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| Interview with a phpws Developer: DON SEILER |
Interview with a phpws Developer: DON SEILER
by Robert Kennedy
Don is the chief developer for the Bulletin Board mod as well as (surprise!) a few others...
Don lives in Manitowoc, Wisconsin (USA) with wife Jane and 1-year-old daughter
Catherine where, Don says, it is very, very cold at the moment!
He has a BA in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison
(1998). By day he's an Oracle DBA and Software Engineer (perl, java) and
also a developer for Gentoo Linux.
How did you first get involved with phpWebSite?
A couple of years ago I wrote a php app called "FFL." It was a
basic php/mysql front-end for your own web-based fantasy football
league. It lacked statistics (you had to calculate scores on your own),
but people seemed to like it.
Then Mike Noyes contacted me and other coders who had written
similar fantasy football apps. He wanted to join forces and create
"the app to end all apps." Mike suggested making it a module for
this app called phpWebSite. phpWebSite was still in 0.8.x at the time
and I wasn't too impressed. Once it went 0.9.x though I gave it another
look and started participating in the dev mailing list and what-not.
Through this participation a fellow named Mike Windsor contacted me about
writing a module for his real estate website. This was my first module
and became phpwsListings. Mike generously sponsored my development and
released the code open source. Wendall Cada has taken over development
and done a fantastic job. He's working hard on re-writing it for the
newer Item/Manager setup that makes module development much cleaner and
easier.
After that came TeamSite, now LeagueSite, which was started
for my brother-in-law's baseball team, the Manitowoc
Bandits (http://manitowocbandits.com). LeagueSite is really my baby
and I've got a lot of great RFEs to adapt it for sports like
tennis, volleyball, cricket, and racing sports like auto racing and
track & field.
phpwsBB and phpwsContacts were written to fill many users' needs,
including myself. Obviously many sites use bulletin boards, and
I didn't like the idea of just having a wrapper around phpBB when a
native bulletin board should be simple, and it was at first. The users
have pushed some great ideas in since the first incarnation.
phpwsContacts started so I could have a site for my class reunion. I
was my senior class president in high school and so am responsible for
class reunions and I was pretty steamed that classmates.com charges to
get address info. I wanted to have a site where alumni could get
together free of charge and contact each other. phpwsContacts is a
generic contact site that isn't "class reunion" based at all, so it
fills many more needs than just mine.
I wrote phpwsFortune just as a way to take a lot of existing quotes
collections that were written for fortune-mod and display them.
I've also got a couple of modules in the planning stages…
phpwsScheduler is one. phpwsProv is actually released but there's not
much to it.
I'd like to actually scale back and focus on quality rather than
quantity. Any willing dev should feel free to contact me if they want
to help.
Were you creating similar solutions in php before phpwebsite?
FFL was my first open-source app. It felt great to finally contribute
_something_ to the OSS movement, regardless of how insignificant it
might seem compared to other applications.
For those of us who don't have your perspective, how has the growth in
interest been over the years with App State's releases?
Well obviously my own interest is always high with phpWebSite core
changes. The last changes made in phpWebSite 0.9.3-2 have done us a
great service in terms of memory usage and efficiency.
If you're asking me to judge the public's interest in my own work, I
really have no idea. SourceForge's statistics are notoriously
inaccurate, and I haven't received any donations yet -- hint hint ;) --
so it is hard to judge.
How can new developers get involved?
If you want to create a module, I'd first join the phpws-dev mailing
list and make sure no one has or is creating something like it already.
You may even find an interested veteran developer to join in and monitor
your progress. Otherwise if you want to dive in and go through it
yourself, that is what the Skeleton module is for. Copy it and start
modifying to your heart's content.
The main thing is to have a purpose. Obviously your module needs to
fulfill some task, whether it be a bulletin board or contact manager or
whatever. It is one of the fundamentals of software engineering. Get
your functional requirements together first and your development will go
much easier.
What are some of the common errors developers make with the development team?
Not sure if there are any "mistakes" that you can make really. The core
team (Matt and Steven) are pretty great guys and we can sit in
#phpwebsite and gab until the cows come home.
