redbullmarky

as blogs are the order of the day and the new "hello world" for these new frameworks, why dont you try it out? seriously. watch the rails screencasts. watch the codeigniter and cake screencasts. then download a copy of Cake, and write a blog with it. seriously dude, once you've got to grips with what's going on, you'll very quickly toss your current stuff in the bin and realise a whole new way of doing things EXTREMELY quickly. only then, once you've gotten experience of USING a framework and understand the MVC thing as steelmanronald point out should you be writing your own. I've written an entire, live and hugely busy site without a single SQL query using my own framework that's heavily based on Cake/CI as i've explained, but mainly based on the way Cake handles the database. i may sound a little contradictory, one minute encouraging and the next not, but first things first. writing a framework is fun and rewarding, but very tedious if you dont know exactly what you want, where to start, how you like working, etc. Spend a day or two with Cake getting to fully understand it, and it'll shave several weeks off how long your own attempt will take to write.

i've got a 40" one. jk as for my monitor, i'm still on a bog-standard 15" here. When I'm in serious need of extra desktop space, I just boot my mac up and plug my PC monitor in and voila - dual screen. I will be upgrading soon though, to at least a 17 or 19, but that'll wait til I get a whole new computer within a month or two. It's the resolution that's my concern rather than the actual physical size. Thorpe, that's some setup you have!

just tried it myself. i had exact same problem as emehrkay (thank god for 'restore session' ;) )

you know what, it actually isnt bad. almost like an enclosed MySpace just for your family. Here's what I'm not so hot on: - a personal preference, but i always like the top banner/logo to be clickable to take me back home. - your nav is repeated twice. if you lost it out of your left column, and left it up top, then all your other stuff like multimedia would be visible. - the footer (the big flaming logo). doesnt really fit with anything. I won't even [i]start[/i] on the 'Site Optimized for...' comment, as here on 1024x768, it looks good on FF. Apart from: - there is an overspill of text from one of your two boxes (the Guest Book Entries one) on the home page. - i was able to submit a blank contact form. also, the message saying "This is what you sent" in big, bold red, makes it look like an error message. Consider changing/adapting this so something like "Thanks for your message!" with a friendly link to go back to homepage. - give the calender you have (top left) a container of its own. even if it's just a bordered white box or even styled like a calendar page. i'd personally swap the calendar and the banner around so that the calender goes top right, just because of where i was focusing when i first looked. To be honest, I always find personal/family sites a bit hit and miss but mostly not my cup of tea (I guess they're aimed more at friends and other family anyway) but I think this is actually ok. A few issues of tweaking, and possibly just adjusting colours a bit, and you're there. Maybe keeping the homepage quite clean (theme free) and leaving the themes to the individual family member pages? Cheers Mark

got a link? i can see the one in your sig, but people have all sorts in there....

dude, like thorpe said - go download a proper framework. codeigniter and cakephp are both great, like i've mentioned to you before. in some ways, and possibly in your defence, maybe you've picked the wrong audience to look over it. what we've seen recently is plenty of posts regarding plenty of confusion, including the bit where you had your secretefeedback site ripped open like a prisoners buttcheeks. it's hardly been a rocking good advert for your framework. css styles should not be part of a framework, nor should anything else project-specific. a framework is generally a collection of common, reusable functions/classes, etc, all working in perfect harmony to actually make sure that applications run quickly, smoothly and securely. you need to do some work, and (for the time being) just get on with earning money for yourself. Only once you've semi-mastered a "proper" framework will you truly appreciate what a framework is and what it's supposed to achieve. People need to see some proper stuff built WITH it, to see what it can truly do, before they'll even take a sniff. [b]edit[/b]: here's another example of what's wrong (taken from forms.inc.php): [quote] This function may need to be modified slightly on a project to project basis, but for now... [/quote] which, to be honest, defeats the whole point of what a framework is all about. if things need tweaking project by project, then wrap it in a class and use variables to alter its functionality, or use a seperate 'config' file that holds settings for things like this, so someone using your f/w doesnt need to keep peering into all these scripts changing things around. If that's the case, then they may as well not both using a framework at all or just write their own.

it's clean, it's fairly appealing, and one of the better phpbb skins i've seen - but like AndyB said, it's just a forum. once you've seen one, you've seen them all, no matter how they get dressed up. as for forum critiique - you've lumped one hell of a large list of categories on there. surely you can strip away some of them and simplify things a bit?

yeah kinda agree with emehrkay here. thought it's not really bad, the bar has already been raised as far as the whole look/feel of these type of sites - and whilst I hate the whole Web2.0 thing, there's no doubting that this is the direction that these sort of sites are taking - in terms of colour, layout and font selection. the problem pointed out by chris is not evident on Safari (there's a background colour that shows fine), but is on Firefox.

look up your local TV production company. also, some large music recording studios actually hire DJ audio and lighting equipment - at least here in the UK anyway. might be worth checking them out, even if just for getting a pointer in the right direction.

