PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor? Hardly. A server-side languages for producing web pages, simply. Build it up into complex object-oriented frameworks. The workhorse for dozens of content management systems, blogging systems and web sites. Can build rich client apps, too.
The monthly meeting of the Monadnock region Linux User Group takes place as usual on the second Thursday of the month at the SAU #1 offices in Peterborough. Details and directions here.
Seth Cohn will be presenting Drupal, http://www.drupal.org. I’m looking forward to it. The LUGs have been privileged to see a couple presentations on CMSes: Jonathan Linowes presented Xaraya, and Barrie North Joomla! It’s great that there are som many great choices!
Robert Jennings posts Yet “Another Life After VFP Thread.” For those not following VFP closely, MS recently announced a confirmation of earlier news that there were no plans for a VFP version 10, and that the VFP scripts in the project known as Sedna would be released under some sort of public license. Poor communications lead to media and Slashdot reports that VFP was to be Open Sourced, sadly not the case.
Robert does a good job of outlining the huge cost in moving a vertical-niche application into another development environment, language and runtime. Most sophisticated specialty applications have person-years of investment built into them, knowledge not easily extracted, transferred or translated to any new environment. Regardless of whether that new environment is Dot Net, Dabo, LAMP, Python or Visual Fred, there will be a huge cost and risk with any enterprise making this switch.
Unlike the Open Source world, when a vendor choses to discontinue a product, developers have little choice but to move along. While many folks point out the upside that the product will likely run for years to come, and a lack of Microsoft official support doesn’t instantly obsolete a product (DOS apps can still be found, after all), there is an immediate slowdown in the custom software market, and a longer-term turning away from the product by customers. Large-scale vertical products have to be operating with 5- and 10-year plans for reinvestment and changes in direction, to ensure they can fund “The Next Big Thing” while continuing to deliver good value to their customers today and tomorrow.
This is not a death knell for the product. The writing has been on the wall for years. But developers with large applications have to be looking around for a new platform.
FoxPro developers always viewed themselves with a bit of “Battlestar Galactica” mythology: a rag-tag crew of self-taught developers from the PC Revolution, they survived the dBASE wars and the implosion of Ashton-Tate. Working under a cruel master who never promoted their product, they persevered. MS’ internal team developing VFP did amazing things on a shoestring budget, introducing a fairly smooth transition from procedural to object-oriented, from developer-guided to event-driven interfaces, from characters to pixels, from local ISAM to RDBMS. The VFP IDE was a remarkable environment in which to develop rich-client, component-based, web-driven or even server-based applications. I will miss it, and look forward to becoming as skilled at my next platform.
Dan McTough shows off his Optimal OPML browser at his opml.org site, http://blogs.opml.org/yabfog/. Pretty slick!
… ended yesterday, and today I start the sixth year of blogging. The first year was blogging on the Perl-based TWiki software, 2003 through 2006 on Radio Userland. This year, I’m using WordPress, on a self-hosting Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP platform. Wonder what I’ll be running in another five years? It’s been a blast, and I hope it continues to be. Primarily, my blog is my voice online: notes of places I’ve found and want to share (or publicly bookmark so I can find them again), news to pass on, or events on which I comment. Thanks for reading.
Netcraft: WordPress Distribution Compromised, Update Released
“A recent distribution of the popular blogging software WordPress was compromised during a server intrusion, the development team said late Friday. All WordPress users who have downloaded and installed version 2.1.1 are urged to immediately upgrade to version 2.1.2. Earlier versions of WordPress are not affected.”
Ouch! Get patching. I had downloaded but not yet upgraded. There’s a patch to avoid.
Charlie Farinella called the meeting to order promptly at 7 PM and cracked his whip to stick to his streamlined agenda. Brief announcements (“find GNHLUG events on www.gnhlug.org”) were followed by Ray Côté’s presentation of uniq. Ray explained the function and then introduced an increasingly complex set of examples, one building on another to show how uniq could remove duplicate lines from a sorted file, display various counts of duplicates and so forth.
Guy Pardoe was the main presenter. After the requisite wrestling with the projector, Guy talked about Joomla! Guy had hoped to be showing version 1.5, but it is still in early beta (beta 1 with beta 2 due rsn), so he didn’t feel it was ready to talk about for production sites. Guy explained when he volunteered for the presentation he thought 1.5 would be available, and promised to return when 1.5 was available and he had some experience in using it for production work. He briefly reviewed Barrie North’s presentation from DLSLUG last year (registration required) (and our notes from that meeting). Guy then showed us the Joomla! 1.0 correction: 1.5 install he had done that day, highlighting the basic features of the CMS and the ease of use of the administrative interface. It appeared to be a very open and accessible system. Templates and CSS files could be edited from within the interface and they appeared to be XHTML and CSS2 compliant.
A general Q&A followed. General concerns on the security of the core framework. Concern about the timeliness of the 1.5 release. General discussion of what CMS could do and what the target market was.
After the main presentation, the floor was opened up for general discussion. Maddog announced that he and Bill Sconce had met with faculty at the New Hampshire Technical Institute and that a plan to hold a series of MythTV Installfests was proposed (see the -org list for details).
Answering another question that has come up on the discusssion list, I came across this post while I was looking for Barrie’s presentation. While he is advocating for Joomla!, of course, he may be pointing out that WordPress would meet some peoples needs as well.
“Why you want to use Joomla! instead of WordPress”
Thirteen attendees were at the meeting. Thanks to Charlie for running the meeting, Ray and Guy for presenting, Ken and the Monadnock SAU for providing the facilities, and to maddog and all attendees for participating!
Here’s a test of sparklines: [spark][type line][size 20,90][series 14,27,31,30,31,30,30,31,30,31,92,79,118,103,59,67,49,98,57,58,61,53,55,49,52,28,45,54,46][dot 12,118,5,blue][/spark] . Sparklines were described in Edward Tufte’s books, implemented in PHP by James Byers and as a WordPress plug in by Graeme Pietersz. Cool stuff.
If you liked the link yesterday to making RSS feeds more approachable by using an XSL stylesheet to present the RSS in a human-readable form, here's a two line change to the RSS2 module in WordPress to implement it. Add the XSL to your current template directory. You can see an example here.
LXer reports trixbox 2.0 released. “Trixbox 2.0 beta will be available for download on Wednesday. This release will be Fonality's first big contribution to the trixbox/Asterisk community after the recent Fonality acquisition of trixbox. which certainly caused a stir within the Asterisk community. I spoke with Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality, to find out more about this major new release of trixbox.”
I've seen TrixBox 1.0 demoed at MonadLUG in June by Tim Lind and it was an impressive piece of software. Looking forward to seeing what improvements are available in the 2.0 version. Tim's doing an Asterisk presentation in December at CentraLUG; perhaps he'll show off 2.0 there.
From Guy Pardoe's announcement:
The next meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) will be this Thursday, August 10th, 7:00pm, at the SAU 1 Superintendent's Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough.
For directions and other information, visit
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MonadLUG
Mark Witham discusses SugarCRM: SugarCRM is a complete CRM and groupware system for businesses of all sizes. Functionality includes sales force automation, marketing campaigns, support cases, project mgmt, calendaring, documents and more. Built on PHP and MySQL.