The frontend of the project is going to just use the Zend Application MVC tool, but for the backend I’m using ExtJS. I’ve been a fan of ExtJS and used it for a few projects now but this time I’m trying something new – I’m using Zend_Json_Server to provide the data directly to ExtJS. I’m still working out how it works, but basically you create the objects on the backend, enable Zend_Json_Server and then your objects and methods are available right within the Ext.Direct and Ext.DataStore objects. Very slick. Once I’ve figured it out more I’ll post some links to the resources that helped me the most.

Also, it seems that everytime I log into WP there is a software update… maybe I need to post more.

CakePHP

Not a huge fan. My understanding is that CakePHP spawned from a desire to replicate the Ruby on Rails movement in PHP. My experience though is that it is slow and poorly documented. They try to get you to do things their way and I’m just not a big fan of that. I can understand trying to standardize for the sake of rapid development, but then you are stuck with development methods which work for small scale projects and not large complicated ones.

Zend Framework

This is the framework I’ve had the most experience. It’s got great documentation and a very active community. It does have the biggest learning curve though. While it’s true that ZF was more of a library in the past, they’ve made great strides to provide an application framework and a pretty decent one at that. It’s flexible and extensible. You can quickly whip up a small project and the system is adaptable enough that you can also build out large scalable projects.

CodeIgniter

CI is a great choice for those who don’t want to deal with the learning curve of ZF. It’s fast, well documented and has a great development community. It’s supported by a great company who has done a great job developing and promoting the framework. After working with CakePHP it felt refreshing to work with CI. Things were cleaner, faster, and just made more sense to me.

Summary

You can probably tell that I’m not a CakePHP fan. If I hadn’t picked up ZF for a few projects earlier in the year I probably would use CodeIgniter for everything. It’s still a bit of a toss up.

First thoughts – great interface! The UI design makes it super easy to pick which font you want and assign it to the elements of your site. I just picked a couple just to test things out but I’m not a designer so it might take me a while to figure out what I want.

I can’t wait until there are more fonts – it would be great to see some there from some of the big foundries. Also, it would speed up things if they could use a bit of AJAX in the interface. I find that looking for fonts is a process where I need to scan a lot of them fairly quickly and speeding up the UI would be great for that. One last thing I think is missing, but isn’t a huge deal, is a search field. I think that is something which would be more important when they have more fonts, but it will be great if I have a specific font in mind to just quickly search for it by name.

I am very impressed though and I can’t wait to sign up my designer friends so they can start working with fonts other than the usual, and so they can stop using image replacement.

The openness of the web has created an environment where anybody can make a website without having to go to university or accept a specific standard to follow. You can choose to follow a spec but you can also choose to make your website work only on specific browsers or to develop very very messy code that can still work. I think that this is good – it is an open medium to which anybody can potentially publish – and bad – it’s now impossible to start over developing a new one-standard-fits-all solution.

HTML 5 attempts to address the web as it is and I think that all of this discussion is great. Let’s get it out in the open and have thoughtful commentary from seasoned pros and from new developers. Let’s not forget though that there does need to be guidance and direction otherwise we will never see HTML 5 move beyond draft status.

The PHP website has a good method of stripping out those slashes if you are unable to turn off magic_quotes_gpc (http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/security.magicquotes.disabling.php). But what if you need it on to run your legacy code? Here is the inverse of the solution that is provided on the PHP website:

if (!get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
	function addslashes_deep($value)
	{
		$value = is_array($value) ?
		array_map('addslashes_deep', $value) :
		addslashes($value);
		return $value;
	}

	$_POST = array_map('addslashes_deep', $_POST);
	$_GET = array_map('addslashes_deep', $_GET);
	$_COOKIE = array_map('addslashes_deep', $_COOKIE);
	$_REQUEST = array_map('addslashes_deep', $_REQUEST);
}

Put that at the beginning of your script and it will add all of the slashes back in. Not ideal, but if you have no other option it will get you going again.

Installation

WordPress is fairly straight forward to install, provided you know how to create a database and change some permissions on your webserver. A typical install for me goes like this:

1. Create a Database and User – Login to MySQL and add a new db, and create a user that has access only to this table. This is important because I do have some other sites running on my server. Although you could do this from the command line, I often find it faster to just load up Navicat for MySQL.
2. Download the wordpress archive. You can download this from your browser or ssh in to your server and type:
   • wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
   • tar -zxvf latest.tar.gz, and move the files to the right place.
3. Load up the site in my browser and fill in the details. I also always change the password that is assigned to you. I have no idea why it assigns you one instead of asking for an admin password.

Theming

Theming WP is really easy. I take the design, usually a PSD, slice it up and write HTML as if I was doing a static page. Next I duplicate the default theme and rename the folder. I drop in my CSS and my images, and edit the header and footer files. That’s pretty much it. You can write the HTML how you want, but I find it easiest to stick to the default theme’s structure: #header, #footer, #sidebar, and #content divs.

Using WP

WP’s admin makes extensive use of AJAX which makes the interface snappy. They’ve really done great job working on the layout and design of the admin. It’s really simple to start using and very powerful once you get into the more advanced details.

Read more over at Inspire Studios…