NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary A. Mort]

      Hi Guys,
 
 Something I noticed at last nights meeting was a lot of comments about
individuals who want to learn a bit of PHP, especially as it relates to
Joomla.
 
 I was thinking if people are willing to pursue an alternative method of
education, I can put together a tutorial on setting up your system for
programming in Joomla along with a subsection on the website of tasks that
can be done to both improve Joomla! AND learn PHP at the same time.
 
 
 There are 4 aspects of Joomla Code that could always use a lot of help.
 
 1) Documentation
 2) Unit Tests
 3) Depreciated Functions
 4) Management of the above
 
 We could work on this as a group, as opposed to individuals.  Where a
JoomlaNYC repository of code can be kept - members can pull from a list of
tasks, work on them, submit the fixes back, and then a maintainer can
shepherd them through the giving back to Joomla! process[always the spot I
have trouble with]
 
 For example, take a look at line 74 in the Content Controller:
 http://mandrillapp.com/track/click.php?u=11000867&id=c689c7bdc2df4dbba24014567db24006&url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fjoomla%2Fjoomla-cms%2Fblob%2Fmaster%2Fcomponents%2Fcom_content%2Fcontroller.php%23L74&url_id=486258189&tags=252069,957497
 
 JError is a depreciated class - this means it will be going away at some
point.  Generally calls like this are relatively simple to fix, you just
need to replace one function call with a different call.   But these kinds
of changes are boring for an experienced programmer to do, so they tend to
linger.
 
 Moreover, the longer they linger, the more damage they inflict on 3rd
party components - since if the core code isn't fixed, you end up with 3rd
parties who keep using the same depreciated code and then one day someone
finally cleans all the stuff out, the depreciated method disappears, and
3rd party code breaks all over.
 
 Keeping a clean code base is important...it's also a great opportunity for
others to learn PHP since you will learn little snippets of coding as you
go along - the base platform can be improved, and everyone wins.
 
 I'm trying to go through this process myself just to give me a mental jump
start for the day...do a few simple php fixes...submit the patch...move on
to real work.  I was thinking if we centralized this on the NYC Joomla
site, then people could learn and improve the code at the same time...  and
if we can get a decent process in place, we can also move on to unit tests
where you can learn even more PHP coding with the added benefit that you
are learning GOOD programming practices at the same time.
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