drag and drop upload with user data using HTML5 with FireFox

Drag and Drop event handling is one of the new toys in HTML5 available since FireFox 3.6. You can now let users drag files of just about any type directory onto web page without having to use <input type="file">, let them see the preview immediately without an intermediate upload and upload directly through a new binary XmlHttpRequest. Sending some other data, say a description of the image being uploaded, together with the binary file is a more complex story for which I did not see a solution yet and had to figure out for myself.

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Zend with some image manager and TinyMce

If you followed my twits, you would have noticed I've been fighting with TinyMce and a reasonable image manager plugin for it.  Strangely enough, Zend Framework with their enterprise goal, do not have a rich editor feature out of the box which, I believe, is one of the fundamentals in just about any level of CMS.  Dojo Editor is way too limited and lacks important features like inserting and browsing images.
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Relational to hierarchial or MySQL to LDAP (Part 1)

Storing hierarchical data in relational databases, such as MySQL, is an age old question. There have been some solutions such as Adjacency Model or, to a certain extent, Entity Relationship Model.  Oracle, on the other hand, although being a relational database has a good support for hierarchical data with its connect by clause but with an express edition being somewhat limited, and the price tag for a standard edition is a hefty $5′800 (enterprise going for $47′500), for an average open source developer its not an option.

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DataMapper pattern with Zend Framework

Data mapper is a must haveObject Relational Model pattern in any application.  In simpler terms, it is a translation adapter between your persistent database storage and the objects in your application that you can actually work with.  Although for medium or more complex projects you should avoid writing your own datamappers and rely on more field proven and testing ORMs, such as doctrine, you should have a good understanding of what is really going on before jumping to full ORMs and risking not knowing how to take advantage of them.  And of course for smaller projects something like doctrine can be an overkill and putting together a small set DataMapper classes is perfect.
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