And Tuesday again

Busy busy

I restarted work in Pizza Passione recently which offered an opportunity to update some Typomania CMS components that don’t get frequent attention - partly as I don’t build many small websites, and partly because some of the code is a bit old. A CMS was the first thing I built after going freelance in 2003.

So, today’s grind has been replacing an options menu system. The older version stored options in a text string and the new version stores values as JSON, which means it can easily be turned into and object or array which helps.

The trigger was revisiting an experimental module ‘containers’, which I managed to get working quite quickly, and will use in production for the Pizza site. It’s not that exciting - it basically adds some flexibility near the top level of a page structure.

The bigger deal is that it takes advantage of a recent push to switch some MVC concepts. I don’t know if I’m breaking more rules or finally doing things the proper nerdy way, but I’m adding functions/methods into classes that can return fully formed output. For example, if there’s a class for ‘cats’ I could call a function the would say cat->get_cats(array_of_details) and would be given back a list of cats in a format specified in the array_of_details.

I’ve avoided this in the past as there’s a danger when things call each other. A ‘breeds’ object might call the cat object and vice versa, and this takes me back to the reason why I need to hurry up. I have a groovy new way to avoid recursion, but have seen that I’ve not implemented it somewhere - time to go…