Disqus - Latest Comments for Jacob Santos

Re: What’s Your Source for That?

Jacob Santos — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:42:01 -0000

Well, when did facts and accurate statistics ever be part of politics? No, you may not use that as a quote in your ad, because it was sarcasm and has a high probability of being inaccurate. To be honest, it was never meant to be accurate. Much like the people who say, "Bush lied," and then runs off.

The message is the same thing. Oh people are going to say, "Obama loses [some arbitrary number pulled from where the sun doesn't shine] jobs," then run off. If enough people say it often enough and enough people say it constantly, then it must be true. Okay, no. How do you argue with someone who obviously is so devoid of reality, that they'll believe anything?

Also, Obama is the President. When has the president ever created or destroyed any private sector job that didn't involve working on a public sector project? The statement could only be accurate, if he fired 2.19 million public employees.

Re: Does WordPress meet your needs yet?

Jacob Santos — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:19:56 -0000

BackPress is not meant to be the modularization of WordPress, but a single point of the core library for all of the Presses.

I would also like to see modularization of WordPress and plan on writing some code to allow for it.

Re: Does WordPress meet your needs yet?

Jacob Santos — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:57:29 -0000

You can check http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5625 again for basic support for the uninstall hook.

Re: Building Browsergames: a brief design document

Jacob Santos — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 19:23:55 -0000

@Luke

Keeping presentation separate from business logic is the foundation for good development, however, PHP is already a templating system. Using an abstraction on top of something that already does a good job at abstracting code is not a good idea.

Many languages do not have the luxury of combining code with HTML, which forces them to keep it separate and building the abstractions into their business logic. This creates complexities that are not needed. The primary focus should be building a solution as quickly, but as professional as possible.

Smarty goes against this by forcing both the designers and programmers to learn the language of Smarty. You then have to hope that the next project also uses Smarty and not some other convoluted custom system. I've seen many custom templating systems and I have to say that not many projects use Smarty.

Another issue from the developer's point-of-view is extensibility, which is difficult for Smarty, because while it has its own API for it, not every custom templating system will. The API for Smarty (when I last checked) was not as simple as it should be.

When I write a template system for a project, I think of WordPress, because they do it as easy as possible for both developers and designers ("Just plug this code in to your code and it just works"... "In most cases."). As opposed to spending two or three weeks learning how to use Smarty and other two or three weeks trying to learn how to extend Smarty with custom tags.

I can do everything Smarty does using just (X)HTML and PHP, which Smarty abstracts from the developer and designer. If you ask me, PHP is far easier to use than the syntax Smarty forces you to use.

Re: WordPress 2.8 - What were they thinking?

Jacob Santos — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:01:22 -0000

I develop an application for Windows, on the next release, it stops working. Whose fault is it?

I develop an application for Mac OS X, on the next point release, it stops working. Whose fault is it?

I develop a plugin or theme for Drupal, on its next release, it stops working. Whose fault is it?

So on and so on.

Platforms are in a constant state of improvement and changes. Just look at Windows, Mac OS X, Drupal, phpBB, etc. The difference between a paid platform (Windows, Mac OS X, etc) and an free, open source platform is the amount of testers and users.

It also depends on whether the system is closed or open. For systems where they work on a limited set of hardware or configurations or the users are only going to be using a limited set of hardware or configurations, then the amount and scope of the bugs are going to be different.

It also depends on your users and their complacency. Users of the other CMSs are going to be more technical users and know how to get around problems. The users for WordPress are in often cases, novices. Therefore to compare a system that is meant to be used with the lowest common denominator verses something that requires you to be this tall to ride is not really being fair.

As others have said, bugs are found in all systems and platforms. They are an constant that will continue unless you are the guy who writes the "hello world" examples. More beyond that adds complexity and complexity adds bugs. The more users you add, the more fringe case bugs and user case bugs you are going to find.

However, more often then not, you find the fringe case bugs after a "stable" release where as the normal use case bugs are found during the normal beta / RC cycle.