lib.breadcrumbs = HMENU
lib.breadcrumbs.special = rootline
lib.breadcrumbs.special.range = 0
lib.breadcrumbs.1 = TMENU
lib.breadcrumbs.1 {
     noBlur = 1
     NO.linkWrap = <li> |&nbsp;>&nbsp;|*||*| |< /li>
     NO.stdWrap.htmlSpecialChars = 1
     CUR = 1
     CUR.allWrap = <li>|</li>
     CUR.doNotLinkIt = 1
}

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Ok, i understand that we all need to disconnect from work but when you play don’t bother with that all your friends. And Farmville takes friend harassment to the next level. Yeah i play occasionally some StarCraft or some other little strategy game but did i ever sent you messages asking for God knows what ?

And now there are other “little animal” petting games on Facebook. They seem to grow like mushrooms after a good rain. If things evolve this way i guess i will have to quit Facebook and delete my account.

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Interesting articles last week:

1. Gartner report on PHP – published by Danne Lundqvist on dotvoid.com – writes about a report by Gartner (here) that makes it clear that more and more companies discover the benefits of PHP and adoption is increasing among major companies.
2. A case for table-based design – published by Evert Pot on rooftopsolutions.nl – i could not agree more, table based designs are useful in some situations.
3. ASP.NET for PHP developers – published by Chris Taylor on net.tutsplus.com – does a great introduction to ASP.NET using C# for PHP developers. I’m even tempted to do a site in ASP.NET just for educational purpose
4. Why is reusable code so hard to secure ? – published on devcentral.f5.com – some aspects of this article are subject to debate but others do present us with a valid issue when developing reusable code
5. How to speed up your WordPress sites – published on devwebpro.com – as page speed is becoming a ranking factor for Google its nice to know what could i do with my blog if overnight would become hugely popular.
6. 40+ essential Drupal Modules – published on nicklewis.org- well most of these should be familiar to every Drupal developer but its nice to have a place where to look up if you search for something specific and proven for the task at hand.

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But what if you want more?

Maybe you have four columns Left, Normal, Central and Right. And besides that you also have Header, Footer and Border.

Its possible. In TYPO3 you can alter these columns to suit your needs. All you need to do is to place a configuration array in the typo3conf/extTables.php

Here is my array:

$TCA["tt_content"]["columns"]["colPos"]["config"]["items"] = array (
"3" => array ("Header||Header||||||||","3"),
"2" => array ("Right||Right||||||||","2"),
"1" => array ("Left||Left||||||||","1"),
"0" => array ("Normal||Normal||||||||","0"),
"5" => array ("Central||Central||||||||","5"),
"6" => array ("Border||Border||||||||","6"),
"4" => array ("Footer||Footer||||||||","4")
);

Also in your Page’s TSconfig you must set the following value

mod.SHARED.colPos_list=0,1,2,3,4,5,6

Theoretically its possible to add as many columns as you need but practically you are limited to 127 because of the database structure for colPos field = tinyint(3) that gives a max value of 127

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3. Ready for the future of the Internet?

The testing of the platform was quite a different story. I wanted to change some things on the default installation but this became a problem as documentation is not the strong part of Magento. As one user points it out, the Varien forums are full of unanswered threads which end like this “Nevermind. Solved it myself.”. The company that develops Magento has no real interest to put online some good documentation as i see it, probably because they are making their money from support. And if everyone finds the documentation he needs there is less need for support.

Changing only small things took some hours. Don’t get me wrong, i am used to learn difficult frameworks and cmses. I worked for years on Typo3 which is also hard to learn. But even Typo3 is easy to learn when you compare it with Magento.

And the performance of the application is bad. It is very very slow. This is espacially annoying when you try to work on it. The frontend that is supposedly cached isn’t too much better then the backend. For an ecommerce platform speed is a major factor. Customers are used to fast webpages and if the user needs to wait for a webpage a longer time to load, he probably has already opened up some other ecommerce site.  Competition is fierce and you cannot afford to loose customers because your site is slow. Sure you can throw more hardware at it, but that will cost you and from what i’ve read this wouldn’t speed it up very much. And forget about installing it on shared hosting, you will need some powerful stuff to run this platform (something around the 100$/month mark to be reasonably fast).

If you want to tinker with the code you should know that the codebase is huge (~6000 files) and the quality of the code is not so good (see here what others are saying about this).

