Effective programming

[presario]

I have worked in some applications like oscommerce, wordpress. I have developed my own cms which is basically a product management system. I installed wordpress other day and amazed to see that they managed such an application with just 11 tables (talking about default installation). The installation of setup, skinning a new template, adding new plugin all are just a matter of few clicks.

 

We develop product based websites so most of the time, our backend application is same. All we have to do is just loading a new skin to it. To convert a product management system into a shopping cart, all we have to do is just add checkout routine but currently all things are so messed up that we often have to perform repetitive tasks.

 

Having a all that, I would like to have some expert advice on how can I program effectively that editing previous or addition of new features in application would not be that much hectic

[fantomel]

hello from my opinion doesn't matter how many tables are you can split them depending on your application or the way you want depending on what they have to do but if you want something nice you should take the cms from scratch clean it up improve the coding go on mvc if you like to have a separated code and so on.. each of us have different coding styles but in the end the code you build must be understood by the next programmer that will work on it so comment each part try making it  readable easy to use and don't repeat the code 

[Spikerok]

talking about different coding styles.. oh yh, there are several coding styles most common are Hindu and Chinese styles ^^

[zeodragonzord]

The best advice I can give you is to keep this mindset; anything that can change will change.  Make sure it's scalable.  Your code needs to be decoupled enough so that it can adapt to change.  Therefore, as you lay out your folders, name your variables, and design your tables, keep in mind the long term aspect of your actions.

 

Keep your business code separate from your other code.  This is code that models the logic and rules set forth; the business logic and it can be directly interfaced with your database tables.  Therefore, no gui code goes in there.  Utility classes can go in this area.  What I usually do is I have:

 

• business classes:  user, groups, authentication, etc
  
• utilitiy classes:  error handling classes, notification classes (email, log to file, log to database)