Under certain circumstances, you will not be able to "tab through a form" -- ie. use the tab key to go from one form element to the next, standard-issue behavior in the rational (non-IE) browsers. I had a standard form that when tabbed through, would start selecting images on the page, etc. in a seemingly random way.

The solution is to use the HTML tabindex property, to ensure that IE tabs in the correct order.

 
<form>
<input type="text" name="meeting[name]" tabindex="1">
<input type="text" name="meeting[attendees]" tabindex="2">
<input type="text" name="meeting[location]" tabindex="3">
<input type="submit" name="submit" tabindex="4">
</form>
 

As a side note, I fail to understand how so much product goes out the door at Microsoft without any QA to speak of.

style="-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;"

IE now looks sharp and not blurry and pixelated!

Case 1: Wordpress

or, a hammer that hammers

Somebody said to me today "Wordpress is cool, but it's only good for a blog." That "complaint" is exactly what I like about it: it is designed for a specific task, and it performs that task very well, from an end-user perspective. It's very easy to set up and use, and there are plenty of nice themes, and useful plugins out there. It's not so easy to to migrate to a new server but that's another story.

The codebase is pretty garbage, but you can deal with it. There seems to be very little thought to the high-level underpinnings. If you open the wp directories, the structure have almost no meaning. That's not to say that it's disorganized-- it's just organized in a very "PHP" way. My main gripe is that it stores absolute URLs in the database all over the place. Why not store a base URL in a config file, or if you MUST have it in the database, store it in one location and store relative URLs everywhere else? Anyway, it's not pretty code, but it provides a great blogging platform, and because of the task-specific nature of this software, you can work around the awkward architecture. We've installed Wordpress for both clients and friends. (Check out our friend John Kuhner's great blog.) This blog is also proudly powered by Wordpress!

Case 2: Drupal

or, a thingamabob that thingamabobs

We recently worked on the Sports Illustrated Kids site writing a couple of custom Drupal modules, mostly relating to generating custom XML for a gaming engine and the resultant scoring-- "spoints" as they called. Extremely cute word. The folks at Workinman and Milky Elephant did a great job on the Flash end of things.

This was my first real experience with Drupal other than knocking around on my local machine. In some sense, I was impressed with the sheer amount of stuff that is out there in terms of plugins. My work was supported by several of the Drupal plugins, most of which worked well out of the box. I've heard other developers complain about the complexity of the admin user interface, but it didn't bother me too much.

Like Wordpress, Drupal has an almost unlimited amount of plugins and themes, and the installation process is relatively straightforward. Also like Wordpress, the Drupal codebase is poorly organized, and the database is even worse. The problem is compounded because Drupal is not oriented to a specific task: you actually do want to manipulate the code for whatever your task may be. However, Drupal doesn't follow any accepted design pattern-- even the ubiquitous "sloppy PHP" pattern-- you are essentially learning a new language. A language that is far worse than established paradigms.

I do understand how this happened: it was coded for some site a guy had to build 10 years ago, and people just kept adding to a fundamentally shaky idea. In 1999, PHP wasn't an object oriented language (really), so this made sense. It has not made sense since the release of PHP 5. Which was a really long time ago.

However, I bet that somebody with serious Drupal skills can get a lot accomplished in a fairly decent way. And there's a lot of code in production at Microsoft and Chase Bank and wherever else that is like that: it works to the end user, doesn't break much and performs okay. But it is not fundamentally sound. So how can one complain.

Soapbox Please...

In my experiences with these two platforms I have come to a solid conclusion about off-the-shelf webware: if it is oriented to a specific task and does it well (MediaWiki, Mantis) it is worth using. I know people write their own wiki software, or their own bug tracker, but why bother? Smart people have spent a lot of time making something designed for that exact task. It would be like building a car that was functionally equivalent to a Toyota -- why not just buy a Toyota?

That's fairly self-evident, but people extend that reasoning to things that are not designed for a particular task. They believe they need a "CMS". Nobody really needs a CMS. There is always business logic associated with an idea. In many cases, this business logic is more complex than it seems to be. To me, software like Drupal and Joomla have no place. If it is a truly simple "CMS"-- a site where clients can edit the HTML with a good interface, why not just use Wordpress? If it is more complex, you should hire a professional to code it properly. Ultimately, a good coder who uses Zend or Struts is going to be able to work just as quickly as someone familiar with Drupal. Drupal's fundamental logic is not sound, and you need to find a developer in the future who is a "Drupal programmer". This type of specialization is very dangerous for a business. Good object-oriented code-- even in a complex application-- can be readily understood by any developer worth his salt.

http://devzone.pratthost.com/2008/11/24/php-enable-soap-with-php5-on-media-temples-dv-35

Due to a bug in FF 3.5 displaying the pre tag, we're linking to this class here

Maximum execution time of 300 seconds exceeded.

Since this was a very large file that I knew would run longer than this I had to alter the default settings for phpMyAdmin. To do this I altered the config.inc.php in the phpMyAdmin folder (the error message above is probably accompanied with the path to your phpMyAdmin installation).  Set :

$cfg['ExecTimeLimit'] = 0

That will let your script run for as long as it needs. One note, I needed to actually add the entire entry above, as it wasn't in my config file at all. Happy importing!

Do you like to read about new developments in science and other fields? Are you tired of "science by press release"? ResearchBlogging.org is your place. Research Blogging allows readers to easily find blog posts about serious peer-reviewed research, instead of just news reports and press releases.

See for yourself: