I've been coming across mention of the CMS platform ExpressionEngine frequently lately, and considering that it's not open-source or free, methinks that it must be a heck of a product to garner so much attention.  It is PHP/MySQL-based, like most of the other CMS systems out there, which makes me all the more curious about why it's so much better than the other options.

My personal interest is greater in Drupal right now, which will be the next system I try out.  One good thing is that ExpressionEngine does have a free limited version for a taste of what the paid version offers.

A question that has been on my mind is how Microsoft plans to promote .NET when all the development products are very expensive compared to open-source PHP/MySQL platform and tools.  Enter Visual Web Developer Express Edition.  It's a free application, part of Visual Studio Express Edition (also free), geared toward .NET development.  It seems Microsoft also has their own mashups product, similar to Yahoo! pipes, called Popfly.

Here is a good comparison of how Visual Web Developer and Expression Web, which I have been using for a while, compare.

I decided it was time to give pthesis.com its own homepage.

I wanted it to be simple and functional, with an unobstrusive pop-up for the portfolio.  I turned to jQuery, which didn't let me down.

First I placed all the portfolio data in a database (before it was just plain HTML on this site).  From there I used Dreamweaver's Developer's Toolbox to create a PHP script to convert the query data into XML, which happens live whenever the site is loaded, so I don't have to manually update anything when I add new sites to my portfolio.  I was going to use Adobe Spry for AJAX in Dreamweaver, but I found it easier to just hand-code in jQuery (plus jQuery is a lot smaller in size).

I could have converted the query data into HTML or even JSON, but XML seemed like the safest choice because of its portability and easy transferability.

I've given the site more functionality, courtsey of jQuery and PHP/MySQL.  Now the sites I've worked on can be filtered by category.  A useful site I found to compress the JavaScript code is here.  It works by removing comments, whitespace, and "other unnecessary characters" from the code.

I found yet another PHP/MySQL-based CMS platform to experiment with.  Textpattern is a small and light system, which I was looking for to implement an idea I had just this morning.  So far here is what I've got.

I used Open Source CMS to narrow the list of CMS systems down to three: Textpattern, Nucleus CMS, and Dotclear.  I wanted something barebones, since I'm going to be dealing with mostly text on this site.  I found that the biggest deciding factor - the one I used to rule out all the other options - was documentation.  If a system didn't seem well-documented I would probably have a hard time figuring out its terminology, which I didn't want to waste time on.  Of the bunch these three seemed the best-documented.

Came across a simple comparison between Flex and AJAX in a whitepaper here.  I've heard mention of Flex flying around but this article gave a quick two-sentence introduction to what it is.  Some features that stuck out for me, of each technology:

Flex:

• Browser-independent (like Flash, since it runs in Flash player)
• Less code than AJAX/JavaScript

AJAX:

• SEO friendlier
• Better native HTML support