The title says it all about the past 6 months. Let’s see where do I begin. Roughly at the beginning of June I began working on the Freelancers Union project. The team I worked with on this project were awesome and I thank you guys for all your hard work and dedication. Eli especially you. You were my go to guy on this project and you were always there when I needed you at the most critical of moments. The Freelancers Union project was unique because it’s 2 different version of Seagull running side-by-side completely unnoticeable to the naked eye. My team and I used Seagull 0.6.x to build a custom CMS built on top of the Publisher module and the other half of the site that is related to the job postings runs on a 0.4.x release which was built but another company. The main focus of the CMS was to create an intuitive and K.I.S.S GUI that your mom could use. Literally how the client described it.
In addition to the custom CMS we also wrote a couple plugins for it. A Dashboard plugin that displays the different content statuses and current number of articles for each status and a Timetable plugin which displays a gnatt chart or list of content items for the selected status and date range. We also integrated Live User into Seagull for this project but I think the best part of this project was that I finally got to use PostgreSQL. I’ve been dying to get away from using MySQL all the time. Next, I want to give Firebird a run for it’s money. I finally wrapped up the last bug in Trac for this project by implementing Full Text Indexing for a plugin for the CMS that allows you to search content items. I ended up using Tsearch2 an extension for Postgres that add Full Text Indexing support.
While all this was going on I was also working on a smaller project, . This project was a favor for a colleague of mine who got lead on by another coder only later to be told that he never did *ANY* work and wasn’t going to do the projects. I hate to see bad things happen to good people. The nice thing about this project was that I was able to team up with two of my fellow Seagull developers Werner and Davert to create an Event module. This was based off the Publisher module and currently only supports 2 event types. Events that occur on a specific date and recurring weekly events that occur on a specific day. More features are planned.
Mid-August I accepted a contract form m3 Media to work on a Seagull based in-house application. The past 3 and a half months have been a blast and I’ve had a chance to prosper both professionally and personally. For the first time in over 3 years I actually have a set schedule. Never thought I be saying that but man is it nice. I truly enjoy working for m3. This is also the first PHP5 application I’ve had the pleasure of working on. I’ve been patiently waiting to apply all the great things I’ve been reading about PHP5 over the past year. While working on this app I’ve learned a ton but the most notable highlight was working with Pentaho which is an Open Source Business Intelligence tool. Last week, I renewed my contract and I’m about to begin working on a new feature for Open Ads. I’m looking forward to seeing how this project has evolved since the days when it bared the name – phpAdsNew.