Christian Nally's News

Here is a CMS comparison (PDF file) between Drupal, Joomla! and Wordpess.

Let's pretend for a moment that you're a freelance programmer and you're considering taking over work on an already existing website. For one reason or another the previous outfit wasn't working out for this client and you've been approached to take on the work.

Get your hands on the the source code, so that you can do a site survey before you accept the job. Most clients will be happy to have someone look at their code, and put themselves in a position to have an experts perspective on their property.

But what next? What we're really hoping for here is a quick set of tests to do, ones that'll help you assess the site quickly and efficiently.

What methodical steps can you take to work your way through a site, to get the big picture on it, and be able to give the prospective new client a realistic estimate of work that needs to be done?

Here are a few ideas for a pre-work site survey that you could perform BEFORE you accept the job, or commit to the work:

* Run it through a link checker: I recommend Xenu Link Checker. Not only does doing something like this point out things that need doing, it's also a great way to get a first look at the broad scope of a site automatically and efficiently.

* Run it through a markup validator. You'll get a decent feel for whether the HTML is well written straight away, and this simple step might point out some glaring stuff to look at, in an efficient and automated way.

* Look for signs of a development pattern in the source code: Pick the top level page, and then a page buried deep in the site map that happens to use a lot of logic. Has the previous coder followed any recognizable coding patterns? If not, you could be in for a real slog when trying to fix things.

* Do a brief security audit: Did the previous coders do a reasonable job of mistrusting user input? Do they store user data unmodified in a database and then filter output to prevent XSS attacks? Is there any sign of high level code meant to prevent SQL injection?

Ok... so it's not really dead, but today marks the launch of a big push to get the whole world to move on (finally) to PHP 5.

At the time of writing, the countdown clock reads 214 days... I'm happy to have left the decision making to those who launched the site, but wonder what would have happened if the chosen deadline was moved up a hundred days or so. :-)

Regardless, check out this precedent setting kind of 'social movement' among technologists and mark your calenders!