Well, maybe not different, but it has something that I’ve yet to see with any other CMS. Digitalus is built on the Zend Framework, adopting the MVC pattern with a familiar directory layout that most ZF developers recognize. This in itself makes up for the repetition of being yet another CMS solution. And this is what makes it a harbinger of PHP application development. It will no longer be about the “killer app”, it will be about the framework.

So why is this a big deal?
Digitalus demonstrates the practicality of building applications using an open framework. The current giants on the CMS landscape had to create their own infrastructure out of necessity and this, unfortunately, has spawned separate ecosystems for developers. You almost have to pick a project and stick with it and use it for every project because of the investment in learning it. Then the “everything is a nail because all you have is a hammer” syndrome sets in and before you realized what happened you try creating an e-commerce site using Drupal or Joomla … fortunately that is changing. In fact I would not be surprised to see the gradual migration of the current major projects to adopting a common framework. Will the common framework be the Zend Framework? Probably. Since it is backed by the Zend the PHP company the Zend Framework will have the inside track on all the technical advances of the PHP language it is built on.

Is Digitalus it? The next great CMS?
I doubt it, but that is no longer the point. So while we are waiting for the big paradigm shift take a look at the Digitalus project as a good introduction to the Zend Framework. I can see it being used as the base code for a new application that needs to have all the basic web site features like: database storage, page creation, user management, and themes. With Digitalus a developer will not need to “learn” a new system(Drupal, Joomla, Word Press, etc.) to add features. The only requirement will be familiarity with the Zend Framework. Now this is good for us because at work we have selected the Zend Framework as the standard for new application development.

My First impression.
With only a quick run through of the installation and creating a user and editing a page I was impressed not so much by what I saw but by the possibilities. However an immediate drawback is the requirement of installing in the root of the host. This will have to be changed to make it practical.

Links
The Digitalus project home page
The CMS-Wire review
Zend Framework MVC Quick Start

When buying something new, whether its something large like a laptop or HDTV or simply a software suite to manage our bills, what is one of the biggest factors we like to consider when researching the purchase? We like features. We want our new “thing” to slice, dice, and maybe even mow our lawn. With the proliferation of ways to research items online, we read reviews from consumers, online magazines, field “experts”, and even the marketing fluff from the product’s website.

In Feature Presentation, James Surowiecki talks about feature creep and how the inclusion of more and more unnecessary features costs the consumer money and time. He states:

“You might think, then, that companies could avoid feature creep by just paying attention to what customers really want. But that’s where the trouble begins, because although consumers find overloaded gadgets unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It’s only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity.

He also mentions a study where consumers were given the task to pick an item from a choice of three and then add up to 25 additional features. A large majority of them picked the one with the most features and then added an average of 20 additional custom features. When asked to use the device, however, they quickly became frustrated and switched to a simpler model.

This leaves companies with important decisions when it comes to designing a new product. Do they aim for simplicity and risk being seen as “cheap and underpowered”, or do they pile on as many features as possible and hope to at least make the product relatively usable. The problem revolved around the tested idea that people are poor at deciding what they will need for a future product. The product needs to have all the bells and whistles to entice buyers to choose the product, but must also be well designed to be highly usable. The I-Phone is a popular product that has taken this approach.

In a recent blog, Photoshop Senior Product Manager John Nack spoke about this issue as it relates to Adobe when designing new versions of Photoshop. It came from an earlier post by Scott Kelby, president of the National Association for Photoshop Professionals where he proposed that Adobe have a way for users to submit official ideas for the next version of the software. He stated that Adobe would show everyone the top 10 ideas and that those would always make it into the next version. Nack responds by pointing out that if Adobe only focused on giving users what they want, they would never get what they don’t realize they want. So, although they want to give the users what they want now, they are also focusing as much time on giving us the next big thing so that they can stay ahead of the curve and continue to revolutionize their software.

Next time your looking at buying a new product, give a closer look to how you will actually use the product. Try to realize if your choosing one particular model because it has more features you will really use, or just plain has more features. Though, as studies have shown, we don’t really know what we’ll use and will generally choose poorly. So, maybe pick the opposite of what you’ve initially chosen, or just pick the baddest mofo on the shelf and enjoy wrangling it around while searching through a manual the size of an encyclopedia.

