Design and Architecture

Richard MacCutchan10-Oct-13 0:36

Richard MacCutchan

10-Oct-13 0:36

What does this mean?

Veni, vidi, abiit domum

Captain Price10-Oct-13 0:49

10-Oct-13 0:49

It means something like this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKeg1nhe-wE[^]
D'Oh! | :doh:

"If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

Richard MacCutchan10-Oct-13 0:54

Richard MacCutchan

10-Oct-13 0:54

And why are you telling me?

Veni, vidi, abiit domum

Captain Price10-Oct-13 1:00

10-Oct-13 1:00

You ? No, no..... I told BLue.iCe.BoX or Whoever !

"If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

Richard MacCutchan10-Oct-13 1:05

Richard MacCutchan

10-Oct-13 1:05

No, you replied to my message, thus you told me. The original poster will not get any notification of your message.

Veni, vidi, abiit domum

Captain Price10-Oct-13 1:36

10-Oct-13 1:36

Oh ! must've hit the wrong reply button. My bad. Thumbs Up | :thumbsup:

"If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

Captain Price10-Oct-13 1:37

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKeg1nhe-wE[^]

10-Oct-13 1:37

"If A is a success in life, then A=x+y+z. (Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.)"

PHP Webiste Upgrade, design and repair

jkirkerx11-Sep-13 8:04

jkirkerx

11-Sep-13 8:04

I have been hired to fix a ecommerce website in PHP, and improve the SEO Organic results.

So I've been going through the code, and it's pretty old school the way it's written. The original developer who left the company back in 2007, created a product database, in which he placed all the HTML in the columns in MySQL.

So instead of a column saying "Explosion Resistant Phone" it says verbatim, shortened

"<tr><td><h6>Explosion Resistant Phone</h6></td></tr>"

And it issues a echo command to output the data above. Basically it's pure PHP with all the HTML stored in the database. All the pages are pure PHP that generates everything.

So my question is

Do you think it's worth the time to fix the database records?

Write a program in something to go through each record, strip out the HTML, decode and encode the text to the proper format, and then update the record?

I think it is, but my friends are telling me I'm crazy to do that. It will take too much time, do the best you can in a very short amount of time. But there's really nothing to work with, it's all in the database.

I really need the flexibility of altering the HTML that the data will reside in for proper search engine results, but writing a program to do this may take awhile and will triple the price of the project.

I want to alter the design to which the pages are static HTML, With containers that call PHP script to populate the items.

What do you think?

jschell11-Sep-13 9:56

11-Sep-13 9:56

jkirkerx wrote:
What do you think?

It requires more information about exactly what "hired" means and exactly what "fix a ecommerce website in PHP, and improve the SEO Organic results" means to the company (not you.)

jkirkerx wrote:
and will triple the price of the project.

It wouldn't take me that long to write a program to scrub the data so....
- There is more to it than you described.
- The project is much too short for any feel good enhancements.
- Perhaps you are approaching the scrubbing in the wrong way.

jkirkerx11-Sep-13 10:27

jkirkerx

11-Sep-13 10:27

I should of used the word contracted to alter the mechanics of the program code to produce the proper HTML for crawling by search engines.

When I say triple the time, that includes testing the program to scrub the data, and then running it on a test platform, and then doing it on the new production website. I figure 1 day for the data program. Then take the extracted HTML and wrap it back around the data fields, and correct the HTML in the proper format. I can either alter the SQL Export file, or go into the database and alter the columns.

It means more to the company that contracted me, they have 32K products online that they sell, and 26K items can't be found at all in search results, which has resulted in a 80% drop in sales over the last 6 years. People are getting laid off.

Yes there is more to the project than I mentioned. I don't have the entire project code, just the product display system and the files needed to drive it, which is fine.

I haven't written a line of PHP in 6 years, just been doing ASP.net, and I haven't used apache server in 6 years. Plus after looking at the code for about 4 hours, they open a connection to the SQL Server on Apache startup, and never close it (That's what the comments say), won't know for sure until I get the file I need to verify it.

I have a new development machine setup now with apache and PHP, and MySQL, but need to pick out an editor or IDE to work with. Going the write the database program in ASP.net.

Anyways, I'll take that as a yes, strip out the HTML and re wrap it around the data.

jschell12-Sep-13 8:12

12-Sep-13 8:12

jkirkerx wrote:
and 26K items can't be found at all in search results, which has resulted in a
80% drop in sales over the last 6 years. People are getting laid off.

Then I would suppose that they would be willing to extend the contract.

Bernhard Hiller11-Sep-13 21:53

Bernhard Hiller

11-Sep-13 21:53

That's rather a story for The Daily WTF!
Honestly: throw it away and create it from scratch with proper design.
Also: create some update mechanism that the items on the web site's database and the items in the "normal" database of that company do not differ from each other and that new items are added to the other db automatically etc etc etc...

jkirkerx12-Sep-13 5:49

jkirkerx

12-Sep-13 5:49

Good idea

I get the rest of the files I need today to run the program.

