Sea Gulls in Mexico had a unique way to try and ruin my “tan”.

Complicating this is SERIP itself which, by it’s very nature, encourages a high number of simultaneous retirements exasperating this problem. Yes, the retirements will save money in the long term, I don’t take issue with that. The problem is what it does to the current fiscal year’s budget which, in state government, would have been developed two years prior. We’re essentially making it possible for one state agency to be responsible for all the payout of an employee who may not have accrued those hours with them. The fix?

Actually, the solution is pretty simple and is both fair to state agencies and easy to budget for and that is to establish a revolving fund. State agencies would contribute to this revolving fund for each of their employees and those monies would be used to payout both vacation and sick time. Monies would flow back and forth between the fund and the agencies as vacation and sick time is accrued and used. Pretty simple, eh?

I don’t doubt there are things outside my field of view that could complicated this, but the only real barriers I see are resistance to change and petty politics. I’m surprised agency directors aren’t screaming for this type of reform after this last SERIP.

1. Compassion – The key here is, particularly when dealing with your wife or kids, try to understand and appreciate how they feel and the challenges they are faced with. I fit the stereotypical “man” here so it’s particularly important when dealing with my wife and daughters. The key here is recognizing the feelings of others and reacting to them.
2. Humility – This is sure to be one of my biggest problems as I like to be right and sometimes like to make sure others know when I am right. The goal here is to only be proud of being a good man, husband, father and to avoid any focus on self importance. This also include being able to admit when you are wrong.
3. Work Ethic – This isn’t so much in your work alone but is really aimed anything of use to you do. Hard work can be very contagious, yet, still be fun.
4. Devotion – I love this one because it seems, at least to me, to encompass commitment, faithfulness, reliability and affection.
5. Communication – Listen fully to family members, understand their challenges the their perspectives on them. Then be able to communicate back constructive suggestions. This also implies an willingness and openness to discuss things, regardless of difficulty, with family. This includes important topic often taboo in family life (e.g. sex, homosexuality, etc)
6. Frugality – I was nearly convinced by a friend to not include this quality as it seems out of place with all the other qualities. I’m not sure frugality is the right word for the quality I’m after here but my point is as a family man I feel a responsibility to be financially responsible and to preach financial responsibility to the rest of my family. While money isn’t a requisite for happiness, financial stability can certainly help. I don’t want frugality to imply you should be a miser, rather, that you should work to find a balance between financially responsible and knowing when to spend money to have a bit of fun.
7. Tough Love – a *quality* relationship cannot exist between two people if they are not free to constructively criticize and advise one another. If I have my head up my ass, tell me and give me suggests to right my path (read: you must be receptive to tough love). Additionally, with respects to discipline, be firm.
8. Levity – When was the last time you truly had fun? Do you have a sense of humor? Do make time to have fun with both your kids and your wife (together and separately)?
9. Integrity – What do you stand for and do you lead by example? If you want your kids to eat healthy, do you? You must be a role model, a moral compass. I’d like to explicitly list lying as a cardinal sin here and, after deliberation with a friend, I’ve also added lying as an explicit abomination. This include the blatant lies and, with more impact on me, “white lies”.

So there you have it, a list of qualities I will aspire to over the coming months. I will also publish my progress here using the same table layout prescribe by Benjamin Franklin in my prior post. In the meantime I’d love to hear if I missed any important qualities you feel a “family man” should aspire to or why you agree with any of the ones I’ve identified.

Recently I took up reading again and, as a fan of non-fiction, I latched on to a free eBook from Project Guttenberg, which was the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I then supplemented that book with “Benjamin Franklin” by Walter Isaacson. Together both books made it clear Benjamin Franklin was extraordinary in his accomplishments yet quite normal in his flaws. I found myself trying to draw parallels between his line of thinking and mine and what jumped out at me was that my views on religion were reflected in Franklin’s in nearly every facet. Now before you tune out thinking all this is some ploy to suck you into my line of thinking on religion, just bear with me.

