Let me start by saying that wordpress is not an obvious choice to use as a content management system for a community website. Any framework or content management system does have some benefits and disadvantages. In most cases other systems are likely faster and more scalable, but wordpress is flexible and it has a great user interface. The trick is to benefit the most from the wordpress’ upsides while solving problems with its downsides. To manage this, start by analyzing the used system.
Because xTemplate was no longer maintained, I found myself in need of an other template engine. Because xTemplate was so easy to learn and because I don’t like to rewrite already existing templates, I created a new one. It still needs more work, but this is what I came up with so far:
Cached_Templates
Version : 0.0.1beta
Required: PHP 5
Download: Template (4)
It is a working version but it’s not yet ready to use on a live environment. Still I want to share this beta version, so you can tell me what you think of my “cached-template” idea. I hope you enjoy playing with it.
It’s not easy to find free, good, cross-platform, easy to use, eye-pleasing developer tools that go beyond mereIDE’s and text editors.
Take UML-model editors for instance. Most of the UML tools I’ve come across have all these advanced options that clog the computer screen so much that I need to buy a new one just to have some “working area”.
Enter Violet UML.
In short:
- The interface looks beautiful
- So do the diagrams you draw with it
- It’s easy to use
- It’s cross-platform (java-based)
- It’s GPL licensed
It’s probably not for experienced UML writers, but it does help you get started on introducing UML into your development team.
If you’re one of the latter, go ahead and download Voilet UML.
As every developer knows, a way to get a better performance is page-caching. This boost performance because fewer database queries has to be executed, but you can take caching a bit further. A plain html page is much faster loaded than one that is created by an interpreter like php, but it is not flexible at all. You can create a deployment script that creates cache files as html pages before anyone visits them or use some PHP accelerator like opcode to speedup the page load, but here is an alternative.
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The reason you should start to professionalize your development department is that your team will work faster and produce less bugs. In my job at eFuture I focused mainly on this topic. Even though we implemented the following on a PHP development team, I hope this document will help to achieve a professional IT-department in general.
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