I’ve been quite busy this week with various bits of PHP development both for clients and for myself.
The client’s project involves enhancing their codebase so it’s possible (easy, even) to fully test all parts of their sites. Currently, some key parts can only be ‘tested’ by deploying to live systems, and this is not desirable, and there have been a few problems recently where things haven’t gone to plan.
The cause of these problems are hard coded constants in the code which remain the same no matter where the tree is (dev, staging, live servers). So in the past week I’ve integrated Zend_Config from the Zend Framework so that appropriate constants are defined depending where the tree is hosted.
90% of that work is complete. Once they’ve tested the upgrade of ZF from 1.5 to 1.8.*, it’ll be good to see it deployed. As the changes impact every website of theirs, I’m looking forward to the deployment going smoothly.
I’ve also started work on my own project; my first personal project in years! I’ve been looking at ‘life streaming’ – where you take your activity across many websites and display it in a single location in chronological order – recently, and installed sweetcron on my domain. While the setup of the software was easy, there are problems. One example is that displaying different feeds from the same domain breaks it (ie, multiple youtube subscriptions). I eventually got it working on mine, but it required extensive configuration and theme hacks to get working – changes which will be wiped on any future upgrades. Not ideal.
So I’m designing and implementing my own lifestream software. It’s using the Zend Framework, and I’m learning the MVC properly as I go. I’m having fun coding it, and with some regular free time, I should quickly get it to a point I’m happy replacing my sweetcron installation.