But I digress. I’m a lefty, I believe in social justice (whatever that means), and yet I’m not wailing in the streets this morning, rending cloth and gnashing teeth.

Did I miss the memo? The Tories are coming! THE TORIES ARE COMING!

Well, no. I didn’t miss the memo. For one thing, it’s raining today, so I’m not going out unless I really have to, and for the other, well, I’m a little confused as to what we’re wailing about.

Oh, right. We’re headed back to the eighties. Fire up the Quattro and all that. Well, forgive me for not quite getting bent out of shape just yet. Here’s why:

Cause / Effect

We got the eighties because we had the seventies. Everyone hates Thatcher for smashing the unions, but what, exactly, was the alternative? Everyone hates Thatcher for ruthlessly privatising everything, but what, exactly, was the alternative?

This isn’t a post to praise Thatcher, not by a long shot. I mean to bury her, and perhaps even bury the spectre of her. Many of the problems she’s blamed for were the result of having to fix problems started by Labour mismanagement in the seventies. Yes, she was equally guilty of fucking things up, but run a little thought experiment: imagine the eighties under Callaghan. Now imagine the nineties after Callaghan.

It’s as easy to point to Thatcher’s Tories as evil because of what happened to this country in the eighties as it is to point to Blair’s Labour as wonderful because he inherited a country with a stable economy at the height of the dotcom boom, and had Liam Gallagher round for tea. We’re now in a situation where the country’s screwed, thanks to Brown’s handling of the economy and security, rapidly heading towards a police state, where graduates are unemployable and in massive debt, where using the internet is soon to be a crime, where we engaged in a war of aggression, colluded with war criminals, hounded out nay sayers, and bulldozed opposition in parliament because of a massive incumbent majority.

And we’re still talking about “short memories” because of Thatcher.

Balance

The argument against the Tories seems to be “anyone but the Tories”. How constructive. Whom? A party that, as it stands, is guilty of incompetence? An unproven party that has never taken power? Or a party that hasn’t been in power for over a decade, has (perhaps, perhaps not) changed since then?

Or is there an alternative?

What this country needs, more than anything, is balance, conversation, discussion and progression. What we have now is partisan, us and them bullshit threatening to drown out the point that something new is happening here: we have a coalition government, and one with a razor thin majority. Yes, it’s the Tories in power, but it’s the Tories relying on co-operation with the centre. We have Labour in opposition, and it’s Labour relying on co-operation to do their job of opposing.

In short, we have a potential parliament again: somewhere where bills may actually be debated and voted on an individual basis, not rammed through on whim *cough*DEBill*cough*. We have a parliament where our MPs might actually show up, because they might actually make a difference if they do.

We have the Tories in power, but a potentially powerful watchdog.

What if

So what alternatives were there? Clegg could have told Cameron and Brown where to go. Strategically, I’d have liked this. I’d have preferred Cameron attempting a minority government. It would have crashed and burned, and we’d have a general election in six months. In my little fantasy (indulge me), Clegg would have come out of the negotiations squeaky clean, having not compromised his principles, Labour would be adrift and unelectable after 13 years of mismanagement, the Tories would have very recently, very publicly fucked up after only six months, and Clegg would win in a landslide.

That option is still open to Clegg, but it’s unlikely to happen. The Liberals’ hold on the media has never been strong. He’d be painted as a modern-day Hamlet as fast as possible by both sides, and we’d get another minority result with the blame squarely on his shoulders in the public eye.

So he compromised. Get used to it. That’s what is hopefully going to dominate this government. Compromise. It’s what this country desperately needs, and it’s something we’ve never tried before. I could be wrong, the Tories may still be evil, and in twelve months we may be begging for mercy. But make no mistake, life under a continued Labour government was getting worse, and had to end. Five more years of Brown would have been five more years of criminality, public bailouts of private fuck ups, increased surveillance, hyper inflation and darkness. The 2010s are coming, regardless of who’s in power. We can’t afford “business as usual”, regardless of who’s in Number 10.

