Blognation has for a very long time been a sort of a side pet project. This month (and a little into next month), that’s all set to change. With the help of two very capable ladies, we’ll be turning things around in these parts and really focusing on some important improvements.

That includes cleaning up the themes, getting Gravatars to work and me coding up a “Simple” and “Advanced” version of the Blogging platform.

I’ll also be working on some import tools to grab blogs from Blogger and so on.

So, here’s to a month of improvement, excellent work and some interesting collaboration. Wish me luck!

All the various bits and pieces of fantastic software played nicely with each other. Take for example these bits of awesome:

1. CakePHP – Stunningly easy PHP framework for RAD
2. Subversion – Excellent version control system
3. TortoiseSVN – Open-source GUI based SVN management
4. XAMPP – Apache/MySQL/FileZilla etc server

Individually, these are fantastic packages; each excels at what they’re made to do. Combine them and they’re potentially the biggest collection of cockups you’ve ever had the misfortune to come across.

Subversion doesn’t seem to like CakePHP’s directory structure (yes, I know I can restructure CakePHP however I want but I’d like it to work OOTB)

XAMPP definitely doesn’t like Subversion unless you have the right version of apache for your SVN version.

CakePHP doesn’t like the SVN required directory structure.

Hoy. I expect the fun to continue. For now, I’ve got the CakePHP working outside of the normal htdocs folder. Now to try and get SVN working in conjunction with Tortoise and Dreamweaver

CakePHP is a free PHP Framework that apparently allows us poor developers to develop PHP code quickly and easily.

It makes use of the MVC technique for development and seems to hold a lot of promise. I recently downloaded the framework and I’ll be giving it a bit of play in the next few days. What I find out, I’ll post here.

Hopefully I’ll make it through the week without being destroyed by errant PHP code.