One thing you definitely want to do as a module developer is peruse some
of the core classes. A lot of great code is in there and you'll want to
take advantage of existing class functionality instead of trying to
re-invent the wheel (like I found out with image thumbnails).
What are some of the common errors users make with developers?
My #1 top pet peeve of all time is users NOT reading the INSTALL
document or the release notes for a download. I would say over 75% of
the support requests and help posts I get are due to someone not doing
either of those things.
Please please PLEASE: RTFM!
Where do you see the Bulletin Board going?
Well it's a bulletin board, so there's only so many things that it
SHOULD do. Right now I'd like to replace a lot of the text links with
nice graphical buttons, but then you lose translation capabilities so
we'll have to see. I'm still mulling over the "emoticons/avatars" RFE I
have.
The one definite thing I want to do is have it use BBCode. BBCode is
standard now and there are actually PEAR libs to parse it. I've already
gotten the OK from the core team to modify the parseOutput function to
parse BBCode, so it should enable the use of BBCode in all modules, not
just phpwsBB. I really believe that allowing HTML in forms is never a
good idea.
####
Created on 10/13/2004 08:24 PM by andrewp
Updated on 10/18/2004 09:37 PM by andrewp
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Don uses MT?
Posted on: 02/05/2004 05:38 AM
By: Anonymous
I read the interview, I revisited the pwslistings and made a donation. So there, I can take a hint;-) But then I went to Don's site and I was surprised to see his blog is movable type.
The thing about moveable type is it looks really good out of the box. That's why so many designers use it. I've never seen a PWS site look as good as MT. But MT is just a blog. It has numerous plug ins but I've never seen anyone use them.
I've installed both and it comes down to features vs look.
PWS is an overkill to be used as a blog and it doesn't have the nice resize an image upon submitting an article feature that I was hoping Don would write one day (hint ;-) or the bookmarklet that lets you hit the toolbar and grab the link and title of the website you are looking at and send it to your blog.
I just tried it.
That's a great feature.
And here is another (rhetorical?) question.
Is it better to post here or in the forums?
Thanks to Robert and Don for all your work!
Marino
Re: Don uses MT?
Posted on: 02/05/2004 09:23 AM
By: Anonymous
[Is it better to post here or in the forums?]
Both!
Thanks for the appreciation!
Bobby
Edited By: RobertK On: 02/05/2004 10:18 AM
Re: Don uses MT?
Posted on: 02/05/2004 10:16 AM
By: Anonymous
The look and feel is all in the theme work. I have no real design skills and I just wanted something quick and lightweight so yes I went with MT over PHPWS.
My main gruff with setting up new phpWS sites is having to work on the themes. :p
Don.
Re: Don uses MT?
Posted on: 03/14/2004 11:39 AM
By: Anonymous
yuazfytaezstazrdez Right Justified Text
Re: Don uses MT?
Posted on: 06/18/2004 07:47 PM
By: Anonymous
I never played much with phpws till vers 8.. and in 8 as well
as 9 with no phpws theme specific experience found modifications a walk in the park.
here's a basic theme ( much more 3-D in the oven ) that took
less than an hour to do:
http://www.soft-vision.com/ao_vets
I didn't come here to post though - was looking for a shortcut ( some instructions vs.. deciphering the code ) on the phpwsfortune ( those cute saying's) format so I could inport a
few and use a little more band width. Of is that the catch? We get it free - without doc's on the format - so we have to work as hard as you did to create it???? eh? eh? eh?
Best
Houston, TX
Re: Don uses MT?
Posted on: 11/19/2004 11:59 PM
By: Anonymous
Just an FYI that the next version of announce module will be usable with the JustBlogIt! mozilla/firefox extension for easy blogging!
Tennis Module
Posted on: 05/10/2005 12:06 AM
By: Anonymous
I Really really need the tennis version of this leaguesite for a non profit site I am doing for a local tennis association. Please help?
Deborah www.acecomputerguy.com
debbie@acecomputerguy.com |
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