I would like the time to say...
 

<rant>
PHP PEAR is this biggest piece of crap I have ever seen. Seriously, way to make something simple way complex instead.

Half of their crappy instructions are shoddy an the other half don't even work.

GRRR...

</rant>

A lot of open source programs and classes make things overly complicated when there are almost always easier ways. That's why I started writing my own scripts..

I think some programmers like to show off their uber skills by making simple things seem complex.

I hear that.

I've been trying to figure out how to get PEAR to work in a shared hosting environment but it never seems to work. *GRUMBLE*

Do you use any ORM's for your scripting or do you use pure SQL Scott?

Scott uses magic and alcohol :gj:

lol!

What problems are you having getting it to work in a shared environment? Do you have multiple php.ini files or something? It should be pretty straight forward.

As far as ORM's, no I haven't really been interested in that yet..

For some reason the web-frontend file is being placed in the wrong directory, no matter what I do.

Too bad about the ORM's they save you a ton of time and make it easier to make changes to the DB without breaking your code (as bad).

BTW, Zend Framework is pretty sweet on PHP, recommend that too.

What do you like about Zend? I remember back in the day, zend was a PITA to work with. These days i've been using a lot of Javascript and Ajax on the sites I build. One of my biggest gripes when building sites was that posting data from a form had to be submitted to another page where it was validated. This made for some really messy code and was hard to keep track of. Now I just have some simple html pages that post data to php to be processed, then returned to the page without any waiting or page refreshes for the user. It's slick stuff and makes it fun to build sites again.

...

Stop quoting spammers. Just report them.

Have you looked into the MVC concept? I think it makes the code much easier to maintain first off, second, it is nice to have inline php code with your xhtml and Zend makes it easy to do that.

Zend is pretty slick with page inheritance and nicely formatted URLs. One thing I think is poorly documented is Ajax services.

Personally, I like to create my own php frameworks. I generally find it hard to follow others code and often framework projects are left without support, documentation or updates for years. It does indeed take a bit longer to program, but I don't have to rely on someone else for bugs and updates. I find myself making many frameworks custom for each site I build. Over the years i've found my own ways to save time. I've amassed a huge library of functions and classes that i've built from each site and often find myself using them on many sites. Every site i've built in the past few years follows the same directory structure, coding standard and principle. It took me years to develop but it hasn't needed any changes in a few years.

I agree, I hesitate to use any 3rd party stuff. I worry about code maintenance as well as security, since you never know where they have coded backdoors into their "open source" stuff.

I hate the learning curve too. Sometimes it takes a lot longer to learn someone's stuff than to write your own. I think it is good though, to see other's code. I actually learned a lot of my PHP from your Simple Squad Site.

I had been trying to create my own framework also, but I lacked some of the knowledge required and I am doing this project professionally so that means I am not going to be tied to the project once it finishes. I don't want to have to do all the documentation required for a framework. Zend has pretty decent documentation for being an open source framework so I figure if someone doesn't know how to change/update the code they can just refer to Zend's site. I also couldn't come up with a satisfactory way of securing SQL queries efficiently, so I went with Propel (really hope you look into it at least to see how they do stuff and their syntax). It is really simple to use.

Propel does look very interesting. I will have to check that out, I've not really thought much about SQL frameworks lately. Maybe it's time I learn and start using one, or try and build my own. I always like the challenge of new things. I've never liked the way SQL was handled within PHP.

Simple Squad Site was my absolute first attempt at php and full automation. Pure php in it's most basic form. I love building simple applications that perform tasks well. It's amazing that even after all these years, my two scripts phMailer and phUploader are two highly rated scripts on hotscripts.com in their categories, even though they are the most basic scripts with no fancy ajax, frameworks or classes. Just bare-bones php.


Edit: I just downloaded my simple squad site script.. holy security holes! lol

Lol I used phMailer too :)

Gotta love looking back at old code. I look back at stuff from a couple of months ago and think "wtf???!?! was I doing?"