@jose_zap has replied to me regarding a tweet of mine comparing CodeIgniter and CakePHP and the different aspects of both technologies.

Since Twitter itself is way restricted into the 140 chars (which I like most usually - less offtopic and media) I will better blog this off here as a couple of things I don't like in Cake.

First of all, I've been doing Cake for a year and a half and have several projects up and running with different web services, sync mechanisms and so on. It's usually one of my preferred platforms (right after WP and Croogo which is actually Cake based) but it doesn't mean that I adore all of the features in it.

Auto recursive models 

By default linking the models in Cake sets a recursive level of 1 - so you get a direct access to level 1 of all corelated models. it is usually nice as you don't ...Dive in

I am off for few weeks delivering several 3-days trainings on web app security best practices in Saudi Arabia. It's my first training outside of Europe so I had to spend some time exploring the culture of the nation here which is pretty exciting.

Already had two trainings so far and few more to go. There is going to be another batch on November for another colleague of mine and I'm trying to sync my materials to serve as a good reference during the next batch of trainings. 

Today I released on github DX Image Box. It's a Fancybox wrapper that hooks in the Croogo plugin system so a developer could easily integrate lightbox integration with two lines of code. 

Last time I was doing Croogo work was in December, but recently I had to do some development on small Croogo-based projects and due to the chance that some of the features are going to be reused later, decided to do some plugin work. This is the first plugin released and I will consider contributing another one or two small thanks to Fahad's work on Croogo.

Note: This essay is not always applicable while some projects definitely demand a straight work schedule, reporting and collaboration between the team members. However it reflects the majority of projects and clients out there in the wild.

As an employer I prefer to charge on a project basis. It's easier to plan my budgets and the costs of the final results. 

As a contractor I prefer hourly payments. It helps dropping the pressure from incorrect specifications and further negotiations after the project and the budget have already been set.

However I am well acquainted with the pros and cons of both methods. But there are three terms that I believe most clients use in an inappropriate context without gaining the maximum productivity and optimal costs for their projects. We're speaking about the hourly rates, the amount of work and availability.

Hourly rate

As I said I got tired of arguing with clients with dummy specifications ...Dive in

I have released a simple and minimalist WordPress theme called Sonne in the WPORG repo. It has a clean two-column index view, some CSS3 effects, logo could be managed through the admin, text is entirely centered and you could also set featured images to the index page for listing and thumbing there. Pretty neat and simple.

Check Sonne here.

Following Dries and Rob Douglas on Twitter I mentioned in the latest updates that Twitter started using Drupal for community site for the dev team. Dries has described in his blog http://buytaert.net/twitter-using-drupal that Twitter migrated to Drupal using one of their community platforms that I really enjoy. While WP has BuddyPress (and that could be ran separately as well) Drupal has few configurations for social platforms and seems like Twitter is using one of them.

There we are - https://dev.twitter.com/ . I would really like to see a feedback from the Twitter dev team for the usability of the platform. It's a well known fact that Drupal is a great platform for developers but has an non-intuitive interface for end clients which is one of the reasons WordPress is so popular right now. 

Working with ddsmoothmenu Smooth Navigation Menu by Dynamic Drive for a WordPress project I encountered a stupid lack of setting to provide image paths dynamically. This is a jQuery-based dropdown menu which seems and works fine but requires a static path to the images. Only two images though, for the arrows down and right, but it would be a serious issue when releasing a website or migrating to a new server.

So I decided to add a new setting configurable through the JavaScript call in your call-menu file where you could use php/java/python/whateva to retrieve the correct path dynamically and just pass it. I'm using v.1.5 and I did 2 corrections:

in the ddsmoothmenu.js file replaced all smoothmenu.arrowimages strings with setting.arrowimages (just changing 'smoothmenu' to 'setting' in these three lines). There are 5 strings to be replaced at lines 75 to 77. What I do is add a new setting for them in the ...Dive in

Google started their new service called Google+ which is the newest addition to their web toolkit collection. After the fail of Buzz and Wave (I'm sincerely missing the last one) this one stands a chance to survive and definitely shake the Facebook market.

Few hours of clicking around I was happy with the light version of network - the standard minimalistic design (total lack of any design according to some users) and lightweight platform unlike Wave. The invitation procedure that we know since GMail works as well - plenty of mediocre users wanted them to be _in_ only for the being special case. However.

A great review on the subject is the comparison of Plus with Wave and Buzz. I'm hitting the +1 on that one.

WordPress is still number 1 platform for blogging. Top used blogging functionality is blog posting and commenting to blog threads. 

However, people that comment on a blog post normally have no way to get feedback eventually if anyone comments back in the same post. The post author (and administrator) receives notification for the comment but the comment author, on the other hand, has no natural way to be pinged back for a reply. This is a serious leak in the WP standard functionality. It is at least unethical not to inform someone for the reply (which might occur in a day, month, year even more).

WordPress comes with a standard feed for latest posts and feed for recent comments as well. However subscribing for all comments in a blog or finding a specific thread to subscribe for is not usable and not practical as well. The solution is the Subscribe To Comments ...Dive in

 

Hello everyone, today we will discuss the hot topics on the Internet and specifically the WordPress platform and some premium hints from the ThemeForest market presented by one of the authors there - Slobodan Kustrimovic (a.k.a. wpcanyon). He is an expert in the WP world and has published few themes on ThemeForest and currently working on a new framework in his passion to constantly improve the quality and usability of his products. 

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M: Hi Slobodan and thanks for your time. How are the things going on your side?

 

S: Hi Mario.

Can't complain, everything is great at the moment. Currently working a new framework that'll give the user even more flexibility and also be a great base on which we'll develop themes faster.

 

M: Great - can't wait to see your first demo. Where are you from?

 

S: I'm from a little country in Europe called Serbia, right next to your country.

 

M: What ...Dive in