Kevin Broome

Classic Car Safe has recently gone live and I’m really happy to be a part of it. The design is based around their grid style logo and the website uses a lot of CSS including some newer CSS3 elements which had to be worked around to make them backwards compatible with Internet Explorer 8. Feature wise it’s updated using a Content Management System (CMS) and has some jQuery for the car carousel in the header.

I’ve always organised my projects in a well structured manner and since I’ve been using Aptana Studio 3 I’ve grown ever curious about git/subversion; distributed version control systems which should help to manage my source code further.

Aptana has a built in terminal client with familiar linux commands so within 5 minutes I’ve already created my first git repository and made my first commit using the very good tutorial available at gitimmersion.com.

Initially I’m going to use terminal to handle commits, changes and staging steps for my private projects before downloading a GUI which can interface with GitHub for publishing any open source code.

$ git add hello.php
$ git status
# On branch master
# Changes to be committed:
# (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
#
# modified: hello.php
#

I’m very pleased to be working with the great Prufrock Coffee of Leather Lane, London from world barista champion Gwylim Davies. I’ve helped with some general website maintenance, setting up emails, fixing a few gremlins and proudly moving the site over to Host My Content.

Evolution Capital Investments were after a fresh, simple and financial look for their static site and here is the end result. It’s a custom designed theme used on a Content Management System (CMS) so it’s super easy to update virtually anything; even the text floating on top of the header image.

My latest work is the table-less and therefore heavily CSS based www.testmypension.co.uk. I really love the way the handwriting gives the site a friendly and personal feel.

Starting on my object oriented PHP adventure I’ve already discovered the amazing web application IDE Aptana Studio 3 and can’t recommend it enough. It’s really increased my productivity with its code assist tools, error highlighter, SFTP support and lovely themes to make it easy on the eye. – It’s even got built in Git integration. MVC is a dream!

The digital sales application we launched a while ago has been spruced up! I’ve started it from the ground up using Code Igniter and therefore MVC / OO PHP which has made it much easier to update and add new features. I’ve only given access to a few record labels so far but it should be rolling out fully very soon!

It’s time for OOP (Object Orientated Programming). I’ve recently picked up the fairly easy to read and recommended “PHP Object-Orientated Solutions” book of which I’ve been zipping through the tutorials quite fast.  It’s about time for me to step away from the pretty much self-taught procedural programming that I’m used to in PHP.

The learning curve is quite manageable so far so I’ve opted to jump into developing an application using the PHP framework CodeIgniter at the same time. – CodeIgniter seems to be a good starting framework which I aim to use in a production environment using it’s much talked about and now more familiar MVC model.

After mastering CodeIgniter and therefore with a good understanding of frameworks and MVC my plan is to migrate over to the Zend framework which looks to be much, much bigger – Along with the knowledge needed to build around it. Wish me luck!