As it turns out, Franklin was conscious of what kind of person he wanted to be at a much younger age than myself. However, seeing a goal and attaining it are two different things and to address this Franklin applied a pragmatic method of self-help that I’d like to share. First Franklin considered some virtues he felt he either lacked or which needed improvement. He finished with thirteen virtues (excerpt here) and while the number and the actual virtues themselves are worth noting, they aren’t the focus here. What was more impressive is what he did next. Recognizing that mastering thirteen virtues couldn’t be done all at once, he set forth a plan to track progress in all thirteen but allowing him to focus on one at a time in succession. To do this, Franklin a used sheet of paper (and later ivory tablets) where he built a table with the thirteen virtues listed vertically on the left hand side and the days of the week listed across the top. Then, starting with the first virtue (in his case temperance), he would attempt to go a full week without an infraction of that virtue while noting infractions on any of the other virtues at the end of each day. He did this by placing a dot on his table where the row of the virtue broken intersected the column representing the day of the week. In this manner he’s progress through each virtue a week at a time. If he failed to complete a week on one virtue he’d start the following week on the same virtue. Additionally, as he progressed from virtue to virtue he made a point not to break any of the already completed virtues. Thus, he built what could be, at best, a 13 week self-help program.

What impressed me most about Franklin’s Thirteen Virtues was the practical simplicity. In fact the only criticism I see in Franklin’s approach is he didn’t think to apply this method to specific areas of his life. So while he applied his virtues from more of a religious stance, if you abstract this just a bit you have a system for improving yourself in any aspect of your life (e.g. marriage, parenting, work, hunting, fishing, health, etc).

In all the exposure I’ve had to organized religion and other systems aimed at self improvement, I have seen few which give you a method this simple and one which can be independently applied (read: no need to pay big bucks for a “kit” from some self-help guru). So my question is do you agree in the utility of this method? Could it be improved? Do you see self-help as too taboo to make this useful to normal people who wish to continue to appear “normal”? More importantly would you ever use this? If not, why?

Please stay tuned as over the coming weeks I will attempt to share my experiences in applying this method, though, I don’t pretend to be able to obtain moral perfection as Benjamin Franklin had hoped.

Anyway, before we get too far my asking price is $11,000 firm. All serious inquiries can contact me at tony [at] tonybibbs [dot] com or at 515.259.0003. Here’s the specifics:

I’ve got a 2000 Lund Pro-V 1800.

• See pictures here
• It’s 18’4″ long
• Main motor is a 150hp 2 stroke 2002 Mercury Optimax with less than 50hrs (no, that’s not a misprint)
• Kicker motor is a 2002 Mercury 9.9hp 4 stroke
• Bow mount trolling motor is a Minn Kota PowerDrive 70lb with autopilot and quick detach plate
• Dash mounted GPS+Fish Finder is a Lowrance LMS-160 Map
• Side mount fish finder is an Eagle Acura 240
• Travel cover is one year old and in good shape
• Both batteries are one year old
• Dual bank, onboard charger included
• Two live wells and two bail wells
• Two lockable rod lockers

1999 Heritage Trailer is:

• 5 pin system as trailer has brakes
• All lights work
• Has rust wear as prior owner drove on gravel roads. Still very much structurally sound.
• Both tires and spare are one year old

This year, in addition to some newbies we invited, I invited a buddy and his family for a return trip. A couple of months ago it was all green lights but rainy, spring weather caused a few baseball games to get cancelled which opened the door to make-ups during the holiday weekend. I understand the dilemma but it forced me to really think a bit more about their situation and how I might react when our kids have activities that conflict with trips outdoors.

Where in the quest to have our kids become top-notch athletes did the outdoors get lost? I know the outdoors isn’t for everybody but you’d be surprised at how many of my friends who love at least one outdoor activity fail to make time for themselves and their kids outdoors. Why? I think with respect to sports, so many of them are team sports that bring a feeling of obligation to be at every practice and every game. While I admire the commitment, have you seen the schedules of some of these sports? Right now baseball season has kids at practice or games 5 days a week. As a father of three girls, gymnastics isn’t much better with two of our girls going to practice three times per week at a couple of hours a pop.

So the question I have is why don’t more parents simply say “not this weekend”, or “not today”? Right now my girls are learning all about sports, school and the outdoors. We make time for all three and I don’t want to put them into a position where they feel obligated to ditch a outdoors tradition because of sports. It’s a really complex issue that has to factor in committing to activities you’ve enrolled in and taking into account our kids desire to do other things. It’s a complicated balancing act…I realize that. But it seems that in this always on, go-go-go world we live in the outdoors always gets a back seat.

All I can tell you is that statistics suggest participation in organized sports all but disappears from our lives after high school. The outdoors is something often enjoyed throughout life. If you and your kids love the outdoors but find it hard to make time for it, it might be time for a change.

