I have a project that I started back in May that is right about feature complete. I used a common CMS because the customer thought that is what they needed. It has several features that I wanted: user management, photo albums, easily extensible.

I thought I needed a fully-built CMS. Jesus was I wrong.

It started off ok enough, built some custom functions into the theme, did some shady things with nodes and pages and detecting which page the user was on. It worked well enough, tricking the theme into displaying things I wanted it to, where I wanted it to. Then the customer wanted something fairly easy: Photo Albums.

Oh. My. Lord. I have never had so much trouble trying to get photos to display. There are a myriad of photo plugins/addons/managers. Somehow, none of them are intuitive or function properly. There is a separate plugin (“module”) just for images. Go ahead, try to tell me what you ACTUALLY need to use it.

Some of the modules straight didn’t work, some needed 14 different other modules just to tell me they didn’t want to work. It was a pain in the butt, but I finally found one that worked fair enough, but still didn’t have what I wanted.

Then the customer wanted something a little more tricky: email lists. I have no clue how to do this. None. I don’t even want to try.

Now, I am using a PHP framework and starting from scratch. Back in May when I started, I had never used a framework before. I used this same one on another project about a month ago, and have had favorable results. So now, I’m firing up my text editor and trying again.

This is going to be less of a headache than you think. CakePHP is very easy to set up with user privileges, and once there, it’s just a matter of moving my functions to the proper Models and tweaking some of the pages.

More to come when this is done. Hopefully.

A hard concept for some people (especially people like me) is that not everyone has the same knowledge base you do. Think about how you would describe what you to to a non-technical person. It’s a hard reality to grasp when you are immersed in code all day. Even the websites that you visit probably have content for people like you.

Everyone Else

I have this problem alot. I spend all day reading articles and blogs about programming, by programmers, for programmers, and I forget that not everyone else in the world is a programmer. I recently read a (rather old, but still relevant) article explaining the biculturalism in software programming. I would like to think of myself as a UNIX developer. I don’t even own a Windows computer (I do dual boot, and have a virtual machine both running Windows 7). At home I have a laptop running Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and a desktop running Linux Mint. Sometimes I have to just take stock and recognize that there are a very very very small number of people who do what I do. It just seems like a disproportionate number because it’s all around me.

Just remember that users are stupid. They aren’t stupid like, us. They’re even worse.

Preface: I will do my best to avoid the lavish praise of Windows 7 and stick to my opinions about running Vista drivers throughout this post. If I diverge, please verbally abuse me.



I recently built a new box with some mildly impressive specs. It can handle just about anything I throw at it, even surpassing crysis required specs. I decided a while back that I was going to dual boot with Linux and Windows because I wanted to be able to game with my snazzy new rig. I went with Linux Mint and have been really pleased. (Again, no OS reviewing, possibly later). I also went with Windows 7 RC and have been equally pleased (minus a few odd crashes when starting up games).

The main worry I had when choosing Windows 7 was that there are clearly no drivers for it yet. And having purchased an awesome video card, this was a genuine concern that I wouldn’t be able to use it to it’s full potential. Worry not. I can run Call of Duty: World at War on full blast (even hosting a co-op campaign) with absolutely no problem. I have yet to try something that will actually tax the video card (like the above mentioned crysis, which I may still do), but for the time being, I am supremely happy with the driver support.

And of course the Nvidia card I have has awesome Linux support too.