issue I’ve found in the web application framework CakePHP.

When using the Form Helper to output date and time fields on forms, CakePHP automagically creates a <select> for each element of your field ie. day, month, year, hour, minutes, meridian (where necessary).

By default, each <select> is separated by a single character, specifically “-” between date elements and “:” for the time elements.

You can override the separator by setting the optional parameter in the view, eg:

<?php
  echo $form->input('my_date', array(
    'type' => 'datetime',
    'separator' => ''
  ));
?>

However, this is ignored on the time fields which maintains the colon.

To combat this, I’ve had to delve into the Cake library files and update lines 1918-1931 of /cake/libs/view/helpers/form.php with the following:

switch ($timeFormat) {
  case '24':
    $opt .= $separator . $this->hour($fieldName, true, $hour, $selectHourAttr) . $separator .
      $this->minute($fieldName, $min, $selectMinuteAttr);
    break;
  case '12':
    $opt .= $separator . $this->hour($fieldName, false, $hour, $selectHourAttr) . $separator .
      $this->minute($fieldName, $min, $selectMinuteAttr) . $separator .
      $this->meridian($fieldName, $meridian, $selectMeridianAttr);
    break;
  default:
    $opt .= '';
    break;
}

Now, the specified separator is applied to the time elements too (hour, minutes and meridian).