You’l notice I’m using the AIR version but my guess is you could use the one bundled with any other browser (e.g. Opera, Firefox). Just run:
locate libflashplayer.so
…and go from there.

Propel

Pros – First, let’s be clear I’m not talking about the pros of using an ORM. I’m talking about the good things that this ORM implementation brings to the table. Those are:

• Hydration Speed – You can argue you should never retrieve hydrated PHP objects from query if you don’t plan on taking some sort of save or delete action on it. Yes, that’s true from a performance standpoint, however, if you are building a site where performance simply isn’t a concern then you’ll be pleased to know Propel can hydrate a set of objects quickly enough to be used in building a view (i.e. a data grid of some sort).
• Classic Getters/Setters – You get these methods stubbed out in the base classes that Propel generates and you can override them easily. I should note Doctrine can do similar sorts of things but not in a conventional way.
• Support – The Propel mailing lists and IRC channel on freenode are pretty active, thought, not near as active as Doctrine’s.

Cons

• Dependency hell – Propel has improved this but it’s still not perfect. Back in the early days, before PDO, you needed Propel’s generator, Phing and Creole. Now you just need the generator and Phing. Phing is very much like Java’s Ant build tool. While I understand and get why they use Phing, it adds a layer of complexity that makes it a barrier to new users. Propel’s generator isn’t as bad as it is just a set of Phing targets to do Propel’s bidding. If you come from .NET or Java using Phing won’t be a big deal but if you aren’t familiar with Ant or nAnt then Phing will come with a learning curve.
• Criteria – Propel’s way to help ensure portable queries are built is via their Criteria object. While I get the need for it, not having a explicit way to run native SQL short of getting a PDO connection and doing all the work that way is a short coming. In fact, I despise Criteria so much I never use it, mainly because it doesn’t take too much work to hit a situation that Criteria either can’t handle well or make the code so complicated it’s not worth it.
• No 5.3 namespace support – Let’s face it, we are all tired of Really_Long_Class_Names ala PEAR, Zend Framework, et. al.
• Community – This is probably hard to blame on any one person but for a long time no work was done on Propel. There was a change in project leads which took a long time and the development efforts took a while to get going. I’m happy to say the team is active again, but a lot of ground was lost during the downtime.

Doctrine

Pros

• No other dependencies. Doing builds is easy as creating a simple PHP command line file and running it. No Phing, no other external property files.
• Magic finders – I love this. Say you have a user table with a user_name field that has a unique index on it. Retrieving this is as simple as

  Doctrine::getTable('User')->findOneByUserName('janedoe');

  . Propel would require a few more lines setting up a Criteria object and running it.

• Named Queries – This is something I pitched to the Propel development team quite a long time ago that always got a luke warm reception from the community. I ended up implementing my own named query implementation which worked well enough that I never used Criteria. With Doctrine you just get it out of the box:

  $this->addNamedQuery(
      'someQueryName',
      \Doctrine_Query::create()
          ->select('*')
          ->from('User u')
          ->where(user_name = ? AND 'password = ?')
  );
  

  Now I’m not totally in love with that syntax, it’s not much better than Criteria, honestly, however I go through that pain once and then I can just say:

  $user = \Doctrine::getTable('User')->find('someQueryName', array('janedoe',SHA1($password)));
  

  It’s also worth noting you can also use named queries to issue raw SQL, though, it will only return the raw recordset. Some of you are probably asking WTF? Named Queries? Read up on them, decide for yourself if they are for you…all I can say is after having used an implementation for years I’m sold on it (maybe that can be a future blog post).

• Documentation – Their documentation is top-notch. Only improvement that is needed is comment support to the manuals.
• Community – Let’s face it. Doctrine has gained some traction and all you need to do is follow the mailing lists, IRC and other community resources to see they simply get it. Their partnership with Zend Framework is a shining example of good strides in this area.

