BlueFire Data Solutions

So recently I posted about how symfony has made the move to officially support Doctrine as the default ORM in future releases of my favorite PHP framework.  A lot of questions were raised, mainly because even though Propel is still going to be supported by symfony, it looked like Propel was dead in the water with not much active development taking place.

Interestingly enough, when I happened to look on the Propel website, I noticed a Propel version 1.4 and that got me wondering.  After some hunting, it turns out a blast from symfony’s past is now heading the development of the project.  That’s right folks, Francois Zaninotto is now working on revamping Propel (see here (groups.google.com) for more details).

I’m glad to see that a good ORM is getting someone with a lot of good ideas leading the forefront.  I’m very interested in seeing what will be coming out of the gate with the revamped version 2.0.

Tags: propel, Symfony

So I’ve been playing around with a few new recommended programs I’ve found through lifehacker (two of my current favorites are RocketDock and Emerge Desktop ), but I hadn’t given Dropbox a shot until this morning, and boy I wish I had of started using it sooner.

You see, DropBox is a cross-OS app (it works on Mac, Windows, and even Linux) that allows for file synching with a web-based storage host.  Currently you can only sign up for the 2GB free account, but there will soon be options for subscribing to larger storage amounts.  When you install the app and create your account, Dropbox integrates into your computer’s file system, which keeps synched up with the web-hosting as long as there is a network connection.  Whenever a change is made to a file, any other PC connected to that file will be alerted to the update.  What’s even more fun, you can share files with a development team or family members, for example.  Think of this as a very simplified version of SVN, with some basic change control.

Anywho, give it a shot and see what you think.  I know I won’t be using my USB sticks as much as I used to lol.

Tags: DropBox, Emerge Desktop, RocketDock

Seeing that there’s been interest with Magento, I figured I would write up my experiences since the last time I published about it.

First off, Magento does a fairly good job about documenting the basics about the program.  As I found out last time, it will take a bit of digging to get into super-specific problems – mine just happened to be a host issue that had to be worked around.

So basically, to access the administration side of the system, you need to go to the root directory of where you placed Magento and add /admin to the end of the address.  In my case, I actually created a store folder to keep it separate from the rest of the website so the address would look similar to:  http://somesite.com/store/admin.

Now during the installation process, you created an administrator account.  Using that will get you access to the backend – which happens to be a nice sales dashboard (one of the features that really sold me on Magento is the reporting capabilities build in, not sure if other OSS e-commerce solutions do something similar.  Feel free to post a comment and let me know what’s up with the other solutions.  Heck, if you have a good review of any of them, send it to me too =p).

One of my big quips about Magento at this point is that even with my broadband connection, Magento seems to take it’s time loading initially, which I sincerely hope they work on in future releases.  Also at first brush, it seems a bit complex to build addon modules for Magento, which I have also seen comments about elsewhere when reading reviews about php|architect’s Magento guide.

I do like how the menu is organized, with the ability to create promotions for a particular date range, newsletter creation, and the ability to create personalized themes for stores (haven’t worked on creating one yet, but I do like that they give the option).

Anywho, I’ll keep playing around with Magento (when I’m not delving into symfony =p) and see what else I can come up with.

Tags: Magento

Just wanted to make a quick post saying congrats to the Mozilla team for successfully hitting the world record for the most software downloads in a 24 hour period, as well as making the most kick-ass browsing experience I’ve ever had possible!

I’ve been using Firefox 3 since before Download Day (btw – got your certificate for downloading FF3 yet?  If not, clicky) and I must applaud the Mozilla group for all the hard work they put into the new version, and must say the plugin community really put the petal to the metal to ensure that most of the popular plugins worked with our new browser friend.

Anywho, I’ve kinda been out of the picture for a while due to my back/other things taking precident, but I’m still working on a few things coming up.  I hope I’ll be able to finish at least one of them up this week for posting, we’ll see.

Tags: Firefox Mozilla