News
News
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Update: February 9th, 2008
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2007 was a year of many changes. The most exciting change (at least from the geek perspective) was the
switch from Windows PC's to Macintosh here at Pemburnia Headquarters. Please check out the new article
describing this odyssey here.
During the course of this year, the major focus of Pemburnia Consulting
changed from PC repair to software development. Although we continue to provide repair, consultation and
network adminstration support for our existing clients, we will not be offering these services to new clients.
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Update: February 16th, 2007
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The big news of the month is our new web site! What, you say, it looks just like the
old website?!? That's true -- but only on the surface. I've redesigned the
"engine" of the site to permit greater control of the inner workings and to add new
features with realative ease.
The old site was based on Joomla -- a content management system (CMS) that controls
every aspect of the site from a database and administrative module. It's a fantastic
system and I still endorse it as a means of maintaining a feature-rich web site with
a minimum of outside help. But, in truth, I'm a programmer first and foremost and I
wanted a site that allowed me to tweak things at the nuts-and-bolts level -- something
Joomla is not designed to do.
This site uses a combination of technologies to produce what you see before you:
- PHP -- a rich and marvelous open-source programming
language available on most Unix-based web hosts.
- The PEAR libraries -- a collection of open-source PHP
code modules that provide such things as a simple way to connect to databases, to manipulate
forms, handle encryption and many, many more.
- MySQL -- the world's most popular open-source database. Also widely available on
most web hosts.
- PHP-Fusebox provides the basic framework for the site
it is a "model-view-controller" (MVC) system that separates the program code from the HTML display
code. This allows web page designers to create the "look and feel" of the site without having
to worry about learning a hard-core programming language -- they simply plug-in the appropriate
"tags" in places where the PHP programmer has provided hooks into the database or other facilities.
- The Smarty template engine -- a system based in PHP that
translates the tags embedded in the web pages into HTML for display.
In the future, I plan to post articles detailing some of the methods and "tricks" I employ to create
web sites and business applications. Stay tuned.
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