And if nothing else, this election was a ringing condemnation of “business as usual”.

The first one to yell loses

There’s a reason that yelling is often called “losing it”. Yelling shows you’ve lost control, it shows that you’ve lost sight of what it is you’re talking about. Yelling means that you’re trying to beat the other person, not win the argument or express your point.

If you start to feel yourself lose it, just:

1. Smile
2. Breathe
3. Go slowly

There’s something much more compelling about a whisper than a yell. This wallpaper might help you remember.

Languages, frameworks, design patterns, blogs, Photoshop, Fireworks, off-the-shelf products, roll-your-own solutions, operating systems, servers, desktop PCs, laptops, phones, shoes, socks, paradigms: they’re all just tools.

Craftsmen create. They use their tools and they get the job done.

The end result is the job. The tools are irrelevant to the craftsmen. Don’t debate others’ choices of tools – learn from them. That is the path of the artisan.

The more tools you have, the better. The more you use them all, the better.

Anything else is just spending your apprenticeship looking for the perfect hammer, then spending your career painting it.

My second guess is that if you called me arrogant, your development language of choice for your killer CMS was PHP.

I know. I feel your pain. I’ve been there. There is a better way.

PHP was good enough for me father, so it’s good enough for me

Okay, so now I’m going to hate on PHP for a bit? What next? Sugar in your gas tank?

Let’s get one thing straight. I have no problem with PHP as a language. Well, okay, I have a few problems, but in principle I think it’s a fine platform for developing, well, anything you want. The syntax is a bit flakey, and language consistency is practically non-existent, but it’s really as good as any other language geared to web development.

I also think there are some great apps written in PHP. In my last post, I mentioned three content management systems that I use regularly. They’re all PHP-based, and I recommend them all.

So what gives? PHP is a ghetto? How come?

PHP is too easy

While it will take me a little while to justify it, my conclusion is simple. PHP is far too easy to hack on and get fast results.

You know what else is too easy? HTML. Let’s take a little analogy trip back to the late 90s.

Back in the day, HTML was a horrendous tag soup. “Progress” was measured by browsers adding proprietary tags to a badly-enforced spec that nobody cared about. We all laid out in tables, we all used massive sliced images to get our message across. Our sites were inaccessible and unsearchable.

But who cared? It was easy to build a website. Fire up Front Page, hack about in Photoshop for an afternoon, and boom – one corporate intranet coming right up!

Of course, you could follow the standards if you wanted. You could create great sites without resorting to the nasty tables, but if you did so you were an one of those guys – what was the point?

The point, of course, was maintainability, with an added bonus of learning a whole load about how the web was supposed to work: semantics, presentation separation, scalability, inter-app communcability. These days the cool kids call it “Web 2.0″.

Thankfully, the sort of table-driven web design that we saw back then is dying a slow, lingering, but ultimately satisfying death. Designers who still think in terms of CSS being “that new thing that nobody really uses” aren’t occupying many high level positions any more, and it’s all a bit more disciplined a discipline.

PHP is still amateur night

Let’s haul our analogy back on track. What does this have to do with PHP? The problem is that while the folks running the show at php.net are desperately trying to enforce some standards, and generally discipline up their users, the users are having none of it. PHP4 just won’t die, and there are still a lot of professional PHP developers out there who haven’t moved beyond a few bits of PHP injected into flat files on their server.

PHP is great for quickly adding some functionality to a flat site. That’s how most of us got into building “PHP apps” in the first place. A file here, a login page there, some admin forms and suddenly we’ve got an app! It’s untestable, unmaintainable, but it’s small enough that we don’t care.

Except we then get adventurous and start hacking at some sort of “framework” idea that we have, without realising that we’ve crossed over to the point where we really need some computer science understanding here. Design patterns? What are they?

