August 18th, 2010
Reading Joost de Valk’s quick post about Simple WordPress Debugging with a query variable made me think for a while. Really, how often do you come accross a white screen with no clue of what’s happening? Very effective indeed, and good note about the security issue, but anyways, what came into my mind is a life-saver for all WordPress themes and plugins developers.
I came accross this following snippet quite some time ago on IRC I believe, but never shared it for no specific reason. Perhaps I thought that everybody is aware of it, but looking at how more and more people struggle with debugging WordPress actions and filters, ugh. Here’s your life-saver:
add_action('all', create_function('', 'var_dump(current_filter());'));
This should be used in functions.php or some plugin, and at first sight you’ll notice a huge bunch of text on the output. Fire up the source view of the page you’re looking at (works for admin panels too) and look through the code. You’ll notice that all actions and filters are printed on screen whenever they’re fired.
How could that be used? It clearly shows the order of each action and filter and it clearly shows the names (which tend to be forgotten sometimes). Maybe there are a few more pros I can’t think of right now. Downsides? It doesn’t actually tell you whether it’s an action or a filter, but anyways – short, useful, could be added up to Joost’s snippet.
August 5th, 2010
I received an e-mail a few days ago from Mockingbird, the wireframing online software which I constantly used for my project:
Mockingbird will launch on August 15th, 2010
Hurray? No. According to their blog post about the launch and a few posts on Twitter, most users seem quite disappointed and they do have a point. Some say the pay-per-month model doesn’t work for them, as they prefer to pay per project. Others say that pricing is quite weird and the active/archived projects doesn’t make any sense. Some argue about the number of pages limiting for free users.
After some feedback the guys at Mockingbird posted two updates to the post about new plans, the beta plan and the transition from beta to an upgraded account.
I say that Mockingbird simply ditched all their beta users. I’m very disappointed as I loved their service so much, that I constantly mocked up anything that came into my mind – from websites to apps, mobile apps, mind maps, graphs and charts and much much more. Now that they’re shutting the whole thing down I’m moving back to my good old Axure RP and Photoshop. Too bad.
I do think that at some point any startup has to go commercial and make some cash, but restricting access is definitely not the way. Add some new cool features and make Pro accounts with these features. Add new exclusive components and sell access to them. But restricting access to what you’re already working with, what the hell? Imagine Twitter says that in order to post more than three tweets per day you have to get a $10/mo subscription, huh? Or Gmail says that in order to read more than 10 e-mails per day you need a $5/mo subscription.. Rediculous..
August 3rd, 2010
Team. Team, team, team.. How good is your team if you can’t manage it? This reminds me of an IT Crowd episode:
Well if you can’t work as a team you’re all fired! .. Hello security? Everyone on floor 4 is fired.
As some of you already know, I run a little web development startup here in Moscow called Frumatic and during the past few months we’ve been struggling to get our project management and collaboration right. I don’t think there’s a reason for me to write about how important project management is and that no good business today could live without a good CRM, PM, SCM and the rest.
If you can't work as a team you're all fired!
Today we’ll speak about two awesome project management systems – Basecamp and TeamLab. Both services are quite cool and look alike in some sense. I’ll try to outline the pros and cons of each app, then give a short tip on how to make your choice between the two. Let’s start off with Basecamp.
Basecamp by 37signals
Basecamp has been developed and launched by 37signals back in 2004. Since then it’s been evolving, new very nice features have been developed, and today, Basecamp is a very powerful project management and collaboration tool, offered as a service (SaaS). Basecamp wouldn’t be complete without it’s sisters Highrise (CRM), Backpack (business organizer) and perhaps Campfire (chat) and of course the Basecamp Extras and the Basecamp API which gives developers the power to mash their software with Basecamp.
Basecamp Pros
Let’s start with a short list of Basecamp pros. I’m sure there are tonnes of others:
- Web-based and easy to use
- Fast and secure, powered by Amazon S3
- Maintaned and supported very well
- On-going development, enhancements
- Offers tonnes of extras and a public API
- Offers time tracking
Basecamp Cons
And here’s a list of Basecamp cons. I found some of these quite annoying, but despite that, I still love Basecamp ;)
- Quite expensive (good plans start from ~$50/mo)
- Not very customizable, all you can change is the logo and color scheme
- Does not offer self-hosted version
- Does not allow to use your own Amazon S3 account to host your data
- Quite poor CRM and Business Organizer
- Basecamp Extras are poor, some of them are even commercial
Yeah, paying for software is not a crime, but in my opinion, Basecamp is slightly overpriced, plus you’ll have to pay extra if you’d like to get Backpack or Highrise (which is quite a poor CRM actually, I found SugarCRM CE, which is open-source, much better than Highrise). Now let’s see what TeamLab is all about.
