NYCPHP Meetup

[BAS]

Hi Marc,

Yes, I've got 11 years of experience with static sites and I've even 
done some simple custom CMS work, but I've never tried integrating an 
existing CMS package with a bunch of other stuff. My PHP skills are at 
the lower end of intermediate, so this is going to be a challenge & 
learning experience for me.

Your practical example and advice re testing & other possible gotchas is 
much appreciated (as is your humor). The only other dynamic site I've 
worked with was for a real estate agent. I used Open-Realty and 
modifying the templates was a PITA--it wasn't difficult, just (as you 
mentioned) mind-numbingly boring having to pick through gobs of PHP code 
to find the template bits & HTML, make a change, upload, test, try 
again. Ugh.

Many thanks,
Bev

Marc Antony Vose wrote:
> Hi:
> 
> It sounded like in the beginning that you had some experience with a 
> static site, and now you're going to build something that's dynamic and 
> has a shopping component.
> 
> If I had to pass along any advice about this in general, I'd say that 
> actually sometimes templating things instead of laying them out 
> statically can be quicker, in terms of building.  But when you move into 
> dynamic stuff, and especially e-commerce-related stuff, do not 
> underestimate the time needed for testing.
> 
> You are going to make mistakes.  Lots of them.  And, you'll have 
> situations where to get to problem x, you might need to go through steps 
> a, b and c to get there, which takes time and is mind-numbingly boring.  
> You don't need to do this kind of stuff on static or simple sites.  And 
> when it comes to e-commerce, it has to work; bugs are not acceptable 
> because you're dealing with people's private data and all that, and 
> customers will get nasty when things don't work right.
> 
> (For example, I decided to drop Zen Cart into a project once circa 2006 
> or so.  It's basically a steaming pile, as I discovered, but that's 
> beside the point. They had an authorize.net module, which it turned out 
> after a ton of testing had a bug in it with respect to error reporting. 
> This couldn't be ignored; I had to go into the module and fix it.  So, 
> if you're using Drupal, and something in Drupal or some third-party 
> module doesn't work like it should, you need to be prepared to go in 
> there and get your hands dirty if necessary.)
> 
> So, budget for testing.  Whatever time you think you'll spend building; 
> add on another 200% for the back and forth, the testing, the unexpected 
> client requests, etc. and so on.  If you can swing it, pay your most 
> anal-retentive friend or perhaps a professional tester some money to 
> test things for you; just like it's very hard to edit your own writing, 
> it's often very difficult to spot bugs in a system you are building, 
> because you naturally tend to fall into certain usage patterns that 
> don't test everything.
> 
> Oh, and remember to budget for testing.  Did I mention that?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Marc Vose
> http://www.suzerain.com