Suddenly we have hundreds of .php files in our public_html directory, each one slavishly copying the authentication header include to make sure the right users get to administer the site. Adding a new section? Fire up the FTP client, create a new directory, and make four copies of the “page” script.

We might even get creative and use .htaccess to start hacking up our URLs to look nice.

But we’re still just using glorified server-side includes to activate our pages.

Go pro

Most of the good, object oriented, application-thinking PHP developers I know only became that way because of one of two things in their careers:

• They came to PHP from a comp. sci. background
• They left PHP to program in a different language, and came back enlightened

This is one of the main reasons that I try to wean PHP developers off PHP as fast as possible when I meet them. I don’t care if you use Rails, Django, Zope, Erlang or frigging Perl (okay, maybe not Perl) – just get out of the PHP ghetto, and see how the big boys do it.

It’ll seem weird at first (”There’s only one file in the public_html directory!!”) and you won’t like it (”I could do this SO MUCH FASTER if I just wrote some inline PHP to process the form submission”), but gradually you’ll start to see all the wins you’re getting (”You mean I don’t have to instantiate the database connection?”) and the time you end up saving (”Wow, all my HTML is bundled in a neat package, and I can drop in a new template any time I like!”).

You’re then free to come back to PHP and start coding like a real programmer. You’ll have a much greater appreciation for how it all works, and that a little discipline saves a lot of time.

Why the venom?

The last couple of posts have been pretty vitriolic. They say we hate most in others the faults we see in ourselves, and I’ve recently been reminded of my “bad old days” a few years ago where PHP was my only language, and I loved Rails but didn’t want to learn Ruby.

I’ve been working recently on a legacy project from those days, and realise how far I’ve come. I hope this post and the last one might save someone else the pain.

PHP is bad shit, kids – just say no.

Picking the engine itself, though, has taken about 2 years, and was based on one thing: immediacy.

Choices, choices

Choice is good, right? Competition is even better. I’ve recently become jaded with my own erstwhile approach to site management systems. That approach could be boiled down to two simple statements:

• Content Management Systems are simple
• Given enough projects, I can incrementally build my own while getting paid for it

The implication being that “my own” will be inherently better than any of the off-the-shelf systems that are already out there, because I’ll understand it from the ground up.

What really happens can be summed up by these parallel statements:

• CMS is as “simple” as word processing: easy to describe, easy to prototype, hard to perfect
• Clients are not software designers, and I’m a scorched-earth perfectionist

All of which results in me, having idealised the first two statements, but followed the second two, writing this post two years later.

Build it in increments -> (step 2) -> profit!

If you are planning on building an in-house CMS, I’m assuming that you’ve already come up with all the rationalising arguments about why it will be “better” than off-the-shelf. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve convinced yourself that the client’s requirements are beyond the scope of any existing system, or whether you’re just full of “Not Invented Here” Kool-aid, the point is that you and your team are committed to delivering a CMS to fulfil your client’s spec.

Of course, what I’ve just described is a bespoke CMS for a single client. Everyone knows that’s not scalable to larger projects, so how do we get around that?

All together now:

We write the core of the CMS for this client, and build it modularly so that we can just give them what they asked for, but reuse the core on the next project!

Bingo. Sounds great, doesn’t it? You make a bit of a time loss on this project, but it’s an investment, because next time around you’ll be mainly writing modules for the next client’s functionality. If the next client has the same spec as this client, it’s instant profit! What can go wrong?

This is where reality creeps in. You build your CMS nice and modularly for the first two weeks. You then realise that you’re not quite finished the core yet, and you’ve only got two weeks left to implement the various bits of functionality as modules. You panic. You know what modules you need, so you start building the remainder of the core with those modules in mind. You maybe even start building some modules into the core, promising to refactor them out on the next project, because you finally remembered your Pragmatic Programmer, and suddenly it’s all about “just get it working”.