Cons

• Hydration Override – This one had me scratching my head the first time I noticed it. By default, if you fetch an object by the same primary key twice you don’t get two different copies, you get a pointer to the most recent version. On the surface that makes sense but there are a number of reasons I don’t like this as the default setting. Luckily you can turn this off through a configuration setting when you initialize Doctrine.
• Hydration Speed – This is my biggest complaints with Doctrine. If you run a query that pulls a parent/child relationship (i.e. a customer and their orders) this take a lot of time with Doctrine’s hydration method. The complexity is the circular references you can get. I don’t know why Propel handles this so much better but the impact is you can’t use Doctrine’s hydrated objects in you views. The way around this, I’ll call the Doctrine Way, is to have them hydrated as arrays. You still get the parent’s children, you just aren’t working with a native PHP object. When you think about it, it make sense, though I still prefer having a choice. The performance hit you take, even on simple queries, makes the array hydration mandatory if you are pulling more than one or two records from the database.
• No 5.3 namespace support – It too doesn’t support namespaces yet.

This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive review of either system, rather, a punchlist of noteable things. I don’t feel this blog post is near comprehensive enough to base your decision on, rather, it can be used in addition to your findings. I’d love to hear the other pros and cons from either camps.

The gun control issue is the one that burns me the most. Gun control advocates are already a motivated group and they will no doubt take Gilbert’s actions, in one of the most anti-gun cities in America, out of context and use this as further motivation to ban guns. This is my “Turn them into Monsters” reference on my post earlier on How to Stop the Hunting Tradition. Arenas will be turned into a monster that represents the hunting culture, though, I can say with virtual certainty that Gilbert knows nothing of the lifestyle. Don’t believe me? With public support for tougher gun control at an all time low, anti-gun rights groups will try to seize the moment. You only need to see some of the comments pouring in already (here and here).

The sad part is Arenas isn’t alone. You have Plaxico, P. Diddy and a host of black entertainers turning up with firearms in situations that impact not only gun control but the hunting lifestyle I hold so dear. It is important that anyone reading this still objective on the gun control issue, understand that people like Arenas do not represent gun owner (generally) and hunters (specifically).

The second impact this Arenas situation has on me is the fact he is black. Stereotypes are already ripe and, trust me, living in Iowa with hobbies that take me into rural settings I know what they are. It is on this issue I find myself agreeing with Stephen A Smith. I say throw the book on him. No, not with just unpaid leave for the rest of the season…what will that do? The guy has a $100 million contact so if you sit him out now when he’s already made roughly $7 million, he’ll only lose around $9 million dollars, or 10% of his contract. Me, if I tote heat to work – joking or not – they put me under the jail. Furthermore, my real rage comes from the parent in me. Children, including black kids, look up to professional athletes. Sure, bring out your Charles Barkley “I am not a role model” mantra. But even Sir Charles didn’t mean it in this bad of a context. Apparently I’m not the only person of color taking this stance. Reverand Al would just assume throw the book at Areans, too.

To many I am probably just an anomoly…a black, legal gun-toting American living in Iowa with a thirst for the outdoors and the lifestyle it affords me. Maybe so, but being responsible regardless of context is something I expect of my family, friends and of all Americans across gender, political and racial lines.

While some of what is Woodsmanship can come natural, such as the ability to see the flick of a buck’s tail through dense, winter timber to the ability to navigate unfamiliar terrain without getting lost. However, much of Woodsmanship comes from a single source. Experience. Luckily for those of us young in our lifetime outdoors, experience doesn’t have to be the kind experienced first hand, it can be experiences others have accrued through the years. In fact, your first course – Woodsmanship 101 – should take advantage of as many outdoors veterans as you can. Working in your favor, many of the best outdoorsmen I know have a unique combination of arrogance and unselfishness that makes it easy to draw knowledge out of them. They can’t wait to tell you what they have learned while hunting and how good they are at doing it!

Your 200 level Woodsmanship course moves you to published works. Wikipedia, outdoors magazines, outdoors television shows and publications by outdoors organizations such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Ducks Unlimited (DU) and outdoor TV shows will be a good place to start and has the added benefits of serving you well when life keeps you indoors. My suggestion is to skip Barnes and Noble and head to your closest half-price book store where there will no doubt be a number of hunting books on the cheap. Better, in my opinion, are the regional online communities such as Iowa Sportsman. Not only do such communities have a lot of members with tons of experience, they can also lead to friendships with people willing to show a novice the ropes.

