Code posts correctly, but when updating it doesn't. Can someone help solve this?

[gizmola]

This was one of the reasons I decided to go and learn programming people... because the people here that are gurus and other types think that people like me, people who actually are here to learn that may have a stupid question or two in other people's eye actually give attitude and look down upon people like me.

 

Sorry but I felt I just had to respond to this.  First of all, you don't have a clue what you're talking about. 

 

Out of all the communities and communication networks and forums I've been a part of, this one is BY FAR, the most easy going and newbie friendly.  Look at some of the post counts of the people who have been answering you, and realize that many of these people have been answering questions for people FOR YEARS.  Phpf is far more lenient and easy going than any other forum covering the same subject matter, and that is why it is the most heavily visited forum on PHP development in existence.  While it is, to one degree a great resource for someone learning web development, it simply can not be a substitute for learning the basics, and it's painfully evident that you are way out of your element here. 

 

I have plenty of empathy, because the plain and simple fact is, that web development to a level of professional competency is non-trivial.  Every day people come to this forum, having jumped, been pushed or were dragged into the deep end, and they're drowning.  People here do understand that, and are far more willing to throw someone a lifeline, than in any programming related online community I've ever seen.  The problem is, that there's a lot of material and you are struggling with basic basic stuff. 

 

What several people have said to you is that they were frustrated by your response to their attempts to help you.  After answering a few hundred different questions, you learn pretty quickly when you are wasting your time, and for even the most altruistic person in the world, there's a point at which you realize that your time is better spent elsewhere.

 

If you have any aspirations to do this at any level of competency, you need to find a decent book and immerse yourself in it, and show some humility and admit that you don't know what the hell you're doing, and that whatever you do create right now will not be very good.  Also realize that it's ok to write sucky code, and that you'll learn and you'll get better.  People who are far better developers than you could ever hope to be, do this constantly, because like nearly everything in life, there is both a science and an art to writing software.  To illustrate this point further, in the PHP world there are 2 state of the art frameworks right now: the Zend Framework and Symfony.  There are other popular frameworks, but they are not new, and don't use the latest features of the language.  The architect of the Symfony framework built a substantial business and following for Symfony 1.x, but at some point, he realized, that the framework that he built that was being used by 1000's of developers around the world on a daily basis, and was powering sites from companies like Yahoo, had a lot of fundamental flaws.  In short, he took a good hard look at what he had done, and evaluated weaknesses, and approaches that had been taken which in hindsight, had fallen short of their objectives.    So he threw the entire thing out and started over from scratch, and thus there is now symfony 2, which is not compatible with symfony 1 in any way. 

 

That is the nature of software engineering -- you learn, you make mistakes, you adapt, and you relearn, and things change constantly.  You have to continuously evolve and retrain and must be willing to roll your sleeves up and dig in and read and experiment, and accept that you will fail, and make foolish mistakes, and if you have the right attitude, you will learn from them.

 

I think what emanates from your posts here, aside from the fact that you're floundering and confused, is that you don't react positively to people when they point out that you don't know what you're talking about.  It would be one thing if this was just people shooting the breeze, but this is people providing you with source code.  So when you say you don't understand what they did, the first question that has to be asked is... why not?  What didn't you do to try and understand it?  Why didn't you break it down, and look up every function provided, until you had an idea what those functions and syntax do, and why didn't you make a little test script or 2 or 3 to tease them apart until you understood them, and could apply them or dismiss them?  This is basically how things work in the programming world.  People provide code snippets, and you have to grok what they do.  And every person who has a badge here, or 1000's of posts to their credit, does this on a regular basis.  In short, to write code, you also have to read code, and documentation, and there is no shortcut or substitute to that. 

 

Having communities like this one, not to mention open source itself, where anyone can get the source code to some of the most amazing software created in history, and go through it line by line, and study and tweak and experiment with it to see how it works makes software development a very rewarding field, but there is no substitute for teaching yourself what you need to know, and actively learning. 

 

You've been acting like someone tasked you to build a car, and even though you've got no education as a mechanical engineer or even a mechanic, and because you think you've arrived at the equivalent of an auto parts store, you have the right to be upset because people are telling you that you can't design and build a custom car from scratch by buying a few spare parts, and asking a couple of questions of the clerk at Pep boys.  This isn't an auto parts store.  This is a forum for people who ARE engineers or mechanics to talk about specific issues they are having or seek advice from the same, that is also tolerant of people who are genuinely interested hobbyists, or dedicated students. 

 

I'll wrap up with a couple of final points:

 

-Your question would have been closed on Stack Exchange, for not being of general interest.  Also Stack Exchange does not allow for a meandering thread of back and forth like this one ended up being.  Don't take my word for it however.  By all means try it out if you really believe for a second that people there are friendlier. 

-Good luck on any of the php lists.  You might have had an exploratory answer or 2, but people rarely will dig in and try and help someone who is clearly floundering and out of their element.

-There's other forums out there, of course.

-Try ##php on Freenode, where people regularly get kickbanned for using what senior members consider to be the wrong terminology in a question.

-Phpf doesn't take banning people lightly.  We don't ban people for being annoying, or to exercise our ban hammers -- you have to break rules, and usually we give people a warning first.  Nobody threatened to ban you, warned you, or planned to ban you, so I'm not sure why you brought that up.

 

Web development is complex stuff, and has a lot of moving parts.  The state of the art is constantly changing.  Even if it was less complex, there are programming fundamentals, and if you don't have those, it's easy to get lost down the rabbit hole. 

 

The people here enjoy seeing others succeed, and you really seem to be adverse to constructive criticism, which does not bode well for you.  In short, if you can't adjust your attitude, I fear that you will soon find that while people here may have wasted their time trying to get through to you, that is not a big deal.  It happens every day, and comes with the territory, and everyone who answers questions here is well aware of that fact.  What is sad, is seeing someone like yourself completely wasting their time because they don't know how to go about how to learn.  We can facilitate learning, but we can't teach you how to learn.