One of the most useful  extensions to PHP is suPHP which allows any PHP script to be executed under its owning user privileges. This helps in administering sites which need write access to their files (like, for example, Joomla! does for its tmp and log directories) without the need for an FTP layer or potentially dangerous permissions tweaking. Let's see how you can implement this functionality on a home brew server based on Mandriva Linux 2008.1

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

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?