Journal - Technology blog

This great looking project has got a lot of publicity on the net recently, and with good reason, the feature list is very exciting for an open source, free project. Blurb from the source:

Magento is a new professional open-source eCommerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control. With Magento, never feel trapped in your eCommerce solution again.

I stress again the features mentioned on the site, really are high-end, i would be very interested to hear if anyone gets a chance to install it. Let me know what it’s like

I’ve recently been looking at an open source replacement for Dreamweaver and stumbled across an IDE called Aptana which focuses on front end development. Heres the introductory blurb from the Aptana site:

The Aptana IDE is a free, open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused editor and development environment for building Ajax applications. It features code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, FTP/SFTP support and a JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code.

You will certainly notice that there are some very handy features on there, such as javascript and css debugging on the fly, which cuts out those frustrating minutes waisted by simple spelling mistakes. The software is strongly related to the Eclipse platform, and as such you can take advantage of the plugins which are on offer, at work i have installed the subversion plugin enabling me to edit & commit from within one program, excellent!

It’s not all perfect though, you have to remember as with everything these days, it’s beta software, yes there will be bugs, yes there will be some things you don’t like, but features are being worked on and if you interested check out the development blog and forums. One feature i’m certainly looking forward to will be php syntax highlighting support. Give it a try you might be pleasantly surprised…

I came accross an excellent method for returning to the root of your folders with php, which is really useful when you are including the same file in many places. Below is a code snippet of an implementation:

    <?php include ($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/includes/file.php"); ?>