Silicon Chisel

This week we launched the latest follow-on to find-a-therapist.com: treatment-programs.com.

This was an 80% rewrite of the old code-base. Some thought was given to going to a full-fledge PHP framework stack, but instead we opted to keep things light and simple. The Smarty template engine was used to handle the “V” side of an MVC application. This also benefited the application by providing a nice view-caching mechanism to increase performance.

Adodb’s ActiveRecord implimentation was used for the “M” part of the design. This put everything on a nice, solid database model which would also allow for migrating to some other platform should the need arise.

Throw in a splash of JQuery here and there, and some other JavaScript controls and voilà.

News active record, adodb, jquery, php, smarty

WordPress 2.5 2.6 was released this week and it was so nice that I decided it was worth converting my old Joomla installation over to WordPress for the main Silicon Chisel site. Another incentive is that my personal blog is also in WordPress – as well as a few other sites I manage, so it just generally eases the maintenance load.

The first cut over went pretty well, aided by the “MAMBO2WORDPRESS IMPORT WIZARD“ script by Rodney Blevins which – with some modifications for table names and the like – at least allowed me to get the primary content into WordPress.

It will likely take another week or so to get everything settled in, and finalize the plugins – but then I should be able to get back to writing about technology. Some topics I plan to cover soon include:

• Reviews of the Mac web design packages RapidWeaver and Sandvox.
• A look at the “big three” content management systems – well, at least as far as I see it, anyway – Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress.
• Some of the new Web 2.0 sites I’ve been beta testing.

News wordpress

Many years ago I was a heavy Mac user, as well as a Mac developer. Then I was more or less forced to adopt the Windows PC – partly for economic reason, partly because I entered the PC game industry.

Recently, though, I acquired a MacBook Pro and am loving it. Not just for the fun of using a Mac again, but also for the fact that it makes a great development machine for web applications. So the site will be adding reviews and articles about the Mac, and using the Mac for software devlopment.

Macintosh, News Macintosh

A new version of the successful psychotherapist directory - Find-a-Therapist.com - was launched this week. It features a complete rewrite from the ground up for speed, ecommerce support, and deployability across multiple platforms. A sister site for psychotherapy information - Find-a-Therapist.info - was launched as well.

News, Projects mysql, php

I’ve added a nice CSS template for the StikiPad online Wiki service to the files area. It uses the “Classic” layout style – just duplicate that in your “My StikiPad”, then paste in the new CSS and update the reference to it in the Layout.

News templates