You probably haven’t noticed, but I’m trying to change. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks (months?) working on public projects. Significant amounts of my time have gone into making WordPress better, not just with the hacks I’ve written, but with a couple of core code changes. I have also been beta-testing some software from MicroOLAP hoping to make it better before it’s released. And there’s always the Blog Breakdown chart, which possibly started me on this whole new direction.
My WordPress additions include two things. First, I’ve written some code that will automatically apply permalink mod_rewrite code to the .htaccess file. In English, I wrote code that makes it possible to set up search engine friendly URLs without having to change any cryptic code by hand. This code is already in the CVS for WordPress 1.3.
My latest WordPress addition is something I submitted recently that I hope is incorporated. It’s a rewrite of the installer. The code I wrote allows the installer and upgrader to share the code that updates the database sturcture, and allows developers to store the database structure in a single place as SQL DDL statements. Rather than the old code that explicitly detects if a table exists before it creates it, my code parses the SQL DDL and compares the written structure of each table to its corresponding live version in the database. If they don’t match, my code will make the appropriate changes.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the forums answering questions and trying to help people out. Mostly it’s with my own plugins, but I occasionally pop in to provide answers on other posts. I ocassionally spend some time on the WordPress IRC channel. It’ll run in the background and I’ll pop in now and then to help where I can. One time, I fixed four complex issues from separate users all in one hour!
I submitted a ton of bugs for MicroOLAP’s DBACentral product. It’s basically MS Access for MySQL. It connects to MySQL as a client and allows you to access the tables directly in a grid. Because it’s an actual Windows application, it allows much more dynamic handling of the data than something like phpMyAdmin. I do like phpMyAdmin, but it’s slow over the web, and it’s hard to do certain things that DBACentral does very easily, such as recalling and comparing stored queries and directly editing table rows. (If you want a 30% discount, email me!)
I guess I’m proud of these things, and if nobody else understands my accomplishments, that’s ok. At least I’ve done them.
Now on to my next creative endeavor…
