Brown PHP

Currently I am actively developing, maintaining, and updating 2 sites.  The two sites are this Brown PHP and the other is one that I have invested a lot of time into, the Informative Post. I also have built a few websites in the past for other companies and some e-commerce sites for myself.  Those site however are not heavily dependent on the PHP language, but could be viewed as my gateway drug to my PHP addiction.  I used just enough PHP in them to get me craving more!

You can find pictures of some of the sites that I have worked on in my Flickr feed. One website that involves PHP that I work on often is Helm Instrument’s website.  I am currently their Web Developer/Software Engineer and I designed, developed and maintain their website and databases. I am not going to take about Helm’s site, because it doesn’t involve as much PHP as I would like (I’m being held down by the man!).  The site is mainly created from HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.  Although, there is a lot of PHP, it is used mostly for a template engine that I have produced for them.

Informative Post

The Informative Post is a news wire and content provider for itself and many other third party websites.  All the content is produced by a community of professional authors.  I have spent a lot of my time working with this site to develop the community base that it needs to grow. This has nothing to do with PHP though right!  However true, it heavily depends on your situation and the types of environments that you would develop in.

How does the Informative Post utilize PHP?

• Zend Framework
• MySQL Intensive

If you check the site out, you are going to quickly find out that it is a massive dynamic website that relies heavily the opposite of light on MySQL.   Also, the site was built with the Zend Framework.

Why use the Zend Framework?

Well to be honest with you, I have never used it before and I had to scratch that itch.  It was risky for me to use a framework that is still a bit new, but I am a sucker for a good MVC designed framework.  Not to mention that it was developed by Zend, which also made it very appealing for me to try.

My overall opinion thus far is that I think it has saved me some time, but it has also wasted much time.  I am beginning to feel like the later is starting to outweigh the former, because it is beginning to cause some heavy load on my host’s shared server.  The site currently gets around 1000 unique visitors a day.  That being said, the server should not be taking too much of a heavy pounding, but they are.

Before I developed the site with the Zend Framework background, I hand coded everything completely on my own.  I handled all the MySQL transaction, session data, cookie information, and everything else that is involved.  It could be from sloppy coding on my part, but now my site is running slower.  I feel like the Zend_Db component is not handling the MySQL connections efficiently at all.  This issue hasn’t currently been resolved yet, but I have reduced the issue by caching all my MySQL queries that are not “real-time” dependent.

Informative Post Conclusion

The Informative Post is currently my baby, as Yahoo is to Yang.  The time I have put into it since its inception is way beyond me, but it has been a wonderful ride so far. The site has given me so much in terms of PHP/MySQL experience on a large community based site.

I have learned a lot from the Informative Post website.  It has given me the opportunity to work with the Zend Framework, which has been a desire of mine ever since it was first released in ’07.  It has also forced me to grasp a better understanding of the need for scalable, modular code.  I have also created many classes for this site that I can now use for future references with other sites.

Brown PHP

Brown PHP uses WordPress.  I chose WordPress, because it comes “out of the box” optimized, and provides everything I need for the direction I want to take the site.  I could have written my own CMS, but I don’t have that much time on my hands.

I like WordPress, because if a feature you need is not included in the base package, a plug-in can surely be found.  It is also a relatively painless process to create your own WordPress plug-ins for you own customized needs.  It just seemed like the best choice for Brown PHP.

Even though I use a CMS for Brown PHP does not mean that I don’t write PHP code for this site.  One of the main things that I do for this site is write PHP OOP classes that I develop, test and optimize.  I like to do off-the-wall classes that no one else would think of, but serve a useful purpose for myself, and other people.  Hopefully they will serve a useful purpose anyway!

Brown PHP Conclusion

I had to talk about Brown PHP.  The website was made not so long ago for me to blog about my experiences with PHP.  I have also decided to use Brown PHP as a method for me to grow my PHP knowledge.  If you take a look at a few of my posts, I am starting to write different classes that can be used in Web 2.0 websites.

All of the source code for the classes that I write and talk about can be downloaded from the site.  All of the code is documented, tested, and optimized.  I made this site to begin writing a shared library with the PHP community.  Hopefully, if errors can be found in the source code I provide, the community will notify me so that I may make the changes.

At my work, and with the Informative Post, I am limited to the spectrum of PHP I can cover.  For example, I don’t really have a need for any web services on the Informative Post website, or at my day job.  So when would I have a chance to work on web services if it were not for Brown PHP where I can write my own just for the fun of it and contribute my work to the community.

- Douglas Brown