Why so many “coming soon”?

Some people asked me why there are so many “coming soon”. Well the answer is relatively simple. I’m a perfectionist kind of guy. Thus, the very first version of m4platform, though lightweight, must be perfect. And I mean it! I am very conscious about the fact that smart people (to which I’m usually addressing) recognize a close-to-perfection kind of thing.

The reason it takes so much to be released is that, as I said earlier, I’m a perfectionist kind of guy. I was about to lunch m4platform many times in fact. But every time I wanted to do it I figured out that it was a bit incomplete. Indeed, I want to keep it lightweight, but that doesn’t mean I must come with something that doesn’t have that high usability I had in mind when I started developing this platform. Beside being lightweight and having a highly usability so that you can go right away and start writing modules, the platform must also run fast when working with large result sets, must implement design patterns, must implement best practices, must take care of a11y issues (i18n will be implement probably in version 2) and many other things. And that’s pretty hard to do especially when you also need to work to earn your money for a decent livelihood, and when you also learn for some though exams.

One thing is for sure. Not too much Dojo/JQuery will be used in the first version. In the first version I focus my attention especially towards back end and less to the front end.

m4platform and m4mc

I am currently working on a so-called application platform, namely m4platform, on which I will be building from now on my applications. It is build with Zend Framework MVC. It comes with 3 indispensable modules: m4modules for managing modules of the application, m4users and m4auth. I believe it’s pretty intuitive what the last two modules do.

As you can see it is a platform for building modular applications which need authentication against a users table. Besides authentication, the platform also comes equipped with an Access Control Plugin. This plugin pretty much controls everything and handles the requests properly. The access control is done via an ACL (Access Control List). This ACL is updated every time a module is installed/uninstalled or enabled/disabled. It is also updated every time a change is done on user groups. The ACL is stored in a file as a serialized object.

There are so many things to say about this platform but I’d like to be short this time. What you need to know for now is that m4platform will be the best free solution for building Zend Framework applications. The aims of this platform are many. Once I have a full list of what you can do and what you can’t do with this platform I will post it here. Stay tuned to find out more about m4platform!

The m4mc is a collection of modules (m4niac modules collection) which are to be plugged into m4niac applications (applications built on m4platform). There two types of modules: m4admin modules and m4public modules. The m4admin modules all need authentication, while only some m4public modules need it in order to access them. Once released the m4platform, a clear categorization of these modules will be available too. I’m planning to build modules for almost everything.

LE: m4platform together with m4mc and m4library will be used on various applications I will build, namely a CMS, a BLOG application and maybe an E-COMMERCE application too. All these will be free.

First m4niac’s post

m4niac logo

What is this blog about?

Well, first of all I will be writing only in English.

On this blog I will be sharing my thoughts with you – the reader. What I will be writing about will be mostly web development (PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Zend Framework, Dojo, JQuery, etc) and web design (basically Photoshop and CSS) as, of course, blog’s title suggests. Beside these, I will be also sharing with you personal thoughts, ideas, theories and so on. Not too many, though.

I will start some tutorial series about working with Zend Framework, Dojo and JQuery too, maybe. I will enlist my projects here and keep you up to date with my current status regarding web development or web design. I will be recommending you useful stuff, I will present you best techniques for development and design, I will comment on various topics concerning WEB and Internet and many other things. Useful stuff, I guarantee! So keep reading. Not just my blog. Read everything you perceive as interesting! And ultimately, SHARE whatever seems interesting to you! For people will be thankful to you. Each one in its own way, though…

One thing I’m not sure about is the frequency by which I will be writing on this blog… for as you can see on the about me page, I have plenty of things to do. That’s why, though I promise I will be writing useful and interesting stuff here, I don’t promise I will be writing everyday. There might be weeks in which I will be writing tones of posts and there might be months since I haven’t posted anything…