Smarter Sheep

I’m really liking Ruby and Rails development. I have been working through some rails books the last few weeks along with evaluating various php frameworks and at this point I have to say that Rails kicks the snot out of anything else so far. phpCake is a close second. I also found Netbeans to be my editor of choice. Coming from a .net world where we have had some amazing editors that I often took for granted, I found it hard to find a good editor for php and rails, but Netbeans is amazing so far and I am quite impressed.

For those, like myself who didn’t attend or even know about the Google conference in may, I ran across a cool area that google has setup with videos and downloads of all the presentations. There is coverage for many of their applications as well as building apps on their new python based appengine. Check it out here

2:00 pm - just finished 2 days of work moving pages around in our Sitefinity based website. Performance was dead slow so it took much longer than it should have.

2:05 pm - testing all the pages in the website menu structure. Hmm.. none of the most important ones are working. I’m getting a generic error message that something failed in the framework.

2:10 pm - logging back in as admin. Can’t edit the pages either. Same generic error message. I’ve seen this before with the framework and I’m concerned.

2:15 pm - go to sitefinity website and login to get latest framework patch which i’ve been avoiding. Hope applying this will fix the issue.
2:20 pm - download completes, unzipping and getting ready to upload to site. Good thing I made a backup last week.
2:25 pm - Put up a website maintanance page and start uploading Sitefinity patch… nearly 3600 files…

3:01 pm - 1 cell call, 1 google chat and 1 text message from 3 different people that the main website was down. No maintanance page or anything just a big server error.

3:02 pm - panic
3:03 pm - @#$%$#
3:04 pm - time of repentance and healing (had to keep it short for obvious reasons)
3:05 pm - checking site, ftp into server, start checking logs
3:08 pm - no logs to be found, editing global.asax file and turn on custom logging feature I wrote for such an occasion.
3:12 pm - log into host account and resetting asp.net
3:20 pm - still no luck…so editing web.config to turn off any caching etc and checking settings
3:30 pm - locating backups
3:35 pm - modifying backup web.config
3:40 pm - short prayer
3:41 pm - ftp and upload 7500 files to restore website file structure from backup
3:44 pm - realize this is going to take awhile… more repentence
3:50 pm - opening more sockets in the ftp client..hey hey.. that helped … short praise time
4:01 pm - backup restored..
4:02 pm - site still not coming up
4:04 pm - log back into hosting server and remove and reapply .net.
4:08 pm - site comes up yeah!
4:10 pm - testing menus because something doesn’t look right. A large group of pages won’t come up without the generic application error message.
4:15 pm - log into admin interface on website
4:16 pm - admin interface errors out
4:17 pm - sinking feeling
4:18 pm - panic, prayer, repentance (I’ve almost got this down now)
4:20 pm - try several other routes to login and finally get in. I can navigate anywhere within admin interface except to the pages screen which is where I need to go to try and repair any of the pages. Same error message there that I get on all the failing pages.
4:30 pm - create a trouble ticket with hosting company to see if they have anything in their logs that may help.
5:00 pm - still working on admin interface but no luck, hosting company responds that their are no errors logged in IIS so it looks like it’s all in our Sitefinity framework.
5:15 pm - make descision that we are going to lose the last several days of work on the site and have to restore database backups.
5:18 pm - log support ticket with hosting company to restore last week’s backup.
6:35 pm - hosting company says they have it done.
6:40 pm - something is wrong. Doesn’t look like they restored anything. data is the same.

