Dale's Weblog

3rd party vs custom made.

I was reading over at http://photomatt.net/2004/09/04/six-apart-musings/ and this topic reminded me of my thoughts towards custom made and 3rd party software. My blog was written by myself from the ground up so that it supports the features that I want.

Now it has been a great learning process and anyone who is thinking of playing around with php/mysql should think about coding their own news/commenting system, it is lots of fun!

But the real issue here is coding your own software as usable as some 3rd party thing (such as wordpress) that has many programmers behind it testing and writing it? From my point of view, I’d call this website somewhat close to wordpress in its basic features. For example:
*Commenting
*Archive
*mod_rewrite use
*trackback functions
*admin panel (with different level users)

But then the thing about this site is that it really isn’t anywhere near "ready" for public use. So far there is no install program, you can’t change that many settings etc If you had the choice between this program/site or wordpress you’d go with wordpress any day. But for me there isn’t much chance of changing over. I enjoy the coding. I like knowing HOW my site works. And any changes can be done by me easily.

For some people they don’t want to have to support the code behind the site, they just want to blog and that is cool. For me this site is as much about the blogging as it is about the code/site behind it.

What has been interesting is making my site "support" wordpress. When I say wordpress I mean the trackback function of it. Making my code compatible with the trackbacks from a wordpress site and then making wordpress sites understand trackbacks sent from here. It has been a great learning process.

After the HSC I plan to rewrite the code behind this site and maybe even make is useable for the general public. That would be cool. But currently the HSC has higher priority (although you wouldn’t know it!).

So in a somewhat conclusion 3rd party stuff is great if you don’t want to support the code behind your site, but writing your own can be just as good. I’ve written this site to suit my needs and likes. I only add what I see is needed, so it suits me better.

On a somewhat different topic. PHP5. My development server runs php5 (where as this one is on php4) and I was testing this site on it. One quick thing make sure you just use things like $_POST and not $HTTP_POST_VARS php5 out of the box doesn’t work with it (and shouldn’t really, $HTTP_POST_VARS is the old style of coding).

Having a development server is great. Don’t test things live, I’ve done that before, not always a good idea! :p