After that, your studies take you into woods where Mother Nature leads the class. Entering the woods shouldn’t make you feel you are encroaching so much as you joining your rightful place in nature. Woodsmanship is much to do with reestablishing your ties with nature that our society, full of distraction has tried hard to tear down. Once there Mother Nature will likely not lay quarry in your lap, rather, give you the chance to listen and watch your quarry allowing you to apply this knowledge on future hunts. In fact, Mother Nature will often give you as much advice on how to turkeys while you are on that deer hunt as she is about deer. Woodsmanship is being open to the experience, appreciating that killing is a small part of hunting, the blending in with nature to watch creatures do what they due is the truest reward of any hunt.

Finally, it’s important that if you learn nothing else from all this, that Woodsmanship isn’t so much an attainable goal, rather, a ladder that much be climbed one step at a time but that can, with the help of others, be scaled quicker. It’s a path that is best shared and when shared with a seasoned veteran of the wood, Woodsmanship is knowing they only do so with the implicit expectation that you will do the same for others.

NOTE: Many thanks to the Iowa Sportsman Community (formerly Iowa Outdoors). Their member continue to teach me about Woodsmanship and the true meaning of happiness.

1. Start Small – Before trying to destroy hunting in a large country like the United States which is deep with outdoor traditions, start with a smaller country such as the United Kingdom. Using the Scientific Method, establish it as your control and try out a number of ideas you feel can lead to outlawing the barbaric outdoor lifestyle. Start by seeking the outran ban of a very specific species of animal that people are sympathetic to. In the case of the UK, for example, you can use the medieval class system and how it ties to oppression as a great reason to ban fox hunting. If that doesn’t work, throw in the fact the foxes will die in a brutal manner because of the use of dogs since, as we all know, mother nature is the most humane of all killers…not people nor pets.
2. Divide and Conquer – This concept is nothing new. Take a large group such as outdoors enthusiasts and divide them into increasingly smaller groups. Start by dividing them into hunting and trapping camps. Then move on to dividing hunting into deer hunters, turkey hunters and the like. Then do your best to turn those groups against one another by suggesting whitetail deer are much more of a challenge to hunt than turkey. Encourage the proliferation of region and species specific online communities. In this manner, mis-information they give about us so-called “antis” will be limited to those communities. Be sure to perpetuate the stereotype that hunting is an activity for only the manliest of white, anglo-saxon protestants. The last thing we need is the additional contention that women, blacks and Mexicans could bring to the table.
3. Turn Them into Monsters – It’ll be much easier to outlaw outdoor activities if the participants are looked upon negatively by the general public. The best part of this is you can often profit off of this activity by making things like stickers of the Confederate Flag, bullet holes or of phrases like “if it’s brown it’s down”. Then make sure others take note during hunting season as these hillbillies sport the elk or deer they shoot uncovered in the back of their pick-up or trailer. After that, find a few sensational idiots in the outdoor community such as felons and poachers and create as much publicity around their situations as possible. When that doesn’t work, hit the public with obscure facts or outright fabrications of so-called “scientific evidence” that clearly show that hunting does nothing to curb wildlife populations and even exposes those populations to hard hitting diseases that could decimate their already “managed” populations.
4. Find Sympathetic Businesses and Organizations – When the above doesn’t work, get a few so-called “non-profits” who can fight these barbarians using public donations. If you can, do some clever things like get companies that provide common, everyday products like dog food to donate part of their revenues to those same non-profits. Outdoorsmen are pretty dumb and won’t dig deep enough to find out that the product they just bought is actually working against them. These non-profits also bring the added benefit of having Washington D.C. lobbyists at their disposal. These groups are great at working the political circuit and the art of the amendment. That’s right, our lobbyist friends have found crafty ways to attach anti-hunting legislation to bills that have nothing to do with hunting or the outdoors! While all that is going on, we need to point out at every chance we get that our non-profit partners and leaders in business are responsible for the massive turn around in game populations throughout the country. Hunters will lie and suggest the government – through hunting and fishing licenses – are responsible which, of course, is a lie.
5. Hit Hollywood Hard – Let’s face it, there is no denying the influence that Hollywood and celebrity actors have on the general public. Many of these same celebrity actors tote around their pets and even dress them up like real people. Find the biggest names in Hollywood you can to take up our cause and publicly humiliate these neanderthals. Don’t forget, these same celebrities have deep pockets and relationships with influential people such as judges and politicians. If Hollywood can get Obama elected, damn it, they can help us outlaw hunting!
6. Outlaw Their Tools – Fact is these bozo’s can’t kill or harm an animal if we take away the very tools they depend on. First try hitting them where it hurts most by taking away their guns. If you can’t ban firearms outright, first try to outlaw automatic weapons. Turn it into an issue of public safety deflecting the issue of hunting. Be sure to point to the escalating crime in your area as a reason to get rid of these radical firearms. Once you get automatic guns outlawed, just start climbing the ladder to handguns, shotguns and rifles. While you work on the firearms bans be creative and consider trying to obtain the outright ban of ammunition. Maybe even sue a firearms or ammunition manufacturer for the death of some pour soul in some big city…it doesn’t matter that hunting wasn’t involved.
7. Give Them Something Else To Do – If all of the above fails, one thing we have in our hip pocket is that hunting is on the decline. We need to continue pushing distractions such as mobile phones, the Internet and gaming devices like the Wii and Playstation 3. Fact is, kids would rather text, update their Facebook status, or play computer games against each other. This is our Plan B. These hunting fools are too stupid to realize how drastic the decline in hunting licenses are and the positive effect it will have for us moving forward.

