I have switched my primary web browser to Brave. But also found that Chromium (or any alternative web browser) is necessary. Since I am a software developer, sometimes need to implement ads related feature. Brave will block ads by default. That’s why I need an alternative web browser that I can freely to turn off the adblock. Though I can turn off the adblock in Brave, it will affect my browsing experience. As a result, using an alternative web browser for development on ads related feature is necessary.

Personal Web Server(?) age

When I was doing web development, that time was mostly static pages, with no CSS, a little JavaScript. The only interaction was CGI form. Then I learnt VBScript for ASP and Microsoft Access and used Personal Web Server.

Designing page layout was like hell, everything was using table. The font style was hard coded. So, the HTML source is too messy.

LAMP age

Then, from Personal Web Server, the web server was upgraded to IIS. Next was XAMPP on Windows, using all open source solutions: Apache, MySQL, and PHP. That was a great solution. Unlike ASP, PHP has more functions, more libraries, supports object oriented, syntax similar to C and C++.

Long time ago, I was learning CakePHP, then followed by CodeIgniter. Due to the restrictions using the framework such as naming convention, strict function calling based on MVC model, I decided to write my own personally framework from the scratch. The experience was very nice. Because I learnt about the caching, MVC architecture, function arguments in PHP, etc. But the development became gradually inactive.

After several years, recently I am trying back CodeIgniter, and now I conclude that, framework, though it is not required, it is strongly recommended. Why?

I wrote a small plugin for TinyMCE, to solve the “tab” problem. This is because, in the TinyMCE editor, whenever I press “tab”, it will navigate, instead of insert “\t” in the editor.

After some understanding with TinyMCE API, then I wrote this plugin.

Usage:

1. Add the inserttab plugin button to the toolbar, in the HTML Javascript. This will show a button with “\t” image in the editor.
2. Click the button to enable the feature.
3. Then, whenever we press “tab”, if it is preformatted text, then it will become a real tab, “\t”, else will be filled with “    ”.
4. To turn off, just click the button again.

The plugin is BSD license. It can be downloaded here.

There are a lot of frameworks available for web development. For PHP, there are Zend Framework, CakePHP and CodeIgniter. I also tried Joomla! before, learn about the Joomla framework, but, it is really troublesome. In my opinion, Joomla! is user friendly, but not developer friendly.

I tried CakePHP. It is better than Joomla, for a developer. But the Acl control provided is really difficult to learn. The “Bake” seems useful, but editing the generated files is also a pain. The MySQL database is also not highly customizable. I totally agree to a post in Stack Overflow:

The followings are only my personal opinions.

Joomla!, a very popular CMS (Content Management System). Easy to use, a lot of extensions, free to download. Yet, not all the extensions are free. Some are commercial extensions. Some commercial extensions allow you to download for limited days of trial. Easy to install, easy to use. A lot of people like it.

On the other hand, CakePHP, not a CMS but only a web application framework (I mentioned CakePHP in this post because this is the only web application framework I used, I haven’t tried about CodeIgniter or Ohloh). Comparing CakePHP with Joomla isn’t quite appropriate because they are not same category. But for me, both of them are PHP and used to develop websites.