TeamLab by Ascensio System
I came across TeamLab a few weeks ago and I found it to be quite terrific! TeamLab was launched this summer, somewhere in the beginning of July I guess. It’s based in Latvia, where Russian is quite a popular language by the way ;) TeamLab is written in Microsoft ASP .NET (C#) which makes it quite easy to understand. As it is a startup they haven’t yet implemented their monetization plan, so TeamLab is offered free of charge as SaaS or open source for download. You can deploy TeamLab in the Amazon EC2 cloud and use S3 for file hosting, which is quite wikid!
TeamLab Pros
Below is a list of pros I found for TeamLab. These may change in the future ;)
- Free and open source, released under GPL
- Compatible with Amazon EC2 and S3
- Web-based, easy to use
- Offers a full-featured Company Intranet and a Wiki
- Quite active on Twitter
- Offers import and export
TeamLab Cons
The cons of TeamLab from a php developer’s perspective (ASP .NET is good, but .. well ;)
- Written in ASP .NET
- Does not offer time tracking
- Has some bugs, like any other startup ;)
- Does not offer extras, mobile or API (maybe it’s only a matter of time)
- Will not remain free of charge forever (I guess)
The last point may or may not be true. Like any other startup, TeamLab will go commercial at some point. I spoke to the representatives of TeamLab on Twitter and e-mail, and I’ve been told that all the functionality included in TeamLab now will remain free of charge in the SaaS and the open source downloadable package, but new features will require you to pump their back accounts with money. This is very optimistic indeed, as we’ve already seen such trouble with Sugar CRM Community Edition and Mockingbird, which is planned to go commercial on August 15th.
Making the right choice
Personally, I’m using Basecamp, but TeamLab made quite a good impression, and I do have thoughts about switching. What would make switching much easier is .. Import! An Import from Basecamp feature would be awesome, besides they offer all the tools (API) and documentation to do that.
TeamLab does though offer import and export, but from their own system and that’s good to go, especially since you can have your own self-hosted TeamLab, which would be preferred by large companies, as they do not usually trust third-party services.
So, if you’re worried about security, need time tracking and CRM integration, then yes, Basecamp is definitely your choice. But if you’re willing to play around and build solutions on top of, then go with TeamLab, as you will always be able to have your own extras running inside TeamLab Open Source. This will also save you some cash ;) Thanks for reading and don’t forget to this post!
July 30th, 2010
I was working on a project lately that involved charts and graphs which had to be interactive, lightweight and somewhat complicated. I looked through quite a lot of different chart APIs, and for some time thought that I’d have to go with Open Flash Chart which is good and simple, but it was Flash. There’s nothing wrong with Flash, but Flash is what makes it more complicated to modify and extend. The standard OFC functionality seemed to work fine for me, but soon I came across Highcharts.
Highcharts is purely written in javascript and uses some advanced SVG to render the content. It’s quite impressive and very well documented. Chart control is all done via javascript, and all the options available make it very flexible and extensible. Since everything’s done in javascript it fits well with PHP without having to write tonnes of code or use some third-party library. The json_encode function comes in very handy when passing options from PHP to Highcharts.
Highcharts is free for personal use, commercial licenses start from $80, which is quite okay. Check out the Highcharts Demo page for some terrific usage examples. Happy charting and thanks for !
July 17th, 2010
It’s July and it’s so damn hot back here! I think all the possible new records have been set last week in Moscow. Thank god we had those new air conditioners install in the office before the heat wave, otherwise it would’ve been impossible to work. Anyways, haven’t tweeted much this week, but I did go through my RSS feeds, and here are some interesting links for web design and development fans:
- Browser Cover me – before you present your designs to your clients, make sure you give them a cool border with this online app. There are several different systems and browsers you can pick from, which makes it even more awesome!
- phpQuery – how many times did you have to screenscrape a web page and dig something out of it? Yes, XPath is cool, but it doesn’t work with HTML people write these days ;) phpQuery gives you the power of jQuery selectors and functions in php!
- 15 Must-Have Minimalist Icon Sets – an awesome freebie set for your new web designs. It’s quite important to keep using the fresh stuff, so posts like these are quite handy
- 10 Useful WordPress Security Tweaks – a very nice article on Smashing Magazine about WordPress security. Very informative and awesome!
- Konstantin’s Notes – okay okay, this is my Tumblr page which I use to post stuff on the fly, sometimes quite interesting ;) which makes it awesome too!
This was the short list for today. Stay tuned and thanks for !
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