MatBennett.com

We’ve been threatening to overhaul our entire PHP development environment for some time, but it has always been something we have managed to put off for as long as possible.  With Dreamweaver lagging further and further behind our requirements and the projects that we are dealing with at work getting more complex we have finally managed to take the plunge and get started on this.

I’ve found that locating really basic information on this has been surprisingly difficult, so have decided to blow the dust off my old blog and put down some notes on what we’re up to.  Hopeful someone else out there might find it useful, or better still offer some tips on how we can improve it further. Read on for more details.

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Ho hum.  I had this morning set aside to get stuck in to my look at PHP IDEs and I have to say that it hasn’t been the greatest success so far.

I roped in Tim at work to help me do some of the comparison and we spend a couple of hours trawling the IDE websites trying to compare features.  At the end of that process the main thing we had learned was that the feature sets were pretty comparable across all the IDEs we were taking a look at (Komodo, eclipse, PHPed, PHPedit, & Zen).  It seems that the only way we are going to narrow the list down was by installing each in turn and taking a closer look.

We’ve pretty much ruled out eclipse at the moment.  It seems that neither of the two forks (phpeclipse and eclipse PDT) are going to be what we are looking for.  PHPeclipse sounds like it is developing slowly, barely keeping up with new software versions, and PDT doesn’t seem polished enough at this time). 

We decided to grab two of the others to look at.  Tim is taking a look at PHPedit and I PHPed.

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One of the motivating factors of blowing the dust off my old blog is that I’m about to start investigating some possible changes to the way we develop websites at work.  This is going to involve looking at quite a few solutions and I thought it might be interesting to get some thoughts on these up on the web as I go through the process. Read more »

I’ve been a fan of Dreamweaver, the web development app from Macromedia, since I first picked up a license for version 1.2 many moons back. Whilst it is far from perfect (a crappy FTP engine and laughable CSS support spring immediately to mind) it is still leaps and bounds ahead of competing packages.

Like many fans of Dreamweaver I can’t help wonder what will happen to the package now that Adobe (of Photoshop fame) have bought out Macromedia. Such is my concern that Adobe are going to ruin the package that I’ve decided to upgrade to the latest version now before they get a chance to screw with it too much.

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… and the lifeblood of intellectual property lawsuits.

I saw this post on Freelancer.com last night and wasn’t quite sure whether we should be flattered, indignant or just plain amused.

Here’s the salient part of the post:

I want a clone website of www.mypropertyforsale.co.uk with all the funtionallity that it has but with a worldwide search and the website must be in two language English and spanish. I want everything done by the winning bidder because I don´t know anything about this, I don´t want any question about the funtionallity nor information needed for completing any task neither.

I should point out that www.mypropertyforsale.co.uk is a site that we developed at work and have an ongoing interest in, so seeing someone ask for coders to rip it off makes me want to put a call in to the lawyers. On closer inspection though it is actually quite amusing.

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Spotted an interesting hack attempt on a couple of my sites today.

Seems that someone is testing contact forms to see if they can add to the headers they use to cause the form contents to be BCCd to additional addresses. Presumably they then use the forms to relay truck loads of spam to unsuspecting net users.

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