Finding a working PHP eBay API...

If you are trying to understand the eBay communication APIs, then you have commited yourself to a BIG leaning curve.

As I have walked the walk already(I worked for eBay), I hope my experiences can help those who follow me up this monumental path..

All eBay programming APIs are designed to talk to the exposed eBay services. These services are constantly evolving. As they evolve, older versions become obsolete.

These older version are usually supported for about 14 months after a new version is created, however, they will eventually fall off the supported list and start to cause API call failure.

So to make sure you can design applications that talk correctly to the eBay services, you need an uptodate API.

FYI: you will need to keep your API up-to-date as well duing the lifetime of your application. As the APIs are really a communication layer, you should be ok calling them directly, rather than implementing your own abstraction layer on top.

So far we have managed to find one fully functional PHP API.
You can get this from IN TRADE SYS at this url:
http://www.intradesys.com/index.php?id=ebay_at_for_php&L=1.

These guys seem to be totally up to date with the current version of the eBay services platform. They also provide a few samples and some basic documentation...

Definetely Recomended if you are looking to develope eBay applications with PHP.

MediaWiki Info

This is a list of all the important pages I have found in my hunt for development and programming information about mediawiki:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:MediaWiki_Development - a good list of basic info.

Leading to:





http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Database_access
basics of database access inside mediaWiki extensions.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Image:Mediawiki-database-schema.png
Main Database Schema in large format png image

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Documentation:Security
Security documentation, uptodate as of version 1.8.1

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extending_wiki_markup
How to write a markup extension.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_architecture

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Template

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Parser_function

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Variable

Using Gmail

I have started to use GMail in a serious way over the last few weeks and I must say I am quite impressed. Instead of spending 30 minutes every day doing the spam hunt thing, I am now only killing a couple a day.

I love the conversation thing. Where a reply to a message is added to the previous messages... but I keep losing touch with my conversations. So I have a wish list addition for GMail...

please
please
please
Can we have a flag to put any unread conversations right at the top of the list, as my ongoing conversations are the most important emails.

Mediawiki Hooks

Programming a mediaWiki extension relies on using the Hooking system to edit and update the mediawiki objects to the state you desire. So the first problem is finding the right hooks. I have found 3 ways to do this...

Using the documentation
There is a document called hooks.txt in the docs directory. Read it.

Finding undocumented hooks
At the bottom of hooks.txt are 2 lines that explain this. Simply put, you call a php script.
php ./maintenance/findhooks.php
This finds all the hooks that are missing from the hooks.txt documentation.

Find out the variables being passed to your hook called function
From you mediawiki base directory call: [grep -i -n -r "wfRunHooks" *] this will show all calls to wfRunHooks and allows you to see the line number in the calling file as well as what is being passed to your hook call. This is very useful as the documentation is sparse on the passed variables.