most of them will take care of many of these repeated tasks in some form, or at least make them much much quicker and easier to implement. But the framework you choose will be a personal preference. Personally, as the MVC design pattern is the one most comfortable to me, I like both [url=http://www.cakephp.org]CakePHP[/url] and [url=http://www.codeigniter.com]CodeIgniter[/url]. Both are structured similarly, both enforce structure on you (a good thing, IMO) and both have tonnes of stuff ready to go straight out of the box. CakePHP is the more mature and developed, and is developed by a team. Therefore, it's pretty stable and tried/tested. The way it handles your database and the tables too makes things a doddle. CodeIgniter is the faster, more lightweight of the two as it uses much less by default - ie, you only load what you need when you need it - and it really has TONNES of stuff for dealing with everything you could want. It's also got a much better manual and comes with a slightly smaller learning curve. Switching between the two was easy enough. I've said it before - you could ALMOST consider CodeIgniter (at the moment, at least) a nice introduction to MVC frameworks if you eventually want to go to Cake. So: CI = fast, TONNES of features, fairly powerful, great manual. problems? single coder does the whole thing and still quite new (which both could also be considered plus points, depending how you look at it) Cake = very powerful, minimal tweaking, easy to use validation (it's built in), ok manual, larger community (hence more "bolt ons", etc), established/tried+tested. problems? pretty heavyweight core which seems to slow certain things down. hope that helps.

are the batteries in your redbullmarkytronometer flat too?

like i say, i think the batteries in my detectoldmanicetron have ran out, but i'd stab a fifty on at the bookies :)

that's what oldmanice asked the last time he was someone else that wasnt oldmanice but was oldmanice but not the first one that was pretending to be oldmanice but the second version of oldmanice. or was it the 3rd oldmanice? hmmm. he was from surrey, too. what you chaps smoking down there?

is it? wow even my oldmanice detector never went off. maybe i need to change the batteries.

was that an introduction or a confession?

You're right by saying i'm a DIY sort of guy, mainly cos I just like to be in control and enjoy getting my hands dirty. But I never had anything that i'd remotely call a framework (more a collection of bits and pieces with no uniform naming conventions or structure) until I looked at CodeIgniter and CakePHP (@Ronald, but at busi too - take a look at codeigniter too. If you're using/learning cake, it's not too far off the beaten track - similar structure, etc. It's very simple to use, and whilst it stands in its own stead, I'd almost call it a 'Beginners introduction to Cake'). You need to know what you need and the way you prefer working before you can tackle a framework, otherwise you'll wind up having to make too many changes that would warrant a total rewrite - not just of the framework, but anything based on it as you move on. My framework now? Halfway between Cake and CodeIgniter (minus the bits I didnt like, plus the bits I did), coupled with a few little bits I liked after watching the Rails screencasts. Mine currently has NO ajax support, but that's cause I dont need it as a general thing, but take a look at prototype/scriptaculous JS libraries (easy to find via google, havent got links to hand) - they're what I like to use if necessary. As for waiting 20 versions to release it to the open source - dont bother. Get your idea together, work out your end goal and how you'd ultimately like it to work, and release it now. Maybe you'll get the little bit of help/input you need before you really make it too huge to do anything with. Cheers

the [url=http://prototype.conio.net/]prototype[/url] library is pretty useful and quite easy to integrate into a framework (Cake/CodeIgniter/RoR all have examples of it in use). It's not exactly lightweight, but it comes with a shedload of other stuff that i've so far found a pleasure to use.

LittleGuy - excluding factors such as aerodynamics, which would be far too complicated, the item that would hit the floor first would be the one that is dropped from the lower height. Theory has it that two objects dropped from an equal height, regardless of size or weight, will hit the ground at the same time. So me thinks you need to come up with a new challenge :)

just out of interest - and also looking at the results - do they actually teach PHP at school/college, or is it one of those languages that's secondary to things like Pascal, C++ (or even ASP), etc? Genuine question. Quite intersting that in such a specialist area with responses by several switched on people, there are no people that are (or wont admit being) professionally trained.

IMO, if you dont fully understand how to fix a problem "under the bonnet" of a 3rd party framework, you should not be using it for client projects. @Daniel, I semi agree with you - only I've written my own framework recently, and whilst its fun, its far from problem free and is a MAMMOTH job. Have a look at CodeIgniter (www.codeigniter.com), for ease of use, easy installation and great documentation. If you want something a little more established, CakePHP is good. The reason I suggest both of these - relatively small learning curve, both packed with features, both fairly simple under the bonnet should you need to fix/tweak things, both in reciept of regular updates for bug fixes, etc. Cheers

online gaming is addictive. the cost of dial-up to an online gaming addict will be huge. it will possibly work, but some gaming communities/servers frown upon slow connections with huge pings, not to mention there's a higher chance of you getting whooped. you're better either sticking with a broadband connection, or just downgrading but sticking to normal gaming until you can go back to BB.

agreed with andy. think about it - most visitors to your site will either a) be coming from a search engine, in which case they'll have seen enough to click through to your site, or b) they'll know of your site anyway and enter it to the URL. Putting a splash page in the way is pointless, and normally an excuse for people to show off their Flash skills. I do use the [i]idea[/i] myself on my news site, but the home page is not an 'intro' page. Click the link in my sig to take a look at what I mean. What it does is sets a cookie. Then, any DIRECT hits to my homepage redirects straight to the news - but if a user WANTS to go to the home page, they can do by clicking the home link (or the logo). as for the sake of an intro page, i'd even go one step further than andy and say that 100% is more fair. cheers Mark

wouldnt it be easy enough just to try it? email is just email. it doesnt really discriminate against clients, although some are a bit harder on the categorising of junk. if the above sends it to another client, it'll work with hotmail too.

http://httpd.apache.org/

thanks for the life story, but what exactly are you after? its quite simple, if you keep it that way. client calls. you decide "can i do this or not and can i fit it in?". if yes-> do it. if not->"sorry client, i cannot do it until 2 weeks time as i've just booked one in. is that ok with you?" it's not rocket science, so best not to over-complicate it. if this is the way you are with just the planning side of things, god knows what you're like when you're actually working...