I keep coming back to PHP for my projects. I’m not talking about anything Industrial Strength like the Wikipedia or Facebook. I’m talking about the web sites I use to teach my courses. For the last 4 years I’ve had my PHP course content on a custom Rails site that I built when I was crazy about Ruby. It has languished recently, as the chore of reinventing every wheel (CMS, user authentication, etc) has taken its toll.
So this week I installed Moodle, a fiendishly complex bit of PHP that contains everything I need to run all of my courses online. In the domain of online course management, it’s the top dog. And because it’s written in PHP, I feel right at home.
Oops. My bad. Sorry about that, Rails.
Don’t bother to tell me that comparing Rails and PHP is a lousy comparison. PHP and Rails are both DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) written in general purpose languages: PHP is to C as Rails is to Ruby (not mention that Ruby is written in C, too). If you think about it, PHP and Rails really kissing cousins.
When duty calls and there’s work to be done, PHP is my preferred vehicle to get from point A to point B. Here’s how I spend my online/programming time these days.
- 35% Moodle (PHP online course management software): user.
- 25% WordPress (PHP blogging software): user and programmer.
- 15% Cincom Visualworks (I’m learning Smalltalk): programmer.
- 10% phpBB (PHP forum software): programmer.
- 10% Ruby (Generating PDFs from HTML): programmer.
- 5% Lastly, Rails for my course web sites: programmer.
I’ll be the first to tell you that PHP has many, many frustrating design oddities, but once you “get it”, you’ll have more time to kick back, drink some brews, and watch a little b-ball.
Happy hacking…
