BackPress is a useful project that packages the re-usable code from WordPress into an independent library you can use in non-WordPress projects.
Composite Primary Keys
Here’s a good introduction to composite primary keys by Jeff Smith. When you’re defining a database table that’s being used to relate two other tables (e.g., products_discounts to map discounts to particular products), you should always create it with a composite primary key (i.e., both the product_id and discount_id columns) rather than a single identity column […]
Success in Business
Here’s a great quote from Jeff Atwood’s post on why he decided to step back from Stack Exchange:
I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.
Including External View Files in WordPress Widgets
I ran into a problem today while cleaning up and modifying some widgets. I moved all of the markup inside widget() to an external view file, and then included it via require_once(), which worked fine. I then tried to do the same thing inside form(), but didn’t get any output. It turns out that you […]
Pushing Back Against Unreasonable Employer Demands
I just read a good article on work/life balance from Kendall Guillemette. It’s encouraging to hear others in the industry pushing back against the sense of entitlement many employers have regarding our time (which is to say, our lives). I think the 40-hour work week was one of the most important advances of the labor movement, […]
Comparing WordPress, Drupal and Joomla in 2011
Ok, so it’s already 2012, but I just came across an article comparing the three from last year and it was a good read. Like a lot of articles, though, the real value is in the comments more than the article itself. Going into it I had the impression that Joomla was a stagnant mess, but […]
FastCGI errors after PHP upgrade
I ran into a small problem upgrading PHP from 5.3.5 to 5.3.10 on a MediaTemple CentOS VPS today. The upgrade completed without any errors, but when I reloaded the site I got a “500 Internal Server Error” message. It was the stock installation, so I’m not sure which module it was using or what repository […]