Pragmatism in the real world
Apart from my day-job, I also do a very small amount of freelance work, mainly for my old company. The weirdest thing about this work is that they don't use any version control system for their websites. So far, I've fixed one particular bug 4 times… It's got to the point where I keep their sites in my version control system so that I can find out which bits of my code they have broken… continue reading.
The most common way to debug is to stick echo statements into your code at strategic places. If you are feeling clever, you might even output a variable's value too: echo "<p>here: $myvar = $myvar";</p> I call this runtime variable inspection and as PHP is a script language, it's a very fast way to debug a script. You stick the echo statement at strategic points and with a few page refreshes in the browser, you… continue reading.
I hacked together support for additional content blocks in CMS Made Simple over the last few days. This constitutes the first time I've hacked the main code and I'm pretty damn proud of myself! In the end the feature wasn't as difficult to write as it might have been. This is due to some rather clever design in the back end. First off, the database already separated out storage of the main text and header… continue reading.
Notes on using ADOdb's data dictionary to create and manipulate database tables independantly of the underlying database server.
