Like I said, it takes days to develop a new design even  when I start with a proven baseline.  So I stopped.  My time is too valuable to do something which I can outsource or pick up a professional looking theme from Woo Themes.

But sometimes I get an idea for starting a new niche and dream about what theme to use even before I’ve worked on developing the content.  I  know that it is going to take a couple of months to get ranked in the SERPS and the only ones really looking at the sites are bots.   Anyway the dreaming lasts for a few wasted hours causing nothing but grief when I could have done productive work.

After the content on the site is aged, I install one of my canned themes I use for Adsense or eBay depending on the type of niche the market falls into.

Lately, I’ve been looking (dreaming?) into updating my canned niche themes using Thesis. I just need a simple design that I can baseline without spending days reinventing the wheel again every time WordPress comes out with a new version.

However after just reading Lis’ Frugal Theme Review, there may be another platform other than Thesis which you can quickly customize including:

1. Frugal’s ability to have unique pages layouts with either no sidebars or sidebars unique to that page. In fact you can develop an entire business website using WordPress pages only with these options.
2. Frugal Theme’s easy use of images which uses WordPress’s native support for thumbnails which means associating a thumbnail with a post’s extract as simple as clicking one button.
3. Frugal’s ability for you to choose colors for your text and backgrounds by either using a color picker tool or by typing in the hexadecimal code (much easier to get a number of different elements exactly the same color by typing in the code).
4. Frugal Theme’s code is very efficient – that means its fast loading on your website – a factor which Google is taking more and more into consideration.
5. There is fantastic support for Frugal from the detailed step by step videos from the developer to an active support forum where questions are answered quickly.

While I’m more familiar with Thesis, I’m going to have to take a second look at Frugal.  It looks like you can produce some really professional looking sites that I can create that are basic and simple for my niche sites.

Of course there are lots of off page factors and topology considerations that Google, MSN and Yahoo have to analyze the macro view of the web. Each company has their own algorithms to present this view for given search terms.

All we know is that Google’s publication of its algorithm, via patent disclosure, indicates that links to your content are a contributing and weighted factor in determining content ranking. Other search engines have not disclosed their IP, so an educated guess would be that external links are a determining factor.

Even though you follow the SEO recipe, there are supply and demand factors where you are providing the supply side of the equation where Google and the other search engines are fulfilling the demand for their customers. There is enough evidence that suggests Google, with it’s massive parallel operations, provides new information near real-time where other search engines may take days.

Thus, with the proper SEO recipe, it is theoretical to achieve short and long-term results for certain terms that you are trying to market. But if you want to keep it simple, just become a PPC guy like Amit.

Basically, the inputs are mapped to the Controller and the outputs are mapped to the View. The Model maintains the persistent state of the Controller. Some MVC Architecture Diagrams show an interface between the View and Model; however, I believe that is incorrect since you want to isolate the view from the content.

For a Web Application, the Controller and View sit on top of TCP/HTTP or HTTPS with the Controller accepting HTTP Request Messages and the View providing the Request Codes and appropriate Markup Language (HTML, XML, etc.) response.

The Model provides the persistent state of the Application and typically interfaces with a Data Base.

There’s a lot of buts: it’s too slow, it’s not modular, it’s “fill in the blank” … Just get over it. Look for ways to extend the component for your application. Write a wrapper, build an interface, just get it to work.

Configuring CakePHP

I spent some time trying to figure out how to change the default templates. Resulting to grep for a few html tags, I found the “default.thtml” file in the /app/views/layout directory. Apparently I overlooked the obvious, because on the home page of your configuration, it tells you exactly that! Duh.

I copied over CSS, images and updated the default template and started getting that urge of “I can do it better.” I managed to overcome it quick by putting a bunch of “TODOs” in the template. I believe that there are a few ways to configure the helper functions or better yet, extend them to our application.

I still don’t understand the CakePHP architecture and the layers of the cake (pun intended). An architecture diagram would be very helpful at this point in time. This is probably the next thing in the list to do: see if one exists or start drawing one.

Our decision to toss out our in-house PHP Framework FIZZI and start from scratch with CakePHP was not taken lightly. The time, effort and development costs are nothing to the future costs of maintaining and upgrading FIZZI. Simply put, let’s get out of the Framework Business and focus on our core process and system strengths!

Installation of CakePHP

No matter how trivial the Cake Developers made the installation process, I simply can’t brush over this step because I’m a dumb ass. I installed CakePHP on a server with an older version of PHP (4.2). After mucking with the initialization script to set up the include paths correctly, CakePHP was bombed out in a session function that was introduced in PHP 4.3.

I know, I should have read the minimal requirements, but what Software Developer really reads yet implements the requirements? So I had to install it on a server with PHP 4.3+ or PHP 5+. That implies either upgrading our in-house test server and possible breaking ongoing development on other projects, use a virtual server on my desktop or just go for broke and install it on a existing domain at a hosted server.

After the trial and error of installing CakePHP on our test server, installation on the hosted server was a breeze! Three lines of code in the initialization file and three parameters in the database file need changing. Load the home page with success! Ideally, if you had the capability to install cake in /usr/local/src, you should install it there. This will make system-wide upgrades easier in the future especially if you are planning to use CakePHP for more than one project.

So today I’m starting out with a positive outlook and tossing out our in-house PHP Framework (FIZZI) that we’ve been using for MustFindit and replacing it with CakePHP. It’s taking too long to develop MustFindit and extending and adapting FIZZI for MustFindit’s requirements will basically kill the project.

Why CakePHP? I’ve considered Rails, Symfony and quite a few more; however, CakePHP seems like the best fit with our current technology, design and knowledge base for a MVC architecture. This is a big plus since we want to expedite development process and keep the learning curve down as much as possible.

Over the next few days, I hope to present our findings on CakePHP and if it is a viable Development Framework for PHP and our projects.

I’m well past the MustFindit alpha launch date of June 15, 2007 but with these latest changes, things should go much smoother now.

Anyway, I was inspired and started hacking out some png’s and updated the CSS to make everything flow with the backend database. I would like to get the blog up and running by the 4th of July so we can start marketing the site for beta users.

– Howard Young