Post-mortem of 4 Days Web Development Challenge

What started as Ruby on Rails challenge end up to be a Cake PHP projects. Nevertheless, my objective is met: a new software product showcase website MMW Software.

Let’s look at how I spent my time

• Day 1: After meddling with RoR for 1 day, I decide to ditch RoR because it is not quite suitable for shared hosting, especially with the one I am hosting with (perhaps the scenario might be different with professional RoR hosting like TextDrive or DreamHost).
• Day 2: Decide to follow my hunch and get on Cake PHP, and the baking is fun and hassle free. The basic tutorial is pretty good, but the overall documentation is pretty weak (but there are a few useful venues for information hunting). PHP Cake is very much like RoR, pretty much lightweight and flexible.
• Day 3: Trying to get my hand on some free templates for layout and CSS (CSS and DIV is quite a beast nowadays), and I manage to find some minimalist theme. I tried the get the more complex corporate theme running, but they are quite a headache to convert. I still need to get my hand dirty with some CSS work and design, quite time consuming though. Create the material and graphics, where most of the time is consumed here (content is king, yeah!)
• Day 4: Try to get a Javascript image viewer running, with spell checking and proof-reading of my content. Reconfigure Cake PHP setup again for better structure and extensibility. When everything is done, setup the new sub domain, transfer everything up, configure and set it to production mode, and it is running within minutes. And remember to put it the Google Analytics code as well, just for the fun of it.

That’s about it, with 1 day wasted, 1 day working on new framework and 2 days on content creations and implementation. It’s not bad at all. I kinda grow on PHP Cake, though it isn’t really great, but lightweight and flexible.

I’ll touch more on PHP Cake as a framework, and why Ruby on Rails didn’t work for me.

Time to move on to something bigger, something more exciting, something more time consuming, haha.