Today, March 22, 2007 marks 3 years of not smoking. This is a big day for me and it has been very tempting to smoke, but I have made it this far and I am very proud of that.

Recently I have been involved with some individuals that failed to meet my expectations and I have let it bother me a little too much. The situation is that someone was hired to do a job, did not finish the work I was informed they would finish and the work they did complete was lacking in my ways.

I don’t blog about my personal life much, but in past years I have had some tough times, and some of that was financially and it really really makes me upset when I see people making 250% of what I do and they can’t even do the job. I have had to fix most of the problems that have been introduced or the parts that were not completed. I am making enough that a lot of people would be happy with their take home, but the individual I speak of has made a lot more and from what I have seen does not deserve it.

There have been a number of amateur mistakes made and I just don’t understand how someone can get by with some of the things I have seen and still make as much as they informed me they were making. True, it could have been a lie, but I somehow doubt it. I am not trying to broadcast that I am a genius in the design world, or ever close to what some of talent that is out there, but I have been doing it for a long time and there are just certain things you do and don’t do.

The whole point of this is that just because someone charges less than another does not make them any less quality, and just because someone is more expensive does not mean they are worth it.

I was just looking in my query log for MySQL and one view of the resources page for the FTA project is 106 queries. That is going to have to be trimmed down big time, some of these queries are the same repeating 4 or 5 times. I guess thats what you get when you use modules and some contributors don’t know how to reuse information.

Something I would like to possibly try is driving for a living, not trucking, but driving cars around the country for whatever reason. I don’t local and I don’t want it to be a truck. I would really appreciate it if someone would let me know where a job like that might be found.

Tuesday night into Wednesday I finished the majority of the work on Docman and let me tell ya that is an adventure. Docman is currently setup so that you upload 1 file (pdf, doc, whatever) and then you create a document, which is only an entry in a database. That document can only have 1 category, so if you need it to belong to multiple categories you are screwed. Also Docman continues to list a document when it is ‘checked out’ which is not ideal in a lot of cases. For me checking out means checking out, like a library, that book is no longer available.

Our system needed to have documents belong to 3 ‘categories’, but only one is really a category. The other two are document type and relevance (state, federal, etc). We were using Docman Uploader or something instead of the stock upload functions, but the root docman upload functions are used within that component. The way the uploader is made it is pretty simple to add additional database fields, it does however take a lot of code reading to find that out. You can pretty much just add the fields you need to the database and then add the appropriate form elements with the same name as the field. I would make the fields allow for null unless you want to go through every previous entry and add numbers. For this project I setup categories so that in the root of the categories you had each main topic, Document Type, Relevance, Topics and then each subcategory was the actual information. That causes a problem if you use the stock code to give you drop down categories since it will list all of them and there is no filtering. This means that you must apply some filtering and I did that by specifying the categories to be left out in the main configuration and then do an in_array to check if that category was to be left out. That still leaves you with the name of the parent category so you need to do an array_shift to get rid of that. In the end I have 3 drop down boxes only showing the categories I want and they are entered into the database as I want them. That won’t make shit work though, since you have two new fields and they are based on category numbers you need to be able to find information on only that. For this I included the parent categories that house the other information, and if the GID matches you append tid or rid to the end of the url, this way when that person browses into that category the next url has the information you need. If rid or tid are found on the url it then searches rid or tid instead of catid and whala, you have your information.

It was nowhere as simple as that as Joomla uses about 500 steps to do one thing and everything has to be traced back to the origin. Getting the resources page to work was also a hassle. The built in functions for category listing will list everything, but I only needed parent and one level in, and editing the functions that come with the script wasn’t working so I had to write my own. Writing my own wasn’t a problem, but for some reason it wouldn’t work within joomla, I could get it to work outside as a standalone but not within. It appears I was having problems using global, the information just wasn’t being brought in the functions.

I will eventually post the link to the site when it is live so you can see what I did.

Take a look at Daniel Viney’s work, its good stuff.

http://www.stolenpixel.com