I’ve been taking on a lot of small projects lately, and have been noticing the same problems over and over.  I’ve seen these for years, but I’ve dealt with far more projects in a short time than I ever did in the past.
The checklist below wouldn’t necessarily determine if I’d take a project or not, [...]

Posted in Design, Development, PHP, Software, Testing, Web 4 Comments »

I had a chance to catch up with the Symfony guys at the MySQL User Conference a few days ago.  We get some background on the Symfony project, and a glimpse as to where things are going in the near future.
This was my first ‘from the floor’ recording - I think the levels are *OK*, [...]

Posted in PHP, Podcasts, Software, Web, opensource No Comments »

The KickFire people stayed too long in the room before OBM, so I think they’re having to cut short the presentation - there were some display problems too which took some time.  Given that, the presentation has been good, if a bit rushed so far.  OBM has been developed in France for the past 10 [...]

Posted in Conferences, MySQL, PHP 2 Comments »

A new module for Magento was put out in to early release today.  The module provides “made to order” functionality for ecommerce shops which need to provide custom ordering capabilities for ‘just in time’ manufacturing. From the module author:

The MTO module allows users to enter in specific dimensions in for any product and that [...]

Posted in Ecommerce, PHP 5 Comments »

Listening to Joe Stump from Digg.com talk about SOA and MySQL and some PHP.  One key thing he’s repeating is using a service layer to access data asynchronously.  His advice right now is to group data requests at the top of a user request, do them asynchronously, and then use the data in the rendering [...]

Posted in Conferences, PHP, Software, Web No Comments »

TechCrunch is announcing Google’s new “App Engine” service being launched this evening.  The basic service is a full app stack hosted and managed by Google, providing a web framework (maybe I’m misreading this?) and the Google ‘big table’ database service.  The web stack is Python, but there’s no word I’m seeing on whether it’s plain [...]

Posted in PHP 45 Comments »

I started a small ‘quick fix’ project for a client the other day.  He had outsourced development of a small ecommerce site to a company in India.  He had originally outsourced (via guru I think) the design to someone in Brazil and had good results, so then outsourced again, and has been burned so bad [...]

Posted in Development, PHP, Software, Web 30 Comments »

Every so often I try to use PDO under PHP5, and every time I run in to basic functionality problems with no ability to find out what’s going on under the hood.  A recent example:
$dbh = new PDO(’mysql:host=localhost;dbname=db’, “user”,”pass”);
$stmt = $dbh->prepare(”SELECT * FROM table where service_type = ? and name = ? “);
if ($stmt->execute(array(2,$short_name))) {
….
The [...]

Posted in Database, PHP 19 Comments »

I just chatted with Manuel Lemos of phpclasses.org fame.  He’s recently launched a new PHP professionals center aimed at matching up PHP developers with people looking for specific skills.  The premise is simple - sign up, add your skill history (easier to do than I’ve seen with other systems) and you’re done.  The idea is [...]

Posted in Job, PHP 1 Comment »

Magento has a new release today, and there’s a lot of features/fixes in there.  The neatest one to me was
Added zend cache backends for apc and memcached by Mark_Kimsal
cause that same Mark Kimsal is my brother. 
The link above points to the full announcement, but here’s a sample of some features in this release:

Add [...]

Posted in Ecommerce, PHP 3 Comments »