Magento 1.0 is out.
Last time I checked (when it was 0.8 beta) I couldn’t install because my host doesn’t have pdo_mysql. Since then I requested pdo_mysql to be compiled and now is a great time to give it another spin. ;)
It should be very interesting because Magento is built on Zend Framework.
WordPress 2.5 RC1 is released today. I thought I’d give it a spin, I like the idea of having an automated plugin upgrade system. :)
So far so good, things are pretty smooth. If you’re going to upgrade too, remember to backup all your files! I for instance have accidentally overwritten my theme files, so I had to take them from the backup.
About the new back-end: I don’t really like it. To be honest I prefer the old style any day. The new back-end lacks contrast (too bright actually), making things more difficult to recognise. Also, when posting, some of the options such as the categories are now down the bottom. Why? We do still have a sidebar, why not use it?
The new back-end also has some styling issues: e.g. on a wide screen, everything is squeezed to the left. I say bring back the fluid page width!
2.5 has some highlights though. We now finally have a asset management feature (file management and gallery), it is simple but still better than nothing. The automatic plugin upgrade feature works really well! Just remember to CHMOD your plugin directory (wp-content/plugins) to 777.
I haven’t fully experienced with this new installation yet, but I am not that impressed with it, mainly because the back-end is in my opinion worse than the old one in terms of user experience.
Okay, so what is a transparent layer? How does it benefit a developer?
Well, please watch the screencast (4min, 12MB) first, you will see the transparent layer in action.
To me, I wanted to make a framework that is more feature-rich than Kohana but at the same time is not intrusive. By having this transparent middle-man layer, a developer is able to seamlessly enhance the Kohana framework without altering the existing user application.
It might not be useful to everyone but what the heck, it at least is useful to one person, me. :D
Here is the link:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm
It has an ‘Emulate IE7′ button which is neat. So now I have IE8 (with IE7 emulation), IE6 standalone, Firefox 2 and Opera 9 installed on my Windows box.
It’s about time for Microsoft to pay attention to standards. I wonder how long we have to support IE6/7 for, another 5 years?
This is a How-to guide for users who want to install and experiment LiteSpeed on LxAdmin Host-In-A-Box, with or without Apache.
If you don’t know what LxAdmin Host-In-A-Box is, please check out this link. Also here is a nice review. In short, LxAdmin is a free/cheap alternative web hosting control panel to cPanel.
And LiteSpeed is a high performance, lightweight commercial web server that outperforms Apache, or even Lighttpd. The standard version is free, but has a limitation of 150 concurrent connections.
All my current shared hosting accounts are using cPanel, I wasn’t a big fan of it because it was (and still is) bloated and buggy. cPanel 11 did improve a little bit so I now at least don’t *hate* to use it. I’ve been playing with different web control panels for a few years now. Did I mention I once even co-owned a web hosting company? :) I personally prefer the simplicity of DirectAdmin, and the nice interface-feature balance of Interworx-CP. Although they are very good control panels, they aren’t free. Web developers (such as myself) and programmers often need VPS or even dedicated servers to perform live testing and debugging. A free control panel seems to be a nice and affordable addition to this process. :) I had been searching for one for years. Believe it or not, all free control panels sucked at that time. They either had the feature or had the interface, but never had both. Until recently (and that was about a year ago) I had discovered LxAdmin, it is in my opinion the best overall free/cheap control panel to date. I got the free 300-domain license a while ago, I’m not sure if it’s still available but even if it’s not, it is dirt cheap. Feature wise it is much more powerful than DirectAdmin, and interface wise it is pretty similar to Plesk (which by the way I don’t really like, but still better than other free ones such as ServerCP).
I discovered LiteSpeed a few years ago and had played with it for a bit. At that time the free version still has a concurrent connection limit of 300. Anyway, the experience was pretty good. It is a shame though that the price tag for the enterprise version is a little extreme for personal use. If I had a high profile website or a company website then I would definitely consider using LiteSpeed. It has a very useful web GUI that controls all the configuration. No messing around with shell commands and files any more!
Okay that was a little background story, now let’s begin incorporating the two together.
My two-month vacation in China is almost over, I’m now starting to get back to ‘work’. There are a few interesting and exciting projects under the hood. :)
Doing development work in China is more challenging, many web resources are filtered/banned in China including Wikipedia. It’s not funny to rely on proxy servers for accessing information. :(
The good thing is however, bandwidth here is unlimited (oh did I mention I’m in Australia where bandwidth is more expensive than sliced bread?), and DVDs are dirt cheap (I just bought 100 of them, shee don’t tell anyone).
GG
