I have recently been playing with the new MODx (’Revolution’) and I must say, I love the concept and it’s flexibility. Just to make things easier for folks starting out with MODx or who migrate from MODx Evolution here are some recommended links.

General:

• Download MODx Revolution:  As of 06.04.2010 there is MODx Revolution 2.0.0-rc-1 available.
• MODx Revolution SVN Docs: Major place to get your first impression and touch the important areas. Start from the chapter ‘Designer’s Guide’.
• MODx Wiki: Holds good information, but is mostly based on Evolution!
• Interview with Shaun McCormick, lead UI developer at MODx.

Focus topics:

• Tag format changes from Evolution to Revolution: The formats for content tags have changed. They now can be nested, they can carry parameters and look a lot cleaner.
• Use the Package Manager to install your snippets: There are still some packages to migrate (e.g. AjaxSearch). And if you install Login and wonder why you can not logout, just check the naming of the parameters. I am sure these issues will soon be solved.
• Internationalization: The new Lexicon facility makes the creation of multilingual pages easier, especially central shared Pages or Chunks used in all available languages like the login, password reminder, 404 etc. You can even use Placeholders in lexicon entries and fill them dynamically with Parameters. On bigger sites I would prefer to have a home page for each language and maintain each language in separate menu trees. This is explained in this forum entry. Notice, the tutorial is based on Evolution, but works the same way in Revolution. You only need to use the new tag syntax.
• New access to MODx objects: Most of the methods from Evolution to interact with $modx will be deprecated soon in Revolution. If you are writing Snippets or Plugins you need to get familiar with $modx->getObject() and Co.
• New permission system: Instead of the distinction of Web Users and Manager Users in Evolution, Revolution switched to ACL (Acesss Control Lists) and Context based permissions.
• Make Resources external to make use of version control: Required resources can also be loaded from files instead of saving everything to the MODx database.
• Friendly URLs: How to use the enclosed .htaccess and what MODx settings to use.

What I dont like with MODx Revolution is the slow Manager interface based on ExtJS. If you have to go through a longer configuration or exploration session, waiting for the frontend to finish loading can be a drag. But the ajaxy Manager helps you to perform some actions in parallel without you losing your form content, e.g. if you need a href and need to lookup the document-ID you just click on the Resource tab and look it up in the tree.

Overall I must say MODx Revolution makes the expression to me like a very well crafted, cutting-edge and thought through CMS. Congratulations and many thanks to all contributors! You are awesome!

Since one of my coolest (private) projects www.lsis.com somewhat lacks the expected amount of traffic, I would like to emphasize the core feature in this blobpost - just to make you aware of it or encourage you to tell your friends or have ideas to apply the concept to other areas.

In short LSIS - Life Science Information Service - on a daily basis crawls a list of essential news sources in the field of life sciences and indexes this content after applying a series of quality measures. You can traditionally serach from our search frontend OR save your searches once you are comfortable with the results. You can then give your ‘channel‘ an name and decide if you would like to get new articles matching your saved query pushed onto your email stack or subscribe to it via RSS-link and process it with all your other industry feeds in the feed reader of your choice. All this is completely for free and anonymous!

After seraching the current content you are provided a 'Save Search' button. It let's you save your individual, private and free channel.

You can also browse a series of existing channels, which are preset saved searches of current life-science buzz-topics and subscribe to as many as you like via email or RSS.

Let’s say you are interested in

• New Drug Applications
• The company Merck Serono
• The Granulocyte-Colony Stimulating Factor
• Botox / Botulinum Toxin Type A

and whatever else you might want to monitor just save yourself a query and start being alerted on a daily basis - make your colleagues wonder what cool up-to-date industry guru you are.

Browse existing channels, find RSS feeds or subscribe to get reports pushed via email.

I just found this handy little tool:

You need to do the following:

• have your OPML ready (e.g. export it from GoogleReader),
• upload it to SuggestRss and
• see other feeds that might interest you.

Happy feed digestion!

As projects and teams I am working on get more interwoven and organizational issues and management processes are gaining more and more traction on the 3 project dimensions time, budget and quality, I was thinking about what I would do as a manager in charge to let steam off the many issues we were facing and become productive again.

A low hanging fruit I identified, was the overall uncertainty about the many projects and tasks running at the same time with nebulous requirements and developers working in parallel on many things without clear priorities, which resulted in an ad-hoc development and fixing-style of work. This created an atmosphere in which it was nearly impossible to plan - a vicious-circle.

As a consequence I was thinking about how we could …

1. … make the ongoing project-related processes more transparent to all participants (Chicken and Pigs),
2. … display project progress, status, expected outcome and deadlines, and
3. … visualize the current consumption of available ressources and the team’s mood.

During my research I came accross the term ‘Big Visual Charts’. Once you enter the arena of visualizing processes, you will also come across closely related topics like Kanban (Japanese for card or sign) and Lean Production.

Summarizing points:

• Hand-made drawings on a wall draw more attention than everything electronically distributed or printed stuff. They are easy to maintain and unique.
• Capture what is important for success, spotted problems, especially recurring ones. Capture good things and bad things equally.
• Do not be fingerpointing in your visualizations, just display facts to trigger goal oriented behaviour. Your goal is always to become more effective through behaviour adaption.
• As time goes by, your charts evolve and display certain patterns which work as trigger for people to come together and find solutions as a team.
• A central project dashboard helps the team and the project stakeholders to understand the bigger picture, what they are currently doing, what comes next and what they want to focus on. It helps the team to self-organize and prioritize tasks.

