Looking Forward to PHP 7

Release Coming Soon

We have recently started to evaluate our website using the beta1 version of PHP 7 which is based on PHPNG (PHP Next Generation) and offers improvements in speed and some new features and operators.

PHP 7

Our website has performed well during tests and the speed improvement is noticeable in its effect. There have been no problems found so far so we hope to be able to migrate over once it has been released as stable.

You can find a copy of the migration documentation over on the PHP website explaining how to migrate and any problems that maybe be encountered such as deprecated or removed functions.

PHP 7 supports return type declaration which you can use to specify the type returned by a function similar to parameter types added in PHP 5. The null coalesce operator looks to make life that little bit easier than using the ternary operator.

$var = $_GET['var'] ?? 'default value';

is the same as

$var = isset($_GET['var']) ? $_GET['var'] : 'default value';

Constants can now be arrays which is handy and there is a list on new functions added to the language here.

We plan on using these new features as we go with new releases along side running the beta version of PHP 7 on the alpha server used for local development our test environment will continue to use PHP 5 along with production until it is deemed stable.

It will be good to gain an impressive speed up with a minimal amount of work on our behalf!!

New look released

Fresh New Look

After much development we have reached the point of release for our new look website which we feel brings the site up to modern standards. If you find any problems please contact us so we can fix it.

Please check it out @ https://www.carehomes.net/

Problems with Jessie

Needs More Work, Our Side

We have run an evaluation of Debian for the live server and it broke our package manager and the install failed leaving Apache not running and the web server down so it seems some more testing needs to be done on our side.

This should be slated to happen within the next few weekends to run along side our new look which is coming along well an we have some parts of the website ported over and in our opinion are much better interfaces for our visitors.

It is to be expected because we have a highly customised installation with many config tweaks and such things.

I am sure with some more time and a better look at the big and small picture and we will have Jessie running as our default server OS.

New Debian Released

Hello Jessie

Debian have released their new version code named jessie ready for the early upgraders. We have recently moved back over to Debian for desktops due to the need for stability and I miss the system.

So now workstations use this version from now on and I will be upgrading my workstation at some point over the day.

There is the usual blog post about the new release which can be found here and there is a set of release notes about the new OS here.

It has taken 24 months of development time to get to this release and here is a list of what has been changed^[1]

• Apache 2.4.10
• Asterisk 11.13.1
• GIMP 2.8.14
• an updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 3.14
• GNU Compiler Collection 4.9.2
• Icedove 31.6.0 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird)
• Iceweasel 31.6.0esr (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox)
• KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 4.11.13
• LibreOffice 4.3.3
• Linux 3.16.7-ctk9
• MariaDB 10.0.16 and MySQL 5.5.42
• Nagios 3.5.1
• OpenJDK 7u75
• Perl 5.20.2
• PHP 5.6.7
• PostgreSQL 9.4.1
• Python 2.7.9 and 3.4.2
• Samba 4.1.17
• Tomcat 7.0.56 and 8.0.14
• Xen Hypervisor 4.4.1
• the Xfce 4.10 desktop environment
• more than 43,000 other ready-to-use software packages, built from nearly 20,100 source packages.

Including upgrading the workstations the server will be evaluated on the virtual machine to make sure the system works with our website and we have no problems with new software versions.

This will be slated for after the new look upgrade which is now half way and progressing well and it will allow our users to have a better experience and also have some eye candy.

[1] https://www.debian.org/News/2015/20150426

Busy Working on New Look

Coming Soon

We have been working hard on bringing a new look website online and we hope to have some fresh content and improvements all over the site.

Stay Tuned!!

New Articles

Some Reading

I thought it would be a good idea to write a little post on a new contributor who join up with us and they have author a few care related articles for the website.

They have been written by Anne Rickards and are a quality read if you have some time and are interested in the care sector.

Moving Into a Care Home Following Bereavement is the first contribution and then a following article Creating Cheerful Care Homes covering hens in care homes has been added.

We hope you enjoy reading these and we hope to bring some more quality articles for you to read.

Care and Nursing Articles

New Release: HTTPS Site Migration

Moving Over to a Secure Website

Our sysadmin has been very busy lately and has now completed the migration from http over to https which is more secure for our visitors with a secure connection being the default. The migration was quite simple because our code base does not use magic numbers or strings so all URL are references to a variable which is replace with the URL contained in the configuration.

Secure Website

Enabling a secure connection by default is the way forward so we decided to make the move over now. We use Apache SSL and SPDY as a module to help speed up connections from clients who support the protocol.

Testing has been accomplished by using a clone of the live server running inside a VM instance, we like to use Virtualbox for VMs although it is now owned by Oracle not Sun it is still open source and a great bit of software that I find very useful.