My overall impression is that Magento has a momentum now based on hype but this will fade away as soon as people will realize that not everything that flies is edible.  Sure, Magento can be a choice if you have very much money to spend on support or to hire a company that has relevant experience with it. Or if you have lots and lots of time on your hand to experiment with the product and you can afford to host it on some powerful server. And if you don’t really care about performance. Otherwise you should stick to other ecommerce platforms.

Yet again one of the Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts of Software Engineering is proved to be true:

“T1. Most software tool and technique improvements account for about a 5- to 30-percent increase in productivity and quality. But at one time or another, most of these improvements have been claimed by someone to have “order of magnitude” (factor of 10) benefits. Hype is the plague on the house of software.”

If you want other opinions about Magento read the following posts:

http://www.blueacorn.com/blog/shopping-carts/magento-commerce-a-first-look/

http://www.htmlist.com/development/magento-ecommerce-review-platform-perils-and-impressions-three-months-in/

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=601503

No related posts.

The annoying thing is that there is no way to enable popups for a certain site. At least not from Google Chrome interface.  I found a startup parameter “-disable-popup-blocking” that should do that but i want to enable popup blocking only for certain sites. Not all of them! Maybe Google should have waited with the launch of Chrome until some basic features like popup blocking are finished.

Here is the rest of the startup parameters (maybe they help someone):

-disable-hang-monitor
-disable-metrics
-disable-metrics-reporting
-assert-test
-renderer-assert-test
-crash-test
-renderer-crash-test
-renderer-startup-dialog
-plugin-startup-dialog
-testshell-startup-dialog
-plugin-launcher
-channeltesting-channel
-homepagestart-renderers-manuallyrendere…
-renderer-pathplugin
-single-process
-process-per-tab
-process-per-site
-in-process-plugins
-no-sandbox
-safe-plugins
-trusted-plugins
-test-sandbox
-user-data-dir
-appupload-file
-dom-automation
-plugin-pathjs-flags
-geoidlangdebug-children
-wait-for-debugger-children
-log-filter-prefix
-enable-logging
-dump-histograms-on-exit
-disable-logging
-remote-shell-port
-uninstallomnibox-popup-count
-automation-channel
-restore-last-session
-record-mode
-playback-mode
-no-events
-hide-icons
-show-icons
-make-default-browser
-proxy-server
-dns-log-details
-dns-prefetch-disable
-debug-print
-allow-all-activex
-disable-dev-tools
-always-enable-dev-tools
-memory-model
-tab-count-to-load-on-session-restore…
-memory-profile
-enable-file-cookies
-start-maximized
-enable-watchdogfirst-run
-message-loop-strategy
-message-loop-histogrammer
-importsilent-dump-on-dcheck
-disable-prompt-on-repost
-disable-popup-blocking
-disable-javascript
-disable-java
-disable-plugins
-disable-images
-use-lf-heap
-new-http

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For example Thunderbird was my email client of choice, i used it for a long time and i was happy with it. But in time my preferences shifted because i needed to access my email from a lot of places and i needed to have my emails accessible from everywhere. I started to move towards web based email. I had my personal mail on my own domain and i was still using Thunderbird for that, the only thing that annoyed me with the software itself was that sometimes it was very slow. But after moving my email hosting to Google’s Web Apps i had no longer a reason to keep Thunderbird. Web based email is my choice and the question that i asked some time ago is being answered. Desktop email apps are on the go. This is a case where the software cannot keep up with the evolution of users behavior.

The other case where perfectly usable programs were developed way beyond what is their main mission is represented by Acdsee and Azureus (now Vuze).

I used Acdsee only for viewing pictures and saving them in different formats. Acdsee was awesome for saving image files for web. It compressed very well. No other software that i knew of could compress images this small size, keeping good quality. The antique version 3 of Acdsee was in use on my computer 4 months ago. But as i changed my PC and installed Windows XP 64, Acdsee 3 won’t run anymore on it. The newer versions are not for me. I don’t like the way the software tries to do everything but manages to do much less. Usability is worse then for earlier versions and the package that tries to be an universal photo manager is becoming a bloatware. I started to use IrfanView instead, which is better, smaller, faster more usable and it is FREE.

About Azureus i didn’t made a final decision yet, i am still using it as it become Vuze and tries to be an offline player for online videos, community stuff and everything. I need the software just for the torrent downloads, i am not interested in watching the latest videos of some short lived emo band or promotional stuff from all kinds of enterprises. So Vuze might be on my PC for a while but i am having doubts about its future.

Do you had any programs that you really liked but you quit using ?

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