Recommended links:

• http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/BigVisibleCharts.htm *
  
• http://www.think-box.co.uk/blog/2008/05/simplified-planning-board.html **
  
• Planning boards at Flickr (browse the photostream): http://www.flickr.com/photos/agileinaction/255127634/ ***
  
• http://www.ddj.com/architect/201807863 ****
• http://www.horstfranzke.de/Artikel/imVisier2.html#DieProjektWand (in German)
  

Examples and inspiration:

One nice example of a project planning board is this one from the ‘Agile in Action’ site. See ** link from the above list for explanations.
Nice to see the Southpark icons for each team member ;).

This one focusses on the planned stories (green) plus incoming change requests (yellow) and defects (red) to be fixed. It becomes obvious if there where fewer changes and less defects, the team could concentrate more on the production of story points. See * link from above list for explanations.

A burndown chart in Scrum showing the remaining stories in the project backlog. It also visualizes the progress towards a deadline. See **** link from the above list for explanations.

In search of an example how to implement a top-level exception handler in PHP I came across this nice site containing lots of well explained tutorials and articles:

http://www.phpro.org

When you do a lot of concentrated work (if you are privileged to be in an environment where this is possible), it is good to do something completely different at times. I discovered that when I switch my mindset to someting else more relaxing like leafing through impesssing images, some of the previously unanswered questions get solved automatically in my brain and what is more - it has a relaxing effect on me too.

This phenomenon led me to discover ‘Photoblogs’. Here is a source: http://www.coolphotoblogs.com

Some Links (just click the previous-buttons on those pages):

• Daily dose of imagery: http://wvs.topleftpixel.com
• Mute: http://mute.rigent.com
• Marta: http://www.marta.com
• Accessible: http://www.accessible.de
• Aktuellekamera: http://www.aktuellekamera.de
• and many more…

Here is a nice idea to present yourself as freelancer:

http://www.vermeersch.ca (click ‘Explore’)

Nice real-life code metric: “WTFs per minute”:

Found on http://www.osnews.com/comics

Watching state-of-the-art things of different areas inspires me. The Coolhunter is a very nice collection with categorized images of design stuff:

http://www.thecoolhunter.net

“Read quality code” is one of the things that good developers should take the time to do regularly. Especially if you have to solve a well-defined problem, code search engines are very handy to get inspiration:

• http://www.krugle.org
• http://www.google.com/codesearch
• http://labs.oreilly.com/code

When you start googeling for something the first step is to be able to formulate an efficient query. You can use Google Suggest to refine your queries and get inspired about terms to use for best results.

Good site for agile practices: http://www.infoq.com

Become member and download this book on Scrum: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

I love reading things like this: Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me

Summary:

• “Object orientation is much harder than you think”
• “The difficult part of software development is communication”
• “Learn to say no”
• “If everything is equally important, then nothing is important”
• “Don’t over-think a problem”
• “Dive really deep into something, but don’t get hung up”
• “Learn about the other parts of the software development machine”
• “Your colleagues are your best teachers”
• “It all comes down to working software”
• “Some people are assholes (…) Don’t take this too hard”

Here is another good page to get started with Solr:

• http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/1668
• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-php-apachesolr/index.html

PHP for a client:

• https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-341

[25.04.2008] I found another helpful tutorial: http://www.xml.com/lpt/a/1668

Sometimes when I have 5 minutes for myself without thinking about ongoing projects, todos or technologies, obvious things come to my mind. It happened as I took a look at my opened webbrowser (Firefox) and wondered why my homepage actually is www.google.com. Firefox has Google search built in anyway. So I changed it to:

http://www.digg.com/search?section=all&s=software+development+web

—

A cool list of webdevelopment ressources, blogs etc. I came accross this way:

http://www.softwaredeveloper.com/features/i-got-99-problems-080707/

—

[15.02.2008] I now switched to http://www.technorati.com/search/software+development

[11.03.2008] Switched to http://digg.com/programming

[23.03.2008] Switched to http://www.wired.com

[04.04.2008] Switched to http://reddit.com/r/programming/

I came accross a nice blog with lots of cool links to layout related things. Start at

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/17/exploring-design-outstanding-start-pages/

and also visit links like ‘50 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs’ etc. in the category section.

———

To research for layouts, there is also a very good book series: The ‘Web Design Index’ comes out once a year. It is essentially website-designs ordered by color. Very interesting to see the evolution over the years.

Today I had some more major hardware failures…

After it was clear that I would be fixing things all day long, I took a deep breath and fired up Peter Dunston’s Website to relax and listen to good music while I was cleaning up the mess.

What happened:

• The switch connecting my dev-servers with my workstations made nothing more but a funny senseless light show. OK, went to Conrad, replaced it and restarted the network. Easy.
• Next, one harddrive in my backup RAID array (Terastation, the old one with the silver case you see on the picture) crashed. This was the first time I actually heard a harddrive crashing. It took about one minute. Nice - if you know it is a) RAID5 and b) you have another backup anyway. After unwinding ~50 screws to replace the defective harddrive I accidentally ripped off the cable connecting the front panel and the mainboard. Oops. Who needs flashing lights? I placed a stickynote saying the thing is running (see picture). 6 hours later the RAID was ready again.
• The hardest part was the sudden death of my most important dev-server ‘africa’, where I had most of my current projects on. First it did not get an IP address via DHCP. As I was checking things - bang - the screen froze with lots of funny characters flying around - the matrix! After that it didn’t even show a bios screen again.

Thanks Pete for the background sounds!

Example: You are looking for instructions to install Debian Etch on your box. Search for ‘debian etch setup’.

Goto: www.howtoforge.org