Setting Up Apache

We already have a setup for the secure site because it is used to process our payments securely although all other traffic is redirected to the non secure site.

We edited /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ssl.conf to configure the protocols we support and to disable ones which have vulnerabilities like POODLE. Here is a snipit of the configuration file.

SSLProtocol all -SSLv3 -SSLv2

SSLHonorCipherOrder on

SSLCipherSuite "EECDH+ECDSA+AESGCM EECDH+aRSA+AESGCM EECDH+ECDSA+SHA384 EECDH+ECDSA+SHA256 EECDH+aRSA+SHA384 EECDH+aRSA+SHA256 EECDH+aRSA+RC4 EECDH EDH+aRSA RC4 !aNULL !eNULL !LOW !3DES !MD5 !EXP !PSK !SRP !DSS"

Next we needed to install a copy of mod-spdy for any user agents who support it

wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux/direct/mod-spdy-beta_current_amd64.deb
dpkg -i mod-spdy-beta_current_amd64.deb

Our rewrite file on the non secure site looks like this now it just 301 redirects all requests to their secure equivalent.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

SPDY for Apache

Installing this has really improved our website response time and it just seems snappier than the non secure site we installed a mod-spdy package but SPDY only works with modern browser but we do not support old browsers any more so this is not a problem.

The source code for it and the packages are available and it has now been donated to the Apache foundation from Google. You can download the 64bit deb package here this is the one we used since we have 64bit Debian.

Site Config

This was simple and we only have two string representing the sites full URL one in the main PHP config file and another in the SiteConfig JavaScript class file. This approach also simplified when we moved over the domain name from www.ucarewecare.com to www.carehomes.net.

Conclusion

Porting our website code over to HTTPS has been quite a simple process in the end this was helped by us not using string literals as our URL and instead using a token which uses a value in the sites configuration so all we did was change one string and they all changed.

Remember to never use magic strings or numbers in your code and abstract away a bit because it does come in handy sometimes.

Server Updates and Fixes

Fixing Bugs and Vulnerabilities

We have been doing some administration on the server and we have decided to enable Perfect Forward Secrecy on our SSL site to improve our security rating which can be viewed using this website we also modified some of the ciphers used.

Our server has also been patched and configured to cover heartbleed, shellshock and POODLE vulnerabilities which have all been made public and fixed already.

Bugs

Perfect Forward Secrecy

Enabling PFS makes our site more secure due to a new key being generated for each session rather than the same key being used. Again configuring this is quite simple.

Poodle

SSLv3 was disabled to cover the POODLE vulnerability which makes man in the middle attacks possible this process is simple and there is a good document about it here all you need to do is disable -SSLv3.

Shellshock

Bash has been patched to the most recent version although I would think we are not affected by this attack vector but it is better to be safe.

Heartbleed

This one was patched up a long time ago and we have no reason to believe that any of our private keys were leaked because it would be quite an obvious intrusion which we have not noticed.

Future Improvements

One improvement we will be implementing is using SHA256 when creating the certificate rather than SHA1 which is a weaker implementation this will be done when we update our SSL certificate.

We plan on moving the main website over to HTTPS with SPDY soon because we feel this is the way the web is moving and it offers more speed and security so it makes sense.

Minor Release: Improved Markup

Some Markup Changes

We have been making some small changes to the website recently to try and structure the markup at bit better and to move some content to make it less prominent and further down the page markup.

The top site heading The Care Homes Director has now been changed to a <h1> as it should be the main header for the banner section. It seems a valid thing to do since we are using the HTML5 doctype, and there is a good article covering it here.

HTML Markup

Bootnote

Soon we will be releasing an improved version of our care groups scheme allowing enhanced listing users to manage their care groups branch information and also the listing page for their care group. We hope to have an initial first version release coming soon.

Displaying Suppliers on Town Pages

More Exposure

Entries in the supplier directory are now being shown on our town pages for their area giving more exposure for our suppliers to the public and home owners.

We have some more improvements to come through on the supplier directory soon, if you are a supplier in the care sector please join up for FREE using this form. 

Gold Listing Scheme

Rewarding Quality Content

Our latest release includes functionality to allow our site administrators to turn an enhanced listing into a Gold Listing with the aim to make them stand out from the crowd.

Gold Listing Seal

Gold listings will be determined by the quality of the home or agencies enhanced listing page, to become a Gold Listing you must be an enhanced listings member which is FREE you can sign up here.