Check it out HERE

If you work in Web design and development and haven’t read any of the articles and discussions taking place regarding IE8 and its use of meta versioning for standards compliance, it’s time to read up on it ASAP. Begin with Aaron Gustafson’s “Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8” on A List Apart. You can follow the threads from there. Russ Weakley at maxdesign is keeping a good list of the conversations too, so you can drop by and fill up on all the mud-slinging and drama as it unfolds…

…Open standards must emerge from public, open, bare discussion. Microsoft clearly does not agree with this. It goes against its capitalist cover-up mentality, even when Bill Gates himself has quite adamantly stated that there should be no secrecy around IE8. In fact, he was the one who let the name slip…

…This shows you how ludicrous the lack of communication had become: Gates himself didn’t even know we weren’t allowed to say “IE8.”…

Excerpt from Jeffrey Zeldman’s blog:read entire post here

We knew when we published this issue of A List Apart that it would light a match to the gaseous underbelly of standards-based web design, but we thought more than a handful of readers would respect the parties involved enough to consider the proposal on its merits. Alas, the ingrained dislike of Microsoft is too strong, and the desire to see every site built with web standards is too ardently felt, for the proposal to get a fair viewing.

Excerpt from Eric Meyer’s blog:read entire post here

As the engineering staff at Netscape prepared a new release of Mozilla, the browser off which we branched Navigator, those of us in the Technology Evangelism/Developer Support (TEDS) team were testing it against high-ranked and partner sites. On a few of those sites, we discovered that layouts were breaking apart. In one case, it did so quite severely…

…The truth, of course, was that we were actually fixing something, and every other browser got this wrong. The truth was not relevant to our problem. It seemed we had a choice: we could back out the improvement to our handling of the CSS specification; or we could break the site and all the other sites like it, which at the time were many. Neither was really palatable. And word was we could not ship without fixing this problem, whether by getting the site updated or the browser changed. Those were the options…

…Looking back on it now, it’s likely this experience subconsciously predisposed me to eventually accept the version targeting proposal, because in a fairly substantial way, it’s what we did to Mozilla under similar conditions. We just did it in a much more obscure and ultimately fragile manner, tying it to certain DOCTYPEs instead of some more reliable anchor. If we could have given that site (all those sites) an easy way to say “render like Mozilla 0.9″ (or whatever) at the top of every page, or in the server headers, they might have taken it…

A CSS reset is the technique of resetting all the defaults like padding and margins that differ so much between the many browsers. By putting this at the top of your CSS file, it gives a default for any rules you don’t specify later and makes it easier to keeps things like padding and font sizes the same between browsers.

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0;
	outline: 0;
	font-weight: inherit;
	font-style: inherit;
	font-size: 100%;
	font-family: inherit;
	vertical-align: baseline;
}
/* remember to define focus styles! */
:focus {
	outline: 0;
}
body {
	line-height: 1;
	color: black;
	background: white;
}
ol, ul {
	list-style: none;
}
/* tables still need 'cellspacing="0"' in the markup */
table {
	border-collapse: separate;
	border-spacing: 0;
}
caption, th, td {
	text-align: left;
	font-weight: normal;
}
blockquote:before, blockquote:after,
q:before, q:after {
	content: "";
}
blockquote, q {
	quotes: "" "";
}

Can you take a simple list and use different Cascading Style Sheets to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to one simple list.

In order for the future to be better by a large amount, it must be different by a large amount.

I think that statement alone is enough to indict Opera’s anti-trust actions as stupid and ill-considered. But we should also recognize that it forms the basis of Opera’s grievances. We should all be pissed off that the discussion today hinges on how we will get MSIE to improve by slight degrees (or should we expect more?). Opera could have done better, though, by shipping Gears and working with Google to make it a host for pluggable renderers…like Opera. Too bad Opera has prioritized proving a point over actually improving the situation. But I digress.

So what was so different about the late 90’s that it allowed a closed process to make huge gains in a short order while we can’t even get basic architectural issues addressed in a timely fashion today?

The first major reason is that web developers in the 90’s were looking forward, not backward…….

These are all incredibly useful features that the other major browsers have supported for some time, but which have not been available for real-world use because of the lack of support for them in Internet Explorer. That’s all about to change. Support for CSS tables alone will be enough to drastically change real-world CSS page layout techniques, making them much easier to learn and use.

Microsoft is promising to release a beta of Internet Explorer 8 in the first half of 2008. The big question for web designers who will be hoping for swift adoption of the new browser: will it run on Windows XP, or require an upgrade to Vista?

As Dave Shea of the CSS Zen Garden put it, “Better bundle up, it’s a cold one in hell today.”

A list of @50 JQuery plugins for a variety of tasks.

“Many of us have been using a good deal of jQuery plugins lately. Below I have provided a list of the 50 favorite plugins many developers use. Some of these you may have already seen, others might be new to you. This is just the first series , the second version will be coming soon, stay tuned and Enjoy!”

Finally! I’ve found something that looks like it will help with troubleshooting things on IE (and it comes from Microsoft, surprisingly). I have it loaded in 7 right now, not sure if it works for 6. It’s very similar to the Web Developer add-on for Firefox with some of Firebug’s abilities thrown in as well.

The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides several features for exploring and understanding Web pages. These features enable you to:

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.
• Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.
• View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.

The Developer Toolbar can be pinned to the Internet Explorer browser window or floated separately.