Web Development

Whenever someone decides to launch a website, or hired to do so for a client, he’s given three broad choices which will define how they’ll proceed: static HTML, a CMS or Flash. The former being practically dead due to inflexibility and the latter being not only inflexible, but extremely costly to produce, the CMS route seems a dead end; more specifically, the Open Source CMS route.

Dead end it is. Try raising the simple, innocuous question “Which CMS should I chose for my site?” on any public forum and a war seems to spring right out of nowhere. The fighting fractions are what I usually call The Big Three: Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress fans. But is this all there is to it? Does the Open Source CMS universe revolve around only three players? Given the Open Source spirit of Freedom of choice, one would hardly expect this to be the case. In fact, it isn’t. There is more to Open Source CMS than meets the eye.

Read my guest post on the SpeckyBoy.com design magazine

If you are a serious web developer, you might have already figured out that performing experiments and untested upgrades on production servers is a disaster waiting to happen, bringing down the live site with them. Staging live servers (in the form of dev.example.com) usually don't cut it either, especially if you have a lot of file transferring or editing to do. However, local development is still a kludge, as you have to develop in a sub-directory, something like http://localhost/mysite. This has all sorts of implications, the most evident of which being that it breaks cross-content links if you try to pack it and deploy it back to the live site.

Ideally, you would need to develop in subdomains, something like http://mysite.localhost, which would mean that you have the flexibility of local development with the peace of mind of not having to develop in a sub-directory. But, face it. Setting up subdomains is an involving process, requiring hacking around your Apache configuration files. This is suboptimal if you want to do it regularly. Unless you come up with a way to turn http://mysite.localhost to automatically understand where it should find its files.

This article will explain you how to combine WampServer and BIND to create this kind of Holy Grail local web development server on Windows. You will configure a single DNS entry and a single virtual host in order to create a server which can handle infinite subdomains! The only pre-requisite is having a fixed IP address for your server. Well, even 127.0.0.1 will do if you can't do anything better than that!

Read more: The Holy Grail of local web development servers

Today it was one of my most productive days. After a JCE plugin for K2 content items and putting modules inside tabs, I decided to do some PHP hacking, with great results. The object of my pursuit was to create a variation of the Factory pattern, written in PHP5, which can be serialized and unserialized at will. Purists will observe that my implementation is not a direct implementation of the Factory design pattern. In fact, it is modelled as a serializable version of the Joomla! 1.5 JFactory class, which provides static methods for instanciating Singletons. Let's dive to the code, OK?

Read more: A serializable PHP5 Factory pattern

One of the things every blogger is aware is the existence of off-line post editors. One of them, Windows Live Writer by Microsoft, is an extremely professional solution – available at no cost. What most Joomla! site owners are not aware of, though, is that this tool can be used to effectively edit new content of their web site.

Read more: Using Windows Live Writer to edit Joomla! content