I think I'm going to just strip out the HTML on the fly, and repackage the data, and fix the SQL connector. They have a back end for product mananagement that inserts the HTML when a product is created.

I wanted to start fro scratch, but they want a small fix to see if it makes a difference.

jschell12-Sep-13 8:24

Ribbon Bars just becuase you can does not mean you should

12-Sep-13 8:24

Bernhard Hiller wrote:
Honestly: throw it away and create it from scratch with proper design.

Of from the point of view of billable hours that is probably a good idea.
But perhaps from the point of view that the company wants it yesterday maybe not so good.

L Viljoen8-Sep-13 22:06

L Viljoen

8-Sep-13 22:06

Ok lets agree on one thing , ribbon bars at first glance look pretty cool , but as many switched from excel 2003 to 2007 I bet the novelty ran out pretty quickly.

For all the software planners your there, heres a very basic tip when it comes to using ribbon bars
1. When people are used to how your toolbars are organized its generally a bad idea to switch to a smaller tabbed version where people have to guess.
2. With screens gettign wider and not longer, putting this massive chunk pf space at the top of your app is not so good. big workspace makes for easier use.

My apologies if this rant is a duplicate of some previous one. . . but I just dived into Office 2010 with some course-ware I am going though

Chona1171
Web Developer (C#), Silverlight

Re: Ribbon Bars just becuase you can does not mean you should

Bernhard Hiller9-Sep-13 0:14

Bernhard Hiller

9-Sep-13 0:14

Chona1171 wrote:
With screens gettign wider and not longer

Buy a monitor which supports not only landscape, but also portrait format. Smile | :)

Re: Ribbon Bars just becuase you can does not mean you should

L Viljoen9-Sep-13 0:21

L Viljoen

9-Sep-13 0:21

Yes totally that will work too Big Grin | :-D

tell your customers they bought the wrong monitor

Chona1171
Web Developer (C#), Silverlight

Re: Ribbon Bars just becuase you can does not mean you should

Eddy Vluggen9-Sep-13 3:00

Eddy Vluggen

9-Sep-13 3:00

Chona1171 wrote:
Ok lets agree on one thing

It's usually not the developers' call. Including a "ribbon" makes it look "modern".

Customers want "modern". It's that simple Smile | :)

Chona1171 wrote:
the novelty ran out pretty quickly.

There's always a new hype $Shucks | :-\$

Bastard Programmer from Hell Suspicious | :suss:

If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]

Re: Ribbon Bars just becuase you can does not mean you should

L Viljoen10-Sep-13 0:37

L Viljoen

10-Sep-13 0:37

Eddy Vluggen wrote:
Customers want "modern". It's that simple

Yeah they do , also have your spent more than 5 minutes in a spec meeting and thought to yourself customers kinda know what they want but have absolutely no idea what they need ?!

Eddy Vluggen wrote:
There's always a new hype :->

there is , one person goes metro style the whole planet has to go , I went to tech ed this year , and for the first time try to familiarize myself with windows 8, it took nearly forever to figure things out , for really basic operations. then they did away with the start button. . . I mean seriously !? both apple and linux have implemented this feature and all of a sudden some genius at microsoft believes no its better to have a pane with randomly sized blocks in an unordered list so someone can have fun while looking for their apps.

Now dont get me wrong first glance it looked good. . trendy as they say.
then on first use was like my WTF moment for the year
first feature I installed , to get the start icon back

you can have a splash screen that is animated, a paper clip that pops up and annoys you while you are trying to write a document and you can have an animation a dog sniffing while you are trying to search your documents. but a programs biggest function is to finish a task and not entertain you

Chona1171
Web Developer (C#), Silverlight

Re: Ribbon Bars just becuase you can does not mean you should

GuyThiebaut12-Sep-13 3:47

GuyThiebaut

12-Sep-13 3:47

Chona1171 wrote:
customers kinda know what they want

I've been in a number of meetings where even that was in doubt Cry | :((

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

― Christopher Hitchens

Re: Ribbon Bars just becuase you can does not mean you should

Albert Holguin8-Oct-13 7:41

Albert Holguin

8-Oct-13 7:41

Eddy Vluggen wrote:
It's usually not the developers' call.

Pretty much Suspicious | :suss:

They're currently trying to force me to change the name of the software I work on to something else... why? ...because it's new and different... ugh, marketing guys... Roll eyes | :rolleyes:

Re: Ribbon Bars just becuase you can does not mean you should

Eddy Vluggen8-Oct-13 8:46

Eddy Vluggen

8-Oct-13 8:46

Albert Holguin wrote:
...because it's new and different...

..complete industries filled with people who actively refuse to think Sigh | :sigh:

Bastard Programmer from Hell Suspicious | :suss:

If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]

Re: Ribbon Bars just becuase you can does not mean you should

jschell8-Oct-13 10:31