gregmoses.net

New Year 2009: SliceHost and Ubuntu

Over the Holiday season I was able to get back on my backender hobby horse for a few days. As a result, I'm now a slicehost initiate and Ubuntu user. If you're interested in either experience, check out the journal entry at wpscape.

Summer 2008: To Prado or Not to Prado

Summertimes I have a few hours to upgrade my web publishing skills, so I was delighted to open up the new Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express (MSVWD2008E) edition, which is FREE, and, on first impression is like the way you always wanted Front Page to behave, or like Dreamweaver on a silver server. I mean when it comes time to test a page in MSVWD2008E, there is no discovering that first you needed to download and configure a localhost Apache, a database, oh, and the latest php. Somehow, everything is right there. It was so cool that I immediately signed up with a host that offered special hosting for MSVWD2008E. Quick and smooth, I had a web project started right away. Whooppee!

At the same time, however, I was looking forward to upgrading a set of wordpress sites, and the thought of the downloading and ftp chores made me want to snooze off. So I began figuring out how to use subversion as a web development layer, and learning how to place a subversion repository on my websites so that I could manage the wordpress upgrades with simple instructions from the command line. This too was very cool. If you have a lot of ftp experience, you will simply not believe how many SECONDS it takes to "checkout" an entire wordpress download from one subversion repository to another. Makes you want to shout!

Ah, but dear reader, at this point I faced a contradiction in desires. If I switched my web developing wholly in the direction of MSVWD2008E, what about all those open source skills and communities out there? What about the emerging use of wordpress as cms? And what about my dream of an elegant php / xml utopia, where a dom archive gets parsed and served up into crisp file views.

Did I want to slouch away from all that on my MSVWD2008Easy Chair? Remember, I have a few hours to budget for a learning curve this summer. So, with a little googling on the question of php vs MSVWD2008E, I came across mention of something called Prado.

Now for me, Prado was a just-in-time discovery. Why? Because just this week, in order to become a subversion user, I had to begin to learn (finally) the basics of command prompt. There are other ways to manage subversion I am told, but I think they would require using some command prompt during setup anyway. So if the point was to get around learning command prompt, well, you see. So, forward I went into the world of command prompt, emailing my trusty support desk and asking for shell access. "you've had it for years, you idiot" is what they told me, in a completely polite and professional way. Duh, oh right, yeah, I knew that, sure.

OK, so here's what you need to know about Prado if these things sound familiar to you. It looks like a very cool way to organize chunks (or classes) of php code so that dummies don't have to write much of the source. Prado offers you a library of php classes (enabled in PhP 5) that you call up with keyword commands stored at your web pages. Meanwhile, in the far backend of your website, Prado is as comfortable as you want to be at the level of command prompt. If you haven't dived into the world of command prompt, I think that once you get over the first few frustrations, it is a very cool world underneath it all.

With Prado, if you use a Secure FTP (SFTP) client with graphical views, it is very easy to navigate through the directory structures to the various directories where the commands have to be issued from. With the SFTP client that I use, you can call up a command line prompt with a simple click of the mouse. It helped to have a "visual" take on the directory trees. If you use a command-line-only client, you can learn to walk to and fro using commands like "cd" (change directory), "ls" (list files in the present directory), and "pwd" (where the hell am I, anyway!).

I also learned something about working with subversion directories as a web development tool. The first day working on the Prado Blog Tutorial, I relied on a "branch" export of the Prado framework, and it was not an unproductive day. But on day two I re-started everything with a "tags" export, and things went better. As I understand the diff from reading Mark Sailes, "tags" mark points along a timeline of "trunk" development. They name the trunk "up to" a certain point. Branches are where hackers conjure evolution. Not where I need to be right now. (Actually, working from a tag, right away on day two I found myself renaming a key file so that it would have the needed ".php" extension. Details, details, always details!)

Once the demo setup was done, I did much of the Blog Tutorial work in Dreamweaver. The download package (not the subversion branch) contains a Dreamweaver Extension for Prado that is supposed to help with auto-completing Prado commands. One slight inconvenience is that Dreamweaver doesn't "recognize" the unique ".page" extension that Prado uses, therefore you have to open the ".page" files from the file menu rather than just double clicking on the visual tree.

On the first attempt at the Prado Blog tutorial, I learned that you should adhere rigorously to the upper / lower case lettering that is suggested for names of page and php files. Error messages in Prado are very diagnostic, showing all the processes and documenting the concepts behind doing things correctly.

Once you begin developing the blog, you see that the structure of the Prado file system is nicely distinguished, so that you can have page templates in one directory, applied to page contents in another directory, while an xml file in the common path stores commands that associate templates to pages with a single robust command. If you want to change template files, you don't have to "find and replace" the code pointing to the template in each and every page. This is cool, especially since I like to work with xml files in my Oxygen editor. Makes me feel young?

The Prado system has a clever feature that creates a shell within a shell to execute some unique Prado command lines. When I tried to work within the Prado shell, the command-prompt from my SFTP client (WinSCP) just freaked out! So I had to switch to Putty for that part.

In fact, the more I used Prado, the more I could see why the developers keep referencing their debt to Microsoft. The structure of site development and the use of keyword commands is very much like what I'm seeing at ASP.Net. Of course Microsoft has the easy-breezy graphical interface with all the drag-and-drop convenience (and all the "weight" that goes with these goodies). Prado doesn't have that - yet.

What I am learning from both Prado and ASP.net is that my good friends at Wordpress have really solved a bundle of functions that nature doesn't deliver bug free. In the Prado tutorial, I stubbed my toe on user authentication, so that's where I put things down. My debugging skills are still in development. I'll continue to play with Prado and ASP.net as backburner hobbies, but for the projects that need my living attention right now, I've opened a project called wpScape. At wpScape I'll stay with Wordpress and devote my learning curves to (1) subversion as a web development platform and (2) the art and science of Wordpress theming.