Fun with Lenya and Roku adds new channels

This week, I updated my Roku HD’s firmware. I’ve known for a while it was coming, but for it to come during Thanksgiving week was an extra special surprise. The first two channels I added: Revision3 and TWIT. First show that I watched: Tekzilla. I’m looking forward to spending more time digging through the new channels and getting more value out of my Roku box. Still think it was the best $99 I’ve ever spent.

I also installed and configured Lenya, the open source content management system. I have a client that is starting to look at some options for replacing their existing CMS. One of the core requirements is that there has to have a workflow process. Many of the CMS options that I’ve researched do not have good workflow options. If anyone has any other open source options that they would like for me to consider, please enter them in the comments sections below. The client is also considering commercial options, but if we can find an open source option that will fulfill the requirements, so much the better.

One of the other requirements is that the CMS has to integrate with Active Directory for authentication. Since Lenya said they had AD integration, I figured it would drop right in. Unfortunately, it did not, but pretty darn close. The way the AD tree is setup, I had to modify the LDAPUser to search the subtree. Out of the box, the way the searchSubtree option is set wasn’t working for me. However, that was pretty much it. Fortunately, I had integrated with the AD before with CAS a couple of years ago, so I was able translate the old config options to match what Lenya needed in ldap.properties. If anyone would like more details about how I did this, let me know in the comments and I will write up a more detailed blog post.

I had to upgrade a CentOS 5 server to PHP 5.3.1. The install worked great once I found a yum repo (remi) that had everything that I needed. However, once the yum update completed, that’s when the real work began. Fortunately, there was only one semi-major issue that I found. PHP 5.3 needs the date.timezone ini entry setting in order to not see warnings. I was seeing errors in some custom code and WordPress. Once I added the date.timezone value to my php.ini and restarted Apache, everything started working fine and clean.

Headed into December, I’m looking forward to finishing up a lot of reading from the purchases that I made from PragProg the other week. I’m about halfway through Ship It! I’ve been really impressed with the level of quality of the Kindle (.mobi) versions of the books. A number of non-Amazon .mobi files that I have purchased in the past were really bad. Again, the Pragmatic guys have moved the bar higher.

If you have any questions or requests, put them in the comments section below.

BTW, a belated Happy Thanksgiving!