Just When Things Start Going Well…

Just when things start going well, I find myself incredibly busy doing the things I have to do, in place of the things I want to do. I’m going to post less for a while, but I’ll try to make up for it in quality. I’m not going to go into the issues at hand, because they are rather personal. I hope that you all understand, and bear with me going forward.

Getting there…

Well, I’m having issues left and right with Laravel. Nothing major, just that the documentation isn’t always clear, and the tutorials all seem to be for Laravel 3. I’m on Laravel 4, and it’s got a bunch of gotcha’s that mean the tutorials for L3 won’t work all the time. It’s okay, Nettuts posted a lovely set of videos documenting the gotcha’s and what not. You can find them by clicking here. A lot of the changes make sense, some of the changes don’t. The tutorials may not have shown me everything, but they showed me what I need to know to figure things out for myself. I’m sure I’d learn more if I signed up for the premium tutorials, and unlocked some hidden content. Oh, another gotcha is that the tutorial is still from an earlier release of L4, so the controller stuff is a little wonky. Well, only the function names. Instead of calling your index method index_action ( like in L3 ), or index ( like in the tutorial ), you need to call it getIndex. I might want to migrate back to L3 until L4 becomes a bit more stable.

Picking up Laravel

Well, I’ve come to the point where CodeIgniter isn’t serving my purposes very effectively. It’s a decent framework, don’t get me wrong, but I think Laravel is a better framework for the types of applications that I wish to produce. I’ve still got a lot to learn about the framework, but I’m sure I can pick it pretty quickly. The documentation isn’t too bad, though there are a few things that confuse me. I guess that’s just the way it is whenever you try something new. We’ll see what happens in the future.

mCMS

Working on a CMS based on CodeIgniter. If asked why, I’ll reply, “Because I can!” Do I think it’ll replace other big CMS’s out there? No. Do I think everyone should code a CMS? No. I’m doing it because it seemed like fun, and I’ve always wanted to do one. It’s not needed, it’s definitely not necessary, but who cares. It’s just a way of excersizing my brain, and conquering new arenas.

Right now, I just started it, so it hasn’t got anything going for it. I don’t really know where I’m headed with it, and I don’t know, nor do I care, if anyone will use it. If people use it, I’ll consider it a flattering bonus. Now, I don’t want to come off as totally directionless. The first task of this CMS will to take the place of my current blogging software. The second task will be to provide some useful way of presenting my projects. Beyond that, I don’t know, but it’s good to start small. I’ll expand to new areas as I complete the current goals. After I get the blog and the project centers working, I’ll probably add a forum, but that’s still undecided.

If you’re interested in following my progress, I’m keeping the source code on my github account. Feel free to check out my mCMS repository! It’s based on CodeIgniter with wiredesignz Modular Extensions.

New Rails Dev Server

My friend Jason graciously donated to me another server for use. I’ll be setting it up to run rails. It’s not up yet, but I can see the potential for some incredible projects over there. I’ll link to it when it’s up. I just want to thank you Jason for your support, and thank you readers for coming back for more! Look forward to rails code in the future!