You complete the project on time, and what do you have? A half-bespoke, half-modular monster that is going to require a serious refactoring job to make usable for the next project.

However, you’ve learned a lot. This is a key realisation, and often missed. You’ve learned a hell of a lot, and this is where the rot starts. You’ve learned so much that you convince yourself that, on the next project, it would be insanity to try to reuse any of what you’ve just coded. What you decide to do instead is to reuse the knowledge. Oh yeah, baby – we salvaged something after all!

So you start coding again from scratch. This time it will be better, you say, since you know how it all went wrong last time, and you’ve come up with five great new ways of modularising from the get-go. Then client number 2 rolls along.

One of these kids is kinda different

So with your newfound “I get it now!” knowledge, you start implementing The Plan again. Client 1 was a false start – client 2 is the real deal. Now you know how to make it modular, you’ll do it right this time.

Except the same thing happens. This time, because you’re having so much fun coding, and because you’ve convinced yourself that last time you caved and started coupling the core to the modules too early, you hold out to week three to produce the core CMS. But again, week three rolls around and you’re still not done. With only one week left to implement the functionality that took you two weeks last time, you start panicking and even more coupling happens. Worse, your project runs over time and is late.

So far, with two projects in the bag, you’ve overserviced both, pissed off one of the clients by being late, given each a rushed bespoke system (with all the attendant maintenance overheads), and have precisely zero reusable code. Not exactly the outcome you’d hoped for.

So what went wrong?

Addiction is curable

What went wrong is that you failed to notice that your stated goals were not really your goals. Worse, you actually got what you wanted all along.

Huh?

Your implicit goal in building an in-house CMS was to reduce the amount of work you do. You’ve noticed that servicing your clients is boring, because you’re constantly writing the same stuff. To fix that, you decide to consciously write that stuff in a way that you can reuse next time.

The logical next step of that is to write an entire system that you can reuse next time. This is where the logic breaks down, because there already are systems that you can reuse. Right now. You can download MODx right now and be at precisely the point you say you want to be at in four weeks.

So why didn’t you? You didn’t because your goal isn’t to reduce the amount of work you do, it’s to increase it. What you secretly want to do is build a bespoke CMS for every one of your clients. You hope that maybe, one day, you might hit upon a pattern that you can reuse, but you don’t really care about that. You love coding, you love tweaking and refining and burning it down and starting again. You love it, and you got it.

Step zero is realising you’re addicted

So what are you addicted to? Coding? No – you’re addicted to the knowledge you’re learning, to the experience, to “figuring it out”. That’s why it’s so difficult to locate the source of the problem. When I said “you wanted to increase your workload”, you balked, because to you the work is becoming more and more painful.

The knowledge isn’t, though. You’re putting up with the pain for the rush of having refined your perfect plan for next time.

And the truth is that your CMS prototypes are getting better all the time. After 5 or 6 more clients, you might have a really solid platform.

Too bad for your first half-dozen alpha and beta testing clients, though.

Where’s the exit?

So how do you break this cycle? You decide which of these is more important to you right now. Do you want to:

• Build a CMS; or
• Streamline your client servicing?

You don’t get both, not right now. If you want to build an in-house CMS, you’re going to have to commit 6 to 9 months of development time to it, and the client has to be your company, not some real-world project you’re using to guinea-pig your sketches on. You need to take yourself (and perhaps another developer) off paid work and become software developers, with the attendant investment and payoff cycles that don’t exist in direct-to-client sales.

That’s the price. Once you have your CMS, you can start flogging it to people. At that point you can start to “Streamline your client servicing”.

Of course, by then, I’ll be in your sector, stealin’ your clients, because I chose to “Streamline my client servicing” straight up using WordPress and Expression Engine, with MODx in there for the really tricky stuff, and have been having a whale of a time developing modules, plugins and extras for those mature platforms you’re only starting to catch up with.

Your CMS had better do something unique.