Helpful Coder

I recently started working on reanimating an ancient site I had just sitting around as a backup. It was built on a very old version of Joomla, and while some of the content is still relevant - much of it is not... So, rather than trying to figure out how to import all this content into some more modern CMS and then delete the old stuff, I decided to use this as an opportunity to play around with Pico - a PHP-based flat-file CMS. The idea is that you can easily create content by just creating markdown files in the 'content' directory, and they magically show up on the site. Organization is as simple as subdirectories inside content. Themes are just twig template files. I'm not a huge fan of twig (remember, PHP was originally a templating language... so why do we need something else for templates?) but I'll give it another try - I haven't used twig in at least six years, so maybe it's better. So far things have been going pretty smoothly - I can just copy...

I'm currently working on a pretty large, long-running project as the primary developer and systems administrator. I primarily work with one other person who acts as designer and the main interface with clients and others. Everyone works remote. We quickly realized we needed some way to keep track of ongoing issues/ideas/features - and our initial response was a simple google sheet. I'm a big fan of starting with the simplest possible system first and adding complexity as needed. This worked pretty well, although prioritizing/sorting and remove completed "issues" became clunky over time. In the past I've experienced quite a variety of systems for handling/tracking work. Jira is probably the most popular in larger organizations, but to my mind it was like using a sledgehammer when a pocket knife was needed... plus it was not free and we had no budget. Trello and things like it are pretty nice, but I wanted something with a little more capability to track all t...

This one had me stumped for a while today, so I thought I'd post it in case it's useful to someone. I'm testing a new install of openX for a client, who plans to use it one a separate machine as an ad server. So I've set up the publisher, zones, advertiser, ads, etc. I used an already existing ad they're running (javascript to a remote server). But the zone kept showing that no ads/campaigns were assigned to it. But if I looked at the campaign properties, it showed as being assigned to that zone. So one place said one thing, one said another. Well, turns out the problem is that the zone is set to be 160x600 dimension zone. OpenX has decided that this ad is not actually 160x600 (although it is) and so it won't allow it to be assigned to the zone. Of course, it doesn't tell you that the ad was blocked for that reason . So you're left to wander the openx forums, until you stumble upon a useful post, and decide to set the zone to accept any size ad. So, here...

phpBB version 3.0 is now out . phpBB is one of the most popular bulletin board/forum systems out there, and is open source. I run a few forums on phpBB 2.x and I've always been happy with the ease of setting it up. My biggest complaint was a relative lack of tools built-in to help with spammers. Perhaps 3.0 will solve this! Of course, you can't convert over to 3.0 from 2.x yet, so I guess I'll be waiting a while before trying the new system.