Beyond the Button

courtesey Ard Hesselink
This Friday I thought I would post on some of the tools that our web/media group has been using lately.

Assembla

Writing code is hard. Writing code in a group that might not even be on the same floor, building, or state is much harder. Assembla is a set of the key collaboration tools that programming teams need, all rolled into one off-site package. SVN, Trac, a wiki, and even Scrum reporting tools. We initially used it as a stop-gap measure while we got our own SVN server up. Now we're finding it hard to tear ourselves away.

IRC

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been around for a long, long while, but we hadn't really thought of it as a work tool until real recently. After two of our finest web/media developers returned from the 2008 DrupalCon, they informed us about a whole 'nother world of Drupal support and discussion living on the IRC channels. I tried it out for a couple of hours one Sunday I was amazed at how much live help was out there for some complex stuff I was trying to figure out. I'm on a mac so I use Colloquy to get on Drupal's IRC channels. Obviously this isn't Drupal specific. There are many channels for the topic you are currently banging your head over right now.

ScreenKeys

What's cooler than a button? A button with a little display built in. Screenkeys are little programmable LCD screens in buttons and switches. These could be quite fun for customized and changing content. The options for control in a game could change every time a visitor plays. We aren't using these yet but I just threw them in for fun.

Any of all those crazy acronyms throw you for a loop? Post a question about how we are using these tools and I'll try and fill you in.

Here at the museum we are starting to upgrade all of our servers and web code to PHP 5. We primarily use a mix of PHP and MySQL to drive just about everything in our web code (with a few minor exceptions).

Here are a couple of the resources I have been following to understand the problems and advantages we will see from upgrading.

PHP's Migration manual - Start at the source. PHP.net's tips of what to look for in your upgrade.

What's all this OOP stuff about? - Discussing some of the Object Oriented Programing aspects of PHP5.

An impetus for change - On February 5, 2008 a bunch of tools that are built on PHP will stop supporting PHP 4 all together. Drupal, the content management system we use here for many of our sites, is one of the participants. So um, yeah, we sorta HAVE to upgrade. Not that we were holding out or anything, but this is a good motivator. Follow the link to watch a slightly ominous countdown ticker.

10 things you (probably) didn't know about PHP - Not necessarily about upgrading but a great list of, "wow, I didn't know it could do that," tips for PHP. Several of these are only available in PHP5.

11 cool things about PHP that most people overlook - Another good list of obscure tips for useful code in PHP5.

ps - Yes, I know we are woefully behind the times and that PHP6 is just around the corner, but hey we work at a non-profit, give us a break.