7:00 pm - 1:00 am working on other things while waing for hosting company to reply to my ticket that something is wrong with their restoration of the database.
1:00 am - 1:40 am - tickets back and forth with hosting company as they realize they were trying to restore wrong database on wrong domain…. scary! they have always been superb in the past… must be a new guy having a bad night as well.
2:15 am - database backup finally successfully restored.
2:30 am - main church website is finally up and running again, but without any of the recent changes so it looks like a “do over”
2:35 am - testing pages and logging in to admin interface of website framework
2:40 am - looks like all is well and we are back to where we started… except for our main xml files on the site rotator got nuked during all this and I have to recreate them.
3:00 am - testing in several different browsers and it looks like we are back online.
3:05 am - sigh of relief mixed with thoughts of having to redo all the work and how to do it without the framework corrupting our data again.
3:10 am - prayer and thanks to God for getting us through another day in the church IT department. I’ve learned long ago that things could be much worse

Reflecting back over the last year and the milestones that we have reached as well as the ones that we have missed, we are revising our strategies. It’s always hard to walk a balance between allowing staff and volunteers to utilize web tools for ministry and also protect them and the organization from problems. At the end of the day, I’ve decided that it’s more important to weigh on the side of buidling relationships however you can and getting the gospel message out. So with that in mind here are a few of my notes for the months ahead:

We want to create on-ramps rather than roadblocks for our staff and volunteers to be involved in
community and relationships using the internet as one of their tools.

1. Rebuild our site to make it more useful and more professional.
- Utilize more of the tools that other churches and ministries are successfully using.
- Utilize more of the community tools that are already available on the internet.

2. Train people in utilizing the internet for relationships and ministry
- Blogging classes, myspace and facebook type communities etc.

3. Encourage our staff and volunteers to use the tools.
- We manage the backend hard stuff and professional look and feel.
- Staff and volunteers just provide the fresh content.

Kohana is a fast lightweight framework for developing php applications. I have been working through some of the information and tutorials on their site. Kohana is a branch off the CodeIgnitor php framework. I looked at Codeignitor first but wound up looking deeper into Kohana primarily because Kohana is based on PHP 5 and Codeignitor was based off of PHP 4. Codeignitor had a pretty good reputation but because it was created and supported by a company with an existing product to support it went for long breaks between updates etc. Apparently a large group of the community got unhappy and created their own branch off the source for PHP5 and then ended up doing a major rewrite all together. i may be getting some of my details wrong, but this is what I can tell from things I have read googling. In any case. I really like them both. They are both light and fast. They certianly don’t do all the work for you, but the frameworks I have used in the past tended to be so bloated and heavy that I spend just as much time trying to work around them as I would have just leaving them out to begin with.

I found this great example on the Ask the CSS Guy website for slightly rounded corners on css styled buttons. There are no background images used at all to achieve the rounded corners. It’s all done in css using a few nested tags. The conversation in the resulting comments ultimately came up with a great way to do this using negative margins without any extra html tags.

Read more »

Kohana is a fork of the Code Ignitor framework that lifechurch.tv is using from what I understand.

I am also looking at several content management systems that look like good candidates for future development.

Drupal

Expression Engine

So far the following frameworks look interesting:

CakePHP
Zend
Code Igniter

More to come

Most of our websites are currently on the .net platform and we have been quite happy with it for many things. One of the biggest issues that I face, is finding volunteers for my team that are proficient in the .net platform. In fact most of my volunteers are familiar with php but not with .net. Building a team of technical people to manage websites and networks can be a bit tougher than finding individuals to help with some of the other tasks around the church and ministry areas. I’ve decided to began evaluating php frameworks to find one that might be suitable for further development as well as an easy transition from .net for those of the team that are currently productive in the Microsoft technologies.

Today’s Web 2.0 number is 2, two, dos.. the number 2 is a bright olive green color. The olive green I’m referring to is not a military sort of green, although it could easily go that way if 2 got angry and became militant. I picture 2 as more of a bright glassy olive tone. Your wondering why number 2 is in the green slot? It’s simple, really… number 2 is not number 1. We all know that number 1 is a forever gloating “hey I’m up here on top and your all not..look at me” kind of a color. Therefore, number 2 always feels like less of a number. Two works hard to stay well spirited and tries to glow as best he can… hence the Web 2.0 glassy, shiny-ness, but because he always feels a deep sense of being in second place, the envy show through…just a little… leaving him green.