Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

CakePHP 3 and the need for breadcrumbs

I’ve been catching up with the CakePHP roadmap.  One of the tickets for the next release (CakePHP 3.3.10, scheduled for tomorrow), is this ticket, relating to the breadcrumbs navigation.

When building applications with CakePHP, you have a couple of easy ways to generate breadcrumbs for the easier user navigation.  One, is to use HTML Helper, which provides a quick and simple way.  The other, is to use a feature rich Breadcrumbs Helper, available since CakePHP version 3.3.6 (but not mentioned in the release notes).

Digging further down into templates, and best practices for user navigation, and different ways of styling breadcrumbs (Smashing Magazine, Hongkiat, UI Patterns), I thought – wouldn’t it be nice to have breadcrumbs navigation built into a human brain?

I mean, how many times did you catch yourself in some dark corner of the Internet, trying to figure out how did you get there?  If only humans had breadcrumbs navigation built into our brains, that would be so easy to trace back the steps.  Browser history can, of course, help, but with so many open tabs and several things happening in parallel, a flat list of tabs is not much help.

Database Engines Ranking

db-engines-ranking-table

DB-Engines.com provides some insight into some of the most popular database engines (312 of them to be precise).  Nothing too surprising there – Oracle and MySQL leading the charts, but it’s nice to have the numbers and trends.

db-engines-ranking

There are, of course, many different ways how the popularity can be calculated.  Their method is based on the popularity of each engine in a variety of online outlets, from Google Search to social networks.

  • Number of mentions of the system on websites, measured as number of results in search engines queries. At the moment, we use Google, Bing and Yandex for this measurement. In order to count only relevant results, we are searching for <system name> together with the term database, e.g. “Oracle” and “database”.
  • General interest in the system. For this measurement, we use the frequency of searches in Google Trends.
  • Frequency of technical discussions about the system. We use the number of related questions and the number of interested users on the well-known IT-related Q&A sites Stack Overflow and DBA Stack Exchange.
  • Number of job offers, in which the system is mentioned. We use the number of offers on the leading job search engines Indeed and Simply Hired.
  • Number of profiles in professional networks, in which the system is mentioned. We use the internationally most popular professional networks LinkedIn and Upwork.
  • Relevance in social networks. We count the number of Twitter tweets, in which the system is mentioned.

It seems objective and representative enough to me.

WordPress 4.7 Field Guide

WordPress 4.7 is just around the corner (this month).  Here is a field guide, detailing what are the changes (and there are plenty!) and what to pay attention to during and after upgrade of your site, as well as what plugin and theme developers should check for the maximum compatibility with the upcoming release.

WordPress 4.7 Field Guide

Holly Molly, that’s a lot of changes!

Over 447 bugs, 165 enhancements, 8 feature requests, and 15 blessed tasks have been marked as fixed in WordPress 4.7.

 

WordPress : Preferred Languages Research

Pascal Birchler of the WordPress blogs some interesting research he did in the area of handling preferred language and how different systems – ranging from browsers, wikis, and social networks to all kinds of content management systems – approach and solve the problem.

drupal-language-hierarchy-module

Drupal

Drupal 8 has a rather powerful user interface text language detection mechanism. There is a per session, per user and per browser option in the detection settings. However, users can only choose one language, so they cannot say (in core at least) that they want German primarily and Spanish if German is not available. But the language selected by the user is part of the larger fallback system, so it may fall back further down to other options.

The Language fallback module allows defining one fallback for a language, while the Language Hierarchy module provides a GUI to change the language fallback system. It allows setting up language hierarchies where translations of a site’s content, settings and interface can fall back to parent language translations, without ever falling back to English. This module might be the most interesting one for our research.

Apart from the research itself, I think this is an interesting example of how complex some seemingly simple features are.