Likewise, I find the Java editors to be a bit bulky, but have been using a very lightweight editor called jEdit for several months now.

Zend is pretty good, but is again Java.

I dont think you have to use OS to be cool, I am not a Bill hater or anything… it is simply a cost issue.

I would never spend hundreds on Dreamweaver for example, althougth I think it is a very good app…. Most people (myself included) give themselves two options…. OS or the Torrentz…. and cracks from the torrentz can deliver some rather unpleasant payloades

For virusess and other undesirables, I have found the best medicine is Nod32. Not had any viruses since I’ve had it, only a keylogger that was installed by a lunatic fiend.

That said I recently changed jobs and have not asked for any software (at work). If I wanted commerctial apps I could have them but I don’t really see the point….

I think the OS webapps are good, the reason I wanted to move into PHP (from Java / JSP) was so that I could work with some of those apps.

Customers have to be careful who they take on though…. lot of ‘UK’ companies just hive work straight out to India or Eastern Europe and have no clue what they are getting back.

Regards Joomla, a while back I was looking at a companies portfolio where they had built a lot of sites using it. They had re-templated / stripped out all reference to Joomla to try and make it look bespoke… but forgot the favicon. This lead me to wonder how many browsers they had tested with, as IE6 did not display the icon. If they had tested with FF they would have seen it for sure…. bet that was an off shored template….

http://www.content-management-solutions.co.uk/

As soon as you see the screenshot you know its Joomla.

There is also another local comapny who uses Joomla and bargs about it as their own. I don’t see what their is to brag about though, all CMSs lack scalability. If you are doing content management, you need a content management framework (CMF), which allows you to quickly code into existance advanced solutions.

I think its fine to make money from OS apps as long as you are honest about what you are doing / charging for.

Those guys are implying it is their own system which is pretty low… also they say they their sites are SEO’d, but last time I looked Joomla did not support permalinks and its SEO was not that good…. issues which they have failed to address on their own site….

I like the “pull me” tab on your site, Ive not seen that done before… how many people do you have working with you??

*A core, which makes PHP more object orientated, adding better functionality for implementation and extension of classes
*A very fast ‘templating’ engine using XSLT which is much faster than regular expression based engines
*A file and image upload handler intergrating PHPthumb.
*Various SEO tools, such as analytics gathering, checking where you rank in search engines and another script I use to find places you can get links from competitors sites
*Events, just like Javascript events, so once a function has done something it will do something else. For example I may have a class that sends emails to people and I might want to add functionality to update a database record. Rather than adding a new method to the class I can just say when the class has finished running update the database.

There are also some parts that have become redundant because they are not good enough - the learning process. Namely:

*A class that creatred the functionality of update, insert, delete from bd and email out from one PHP array.
*Something similar to PDO.

So, currently we don’t have a CMF, although we are carfully planning it.

Do you have any good references that would give some good ideas and directions? The biggest influence in the work is actually a JavaScript framework, Mootools. All the PHP frameworks I looked at didn’t seem to cut the mustard.

What are Joomlas SEO downfalls? I would have thought that a project such as that would have sorted that kind of stuff out by now.

Thank you for your compliment. I have to be kept away from small projects, because I can’t help but make scaleable HTML. It is still something I am perfecting the method for. I have a newer version of it up at:
http://www.semlabs.co.uk/rank-check/
The tool doesn’t work at the moment as i’ve just registered that domain and need to re-config.

The company has six people and use freelance design for overflow.

By the way - Screem is really great but it seems this app works at a snails gallop on my desktop so I’m still a die-hard fan of standard notepad (currently gedit)

Notepad++ and Vim are basically text editors…

You want to see a fangled IDE play with Visual Studio its way ahead of any others Ive used…. its amazing what you can do with drag and drop these days!! The only problem is understanding what its gone off and done!!

Are you planning on using any existing repositories, such as some of the Pear packages, or do you consider those out moded too?

Afraid I dont really have any suggestions, Ive never done anything like this… your some way ahead of me!

One element you do not mention is security, i.e. filters, separation / identification / control of input etc.

It would be nice for example to be able to set at an application level whether you wish to consider the database to be internal to the application, or external (and therefore filtered), I think there are a few things you could play with in that area…

Basic stuff compared to the things you have already described!!

The only one I can remember for sure is permalinks which were not present last time I looked at Joomla… but I think there are a number of improvements you can make to the control of titles, tags etc.

Surprised you say that about Screem… I thought it was quite fast… I dont have a particularly quick pc either…

Selling AdWords. From the second hand. This means she was selling “sponsored links” but there were no sponsored links, only AdWords… So she was a trickster, got it? Con-artist, scammer, fourflusher? No idea how to explain it better Jeremy

Guess some people will try anything!!

I used to use Notepad+ but I found it was a bit of a pain when using UTF8 as it often opened documents using an incorrect encoding. It was a while ago though so maybe thats sorted now.

With regards to Joomla and things - I’m not a big fan of any open-source CMS. I’ve yet to find one that ‘makes sense to me’ and produces quality XHTML to the level I require. They always seem so (overly) complicated (even for a developer with 10 years under my belt).

As a company we use our own CMS built from the ground up - utilising PHP5 to create an object orientated framework that can be extended simply by extending the ‘core’ classes. Our own site www.acopic.co.uk is one example of it. It generates clean XHTML and utilises a clean URL stucture throughout. It means we can create content-managed sites in hours instead of days/weeks. It took about 3 months to build but our productivity has soared since.

Anyway - I’m sticking with Zend until a really kick-ass IDE comes along.

I havent used Zend, PHPEdit is the one I am using now, very featureful and cheaper than Zend.