What Gold Listings receive*

• Listed on homepage of website (this may be on fair rotation)
• Promoted to top of listings for your town page
• Gold logo indicating your page is a Gold Listing
• Added to Region pages
• Displayed in local towns (more exposure)

What makes a Gold Listing

• Quality Content (body text)
• Complete Gallery with 5 images
• Complete home profile information
• Activities and facilities list
• Vacancy and bed numbers
• Social Media links
• Contact email (not displayed)
• Your website URL

If your listing has these qualities it will be made a Gold Listing by one of our Administrators in time although if you would like to apply to make it a Gold Listing just login and click the account tab and choose which home you want to apply with in the drop down and click the apply gold listing button and your request will be reviewed.

The reason we made these changes is that it allows our visitors to know the homes which are making an effort to provide them with all the information they need to make informed decisions concerning your home or agency, it makes you look good to visitors compared to a home with only a basic listing.

Boot Note

Progress is still being made with the job board and we are hoping to be releasing this service soon for both homes and nursing professionals.

We also have some more features being added to the supplier directory which you can join for free if you are a care sector supplier by following this link.


* Not all functionality is currently available as this is an initial release.

Improved Supplier Directory

New Release

We have been working hard improving our supplier directory and we now have support for scaled thumbnail images using the same code we use for our enhanced listing service. 

Page loading time has been decreased so there is no waiting for the page to load. Some of the code has been cleaned up and improved upon and we have run some tests to check everything is working OK.

This is our second main release for The Supplier Directory and we hope the improvements make our user experience better and that there are more releases to come.

You can sign up for a free listing by completing the form at this page.

New Feature Release: Care Groups

Grouping Homes Together

We have improved our data set by adding support for care groups this allows us to group homes by its owners, this supplements the type of ownership data we have.

You can find the main care groups page by following this link there is not much there at the moment but we will be adding to it as we go.

As usual we plan on improving this dataset and also make our offering in this area better than it currently is.

Care Groups

New Feature Release: Home Testimonials

Rating Care and Nursing Homes

Today we have release the first version of our home testimonials so residents and their families can add their thoughts on the service the home provides. Anyone can submit a testimonial for the home although they are all reviewed by an administrator before being made live on the website.

If you would like to submit a new testimonial its a simple as visiting the homes listing page and clicking the show form link in the testimonial section of the page.

Our hope is to open up the data from these testimonials via a public API so homes can display our testimonials simply and/or any other uses.

Testimonials

Free Enhanced Listings

Free Advertising Offer

Enhanced listings has been opened up and we are now offering a free signup and listing for all homes who add a few paragraphs of text and a couple of images using our web based administration panel.

We hope to get some nice content on the website from this so this is why we have opened it up if you want to sign up please complete the form at this page.

Free Webpage

Admin Release

Behind the Scenes

With our latest release we have been cleaning up some under the hood bug fixes and working on improving our administrative features to try and make our site admin jobs a lot easier.

Major improvements have also been made to the custom CMS system we have allowing us to manage our content better as we all know content is King.

Content is King

Testimonials is going into the final stages of development now then it will be tested and released to the public and we also have the job board coming up.

New API Improvements

Better Implementation

We have made some recent improvements to our API by refactoring some of the classes, adding a JSON output writer to complement the XML writer this allows us to use either format for API output by changing the URL suffix for the request.

JSON Output

The  old map XML code has been ported over to a new GeoApi module for handling all our map data requests such as the "other homes in this area" feature or local amenities map markers which is used to display local places of interest.

XML Output

Along with these changes we have created some new DTDs which go with our XML API output, there have been multiple bug fixes along with removal of some unneeded code which has been deprecated.

Our hope is that by implementing these changes we can provide data to the public via a uniform simple to use API. This will be ideal for when we release our new testimonials feature which we plan on opening up for public use.

Care Supplier Promotion

New Homepage Section

Our supplier directory is slowly being populated so we decided to run a promotion on our homepage by adding a new section to the bottom.

We thought it would be beneficial to both us and the supplier to promote the work they have done by adding a quality listing to our system.

You can view Andy's Gramophone Classics supplier listing and we hope to drive contacts to his page. They also have a Facebook page here which shows some pictures of his old records and such so, check it out!!

New Feature Release: Dedicated Global Feedback System

Simple Site Feedback

For our latest release we have implemented a basic feedback system on a global level so it is accessible site wide rather than using our contact form. We feel that having the link to the top left of the screen will encourage our visitors to help improve our website by leaving some feedback.

We hope to integrate this feedback system tightly with our systems over time in an attempt to improve these systems using genuine user feedback and other data we collect. We are also coupling it with our error reporting system to help improve our website even more.

Global Feedback Link

Feedback Page

New Alternate Domain Name for The Care Homes Directory

Going biz

The Care Homes Directory can now be accessed using a new domain name which is www.carehomes.biz this should redirect to our main domain using a 301 redirect using the Apache rewrite module.