New Site

**mburt** · 08-05-2008, 07:25 PM

Hello,

I launched another website recently (well, last night actually) and I think the design is pretty good. Please tell me what you think!
http://mburt.xtreemhost.com/

Thanks,
Mike

**Medyman** · 08-05-2008, 07:37 PM

Congrats! It's pretty good (for a developer

).

**mburt** · 08-05-2008, 07:40 PM

Haha thanks... Yeah I'm not really much for the design aspect of things. I'm more of the "raw" coder type. The special thing about this website, is that I manage the entire website with an application I built for it (located at mburt.xtreemhost.com/editor).

**Medyman** · 08-05-2008, 07:45 PM

Originally Posted by mburt

Haha thanks... Yeah I'm not really much for the design aspect of things. I'm more of the "raw" coder type. The special thing about this website, is that I manage the entire website with an application I built for it (located at mburt.xtreemhost.com/editor).

Custom CMS? Cool!
What's it built on? PHP?

I tried and failed miserably at home-made CMS apps. There is also so much to do and not enough time. Until a few months ago, we used to roll out custom CMS's for all of our client sites. What a pain!! I wish there were better open source ones out there.

**mburt** · 08-05-2008, 07:48 PM

What's it built on? PHP?

Yep it is. I designed it completely on my WAMP server (yes, Windows... I know) here on my computer. Then all I did was copied over the folder "editor/" to my FTP server. It's pretty awesome. I can create/delete/modify files, and my index file (that I created with the editor :P) automatically detects them in the "pages/" folder. The menu links are populated by that folder, so everything is automatic.

**Medyman** · 08-05-2008, 07:55 PM

Originally Posted by mburt

Yep it is. I designed it completely on my WAMP server (yes, Windows... I know) here on my computer. Then all I did was copied over the folder "editor/" to my FTP server. It's pretty awesome. I can create/delete/modify files, and my index file (that I created with the editor :P) automatically detects them in the "pages/" folder. The menu links are populated by that folder, so everything is automatic.

I'm a Windows/WAMP guy too. It's not as bad as everyone makes it out to be. Though, I'm thinking my next computer is going to be a Mac.

Out of curiosity, have you tried any of the PHP frameworks? My PHP skills kind of suck, so I'm trying to pick them up. The CMS that I use (ExpressionEngine) is releasing a new version in the coming months that's 100% powered on the CodeIgniter framework. I've heard amazing things about it and plan to take the dive soon. Any recommendations for a amateur PHP coder heading into MVC frameworks?

**mburt** · 08-05-2008, 08:26 PM

I'm a Windows/WAMP guy too. It's not as bad as everyone makes it out to be.

I know, it's pretty good.

Out of curiosity, have you tried any of the PHP frameworks?

I'm not much for frameworks, to be honest. I think I used one once, for a BBCode type thing. I always build my own set of functions, and use them as "frameworks", I guess you could call it.

I took a quick look at CodeIgniter then, and it seems to be very promising. I'm going to try it out, actually. So I'll let you know.

**Twey** · 08-06-2008, 04:33 AM

I generally end up building my own lightweight MVC framework when forced to work with PHP. I have a template that I use, with Smarty, Propel, and my own routing module.

Any recommendations for a amateur PHP coder heading into MVC frameworks?

Yes — run from PHP while you still can

In seriousness, all the MVC frameworks I've come across seem to be object-oriented, but unfortunately PHP's clunkiness and inflexibility with OO make it difficult to do this without introducing quite a bit of boilerplate into the codebase, hence my custom framework which avoids OO for the controllers (only one is ever going to be called per request, anyway; OO adds too much overhead to be viable).

If you wish to learn the 'proper' OO way of doing MVC, move away from PHP and switch to a more powerful language such as Python or Ruby. Python has a plethora of OO MVC web frameworks (I recommend Pylons+SQLAlchemy+Genshi, but Django might be easier for the beginner), and Ruby has a few, of which Ruby on Rails is the most popular (although also quite rubbish, in my opinion; it will, nevertheless, teach you how the MVC pattern works in practice).

**mburt** · 08-06-2008, 12:54 PM

Yes — run from PHP while you still can

Haha, I completely agree. I've been trying to move on to another server-side language, but I haven't had the time. I glanced at Ruby (on rails) for a bit, and realized how messy PHP was, without "proper" OO coding, I guess you could call it.

However, I am soon going to attempt to learn Python. The only problem for me with these languages, is that not many free web hosts (without ads), support such languages. And generally, I am on a tight budget, so I'm not really willing to spend money for a "testing" website.