Last weekend we attended Mozilla Tech Day at BandTec Faculty. BandTec is the technology faculty of BandTec college. It is located near Paraiso metro station, what is very convenient in Sao Paulo city.

Arriving at BandTec was easy, and there were many families going to the college, for weekend activities with their kids. After the entrance stairs there was a reception desk with BandTec students. They were distributing tags with the room number and talk title. You had to choose one talk for the whole day. You could change that, but you would have to go downstairs :-(

In of our largest web applications is Speak Like A Brazilian. We’ve been working to Open Source it, but first we have to double check the security aspects of this procedure, as well as review the source code.

Recently we added a blog to Speak Like A Brazilian. Navigating in the Internet, we found many tutorials for adding a blog engine to web applications using CodeIgniter.

Since the blog is limited to moderators or developers, we decided to use a static content generator, preferably one that supported Markdown. We opted for PieCrust, and after few tests we were delighted by the flexibility and modularity.

While writing the last post, I had some trouble trying to escape a Twig macro when using Geshi for syntax highlighting. Here’s the trick to escape it: raw.

The raw Twig tag prints the subsequent tags without interpreting it.

{%geshi 'twig'%}
{ %raw%}{% macro button(...) %}{ %endraw%}
<p>Some random HTML code...</p>{% raw%}{% endmacro %}{ %endraw%}
{%endgeshi%}

We had to add an extra space between { and %. Can you figure out why? :-)

We have started using PieCrust in several of our projects (the next one is BioUno, watch the GitHub repo to see the changes needed).

A recurrent task was adding a Tweet Button. So we thought it could help others that are getting their feet wet in PieCrust.

From https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/stacks-users/2HwY2dDyeSM.

Stacks processes RAD DNA sequences and produces output, that is displayed on the Web with a bundled PHP+MySQL application. This application is quite useful, especially since it helps developers to analyze large amounts of data.

One limitation though, is that some management tasks may need manual execution of SQL’s in the database. Someone could add few scripts or new features to the Web interface (like a management section?). This could help researchers on their research.