I owe quite a bit to Geeklog…after installing Linux and PHP for the first time over 12 years ago I ran across Geeklog, learned a thing or two about open source development and started Iowa Outdoors (which I’ve since sold). Not long after that I was fortunate enough to serve as the project lead for Geeklog before handing it off to the current lead, Dirk Haun. Back then, there weren’t many viable options in the now overcrowded PHP CMS market. Sadly, I’ve watched Geeklog’s popularity slowly decline to its current state. That said, I have a few constructive things to say to the Geeklog community and the PHP community at large.

First to the Geeklog community. You’ve run into rough times. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and company really are the champions in this space. Without doing more digging than I care to, I know Geeklog is far behind in any of the hard metrics that really matter (code commits, # of active developers, etc). Just a hint of proof is had by comparing Geeklog’s Ohloh stats with this, this and this. Then there those things you can’t quite quantify, the passion of the community and the level of innovation happening. Right now I feel the Geeklog community is pretty stagnant. Some of this is likely to be blamed on the fork of Geeklog (whose Ohloh stats don’t speak well either). Fact is if you combine both glFusion and Geeklog’s numbers together it still paints a pretty bad picture. You could argue they don’t need to aspire to be like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal which is fine but what I think has gotten lost in all of this nobody has consciously said if that’s the game they want to play and, if not, what differentiates Geeklog from the rest? In the meantime, the set of features added over the past year or two suggest, in fact, they are playing catch-up to some of the features found in those other systems. That’s not bad, but my point is Geeklog seems to lack a tangible goal. I guess that is part of the nature of open source…the perpetual, organic, itching of scratches but I still feel open source projects need to have long term visions far beyond the next commit, next point release and even next major release. With that said here’s some suggestions for Geeklog’s community in no particular order:

• Change your name – I attempted to address this with AptitudeCMS and failed but something has to be done. I’m not sure if there is a precedent for a name change in a well established open source project but it has to happen for Geeklog. To me it is branding 101. For anybody outside of a blogger or hobbyist, it’s hard to take the Geeklog brand seriously. Pointy haired managers scoff at such a name (I’ve seen it). Sure you risk confusing or alienating people but I feel Geeklog, as a brand, is hard to sell. That said, even without a name change the remaining points are crucial.
• Change your image – The Geeklog homepage screams mid-1990′s era design. It’s the first impression we give users. Even if you don’t want to compete directly with the bigger kids on the block, you can’t argue that Joomla, WordPress and even the Geeklog fork looks better. It’s the first impression a user gets. I think improving the Geeklog homepage will lead to more interest. Once captivated, I have now doubt the codebase speaks for itself but, for now, the Geeklog homepage is forgettable for new users.
• Get social – Geeklog is no where to be found on Twitter, Facebook, etc. The missed opportunities here are, frankly, staggering. The PHP community (as well as Drupal, Joomla, etc) all have a strong presence in these areas and I have no doubt the Geeklog community could benefit by joining the conversation.
• Blog – Let’s face it, there isn’t much in the way of active Geeklog developers. The ones there really need to blog about what’s going on behind the scenes. What are you working on? What’s a challenge you are facing? Any good commits lately? This in part gets back to the goal setting discussion but it is more todo with giving the community a glimpse of what is going on.
• Find a partner – Ok, this is probably one of the more controversial points and one that is often dodged in open source discussions but behind nearly all successful open source projects is an organization. Sometimes it is not-for-profits but many times it is a private company or two. Right now there isn’t a single Geeklog developer paid to work full time or even half-time on the core of the system. Geeklog’s current codebase, in my opinion, has to be worth that investment. I think part of the problem here has to do with the name, image and branding issues I brought up. That said, I know of a lot of organizations making selfish use of Geeklog without giving anything back. No bugs, no code, no testing, no translations nada. Zilch. Now before the hardcore OSS supporters flame me, I’m not suggesting the project be effectively run by a company or an organization, rather, there should be enough of a community still where they can contribute developer hours to the project. I believe strongly the project itself needs to remain organic able to change with the needs of those who lead…but that some investment by industry is needed. Who will stand up?

Now to the PHP community at large. As I look at AptitudeCMS, I see a body of work that started before there were any other PHP frameworks around. I started with an MVC implementation. I incorporated a simple template engine. Later added an ORM. Much of this happened over many employers and well before anybody uttered Zend Framework for the first time. AptitudeCMS as a project is a failure in large part because it was never really released as a “formal” project until well after current PHP framework space became cluttered. Fine, it is what it is. However, to see this stuff rot and be used only when I have a new project come up seems silly. I’m pleading, for my own sanity, don’t let this code go to waste. Feel free to dissect it, borrow anything you find useful and laugh at any bad code you dig up. Some areas of focus:

• MVCnPHP – It’s a viable alternative to Zend Framework’s MVC implementation. It’s small, configureless and doesn’t present file contention issues common with ZF controllers. I’m sure a Zender can point out ways around this but most ZF projects I’ve seen have all the logic in the controller which seems really wrong to me and is a bit painful when you have multiple developers working in the same controller. Sure SVN, etc can handle the merge but you end up with a lot of merges. MVCnPHP is much more atomic, view logic goes in a simple, small view class. Command logic goes in a similar command class. The controller is only responsible for routing requests between views and commands. An upside to this is MVCnPHP also has basic support for tainted variables. For the unaware, it’s a simple feature that notifies developers with exceptions when an unsanitized GET or POST variable is used.
• Filtering – I built a filter class on top of Zend Framework that can easily be added to MVCnPHP views and commands. Without much work it could also be incorporated into Zend Framework MVC implementations. Look first here then see the “cool code” in the Filter class which is nothing more than a class that passes calls thru to Zend’s library and then the abstract view that uses it. I doubt the code will tickle you as is but I think conceptually it has merit for someone out there.
• ORM->Form and Form->ORM – Because we use Propel we were able to dream up a way where we could hand a view an object and have it pre-fill from that object without us having to explicitly set the form field values. Similarly, in our commands we found a handy way of creating the same ORM objects from the submitted form without having to explicitly map and set the ORM object’s values. This was a huge time saver. I think with a little work this code could be modified for Doctrine. Here’s how we map a form submission to a set of object(s) and here is mapping a object to the form

One thing I want to warn the community at large about is I’m seeing what feels to me like a trend in PHP to conform. You could argue that this very blog post is me, in a way admitting defeat and conforming, but I want to state the obvious that you always have a choice. It seems like many people are choosing to use part of a framework they have already installed instead of challenging whether or not it is the best tool for the job. Just because a filter class is included in Zend Framework doesn’t mean you have to use it. Just because ezComponents has a workflow component doesn’t mean you must employ it. Fact is AptitudeCMS includes Zend Framework, has some PEAR libraries and even some things like MVCnPHP. You can argue bloat, file sizes, which is valid but I’m confident you can still cherry pick the best parts of a framework to give you something you can work with long term. I’ve used Flexy instead of Smarty, MVCnPHP instead of Zend Framework and Propel instead of Doctrine. Some could see those as one bad decision after another but it’s simply the result of a cherry picking exercise I did long ago. Today I’d likely make different decisions but I can tell you I wouldn’t put all my eggs in one basket. Nor should you.

This blog entry, a self admission to failure, hopefully didn’t upset anybody along the way. To be clear I’m the only one who failed here. Maybe “fail” is too harsh a word as I’m quite happy to make this transition but I want to be clear to Dirk Haun, the Geeklog Project and those of you whom I’ve brushed IDE’s with are all people I very much respect. I hate “losing” and this feels like a loss and will always feel that way. If anybody makes use of any of these suggestions please pass that along in an email to me. It will take a bit of the sting off.