TechnocratTechnocrat’s Random Thoughts

People ask all the time what tools I use in development.  I have a pretty long list of stuff I use, but I will cut it down to the most important things I feel people would be interested in knowing.

For PHP, javascript, and HTML development I use Zend Studio.  It’s not free, but by far the best development tool out there.  I have tried all the other php development packages both free and paid and though some of them are pretty good, its hard to beat Zend Studio for me.  I recently switched from 5 to 6 for Eclipse.  When 6 first came out it was buggy as hell.  6.1 finally fixed almost everything.  Though there are still a few annoyances it’s finally at a point that I can use it and not get too pissed at it.

My FTP client is FlashFXP.  Again not a free product and thinking ahead none of my choices will be so I should just get that out of the way now.  I used to do a ton of FTP’ing in a past life (Shout to EsC and EsX brothers RIP).   If you did what I did nothing is better than FlashFXP.  So this choice is a hold over for me.  I still like its uncluttered interface and ability to do things like search and ignore files and folders.   CuteFTP and SImpleFTP just dont do it for me.

Another MUST have is a tool to examine differences in files.  For me its examDiff Pro.  It’s extremely powerful and very user friendly.  None of the other products are even close in my opinion.

My final tool is TextPad for creating and modify text files (or other text based files such as SQL).  It has a number of great features and abilities such as reg searching.

Anyways I hope you find these tools to be as helpful as I do.

I was talking to someone who was writing a blog post about different CMSs.  I am sure they are wondering why they picked me after my comments during the conversation.  Here are some of the things I responded to.

How do you think Nuke-Evolution is seen in the CMS world?
Very poorly!  We have never got any respect from anyone in the CMS world.  For example we have been a packetpub finalist twice.  TWICE!  How many other nuke versions have done that?  None!  Yet places like opensourcecms.com refuse to list us.  Why!?  I wish I could tell you but they seem to generally ignore us.

The people at Wikipedia didn’t feel that we had enough of a following to have our own page.  Really!?  We have the second highest user percentage behind only the original nuke flavor.  We are in the top five of total users on a nuke site.  We have had many translations and sister sites in different countries.  What else do you need to qualify?

I still get a bunch of grief on different sites when they find I work on a phpNuke project.  Their biggest argument is that it is insecure.  Well the original flavor was (probably still is) for sure.  Do you know how many times a major secruity flaw has been found that would allow hackers into your site with Evo?  Once.  One time and it was in the original Evo release.  We patched it one hour after it was found.  I don’t know for sure how many sites were affected by the number that were reported to us was 5.  5 sites seems like a pretty good number when it was downloaded 5,000 times at that point. Sure there have been other security issues found but none of them have the ability to get past the security we have implemented.  So the argument of poor security doesn’t fly.

They also state the phpNuke is slow and outdated.  That’s true to a degree.  We have done so many things to strengthen and improve Nuke that we barely recognize as it once was.  Evo and Nuke are not even in the same league anymore.  Is Evo perfect, no.  But I think it can hold its own against other CMSs.

What is the future of phpNuke?
There isn’t one.  Nuke is dying a slow death.  FB (the original author of Nuke) let Nuke fall apart.  He didn’t listen to his users, ignored security issues, and let the project become stale and outdated.  Now with phpBB ending the 2.0.x branch there is a nail slowly being hammered into Nuke’s coffin.  Is it the final nail?  Hard to say for sure.  My opinion is yes.

Nukes days are numbered.  I am not sure how big that number is but it’s counting down.

There were some other questions but they weren’t anything big.  I wonder if he will actually post this??

I just updated this sites version of wordpress to 2.7.  Nice!  Bunch of new features.  Faster.  Better layout.  I like it alot!