A Path Less Taken

There is an excellent video on the web about what motivates us. I think it’s narrated by the author of “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”. The topic is interesting and the points raised are compelling. Check it out and let me know what you thing. RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

My latest experiment is building a new site without leveraging one of the many MVC Frameworks that are out there today. I decided to approach a new project using the following criteria:

• Simple can be better sometimes.
• Frameworks don’t do EVERYTHING well.
• Components that do one job and do it well are easier.
• Easier can be more productive.

To be fair, my results were a mixed bag, but so far I’m happy with the experiment. The site is not open to the public yet, but you can check out the current version here if you are curious how it is going. Below is a brief out line of the tools I used and the results (good, bad and ugly)!

Please allow me to introduce Formed, a simple PHP based HTML form generator class. The primary objectives I had when creating Formed were:

• Simple to Use
• Customizable using HTML formatting or CSS
• Self Contained (no framework dependencies)
• Template Support

I created a home site for it in the event that people wanted to try it, make suggestions (be nice), provide changes, that kind of thing. It is not on GitHub because it does not warrant that level of control at this point. The site is built on Joomla and the template is one of the defaults that I barely modified so it looks funny. If you go to the link above you can down load the zip file or read the tutorial. If you are interested check it out and post a comment here.

As a side note, PHP CMS tools must be in a tragic state these days. Joomla was easy enough to get working, but it is far from intuitive when you first use it. By contrast Drupal I could not even get working on Apache. To be fair I did not put much time into either one, but isn’t that the point of a CMS? It is a sorry state of affairs.

One thing I love about the open source community is all you need is another motivated, talented programmer with an opinion and change happens. I just found another new PHP Framework that has waded into the fray (at least from my perspective). It’s call DOOPHP and it has an interesting take on magic methods. The author’s contention on the about page is that magic methods rob frameworks of performance. I don’t know if that’s worth building a new solution over, but it could be worth a look. Enjoy.

Here is an interesting blog post on the fastest speeds that man-made objects have achieved in space so far. Short and fun reading. Wikipedia also has a helpful post on Interstellar travel that is very interesting reading. Some of the concepts in the book I’